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Before 1492 it took a bold imagination to envision what the world would look like if it were a sphere. It is similarly difficult to imagine what the mind would look like if there were no concept of mind. Thanks to George Makari, we are helped in this remarkable volume to realize again that the emergence of the very notion of “mind” in our civilization was not the consequence of “sedate academic debate” but was instead attended by horrific conflict, often violent debates culminating in the ending of careers if not lives; indeed, though the struggle is less dramatic in modern times, the matter is by no means settled. At least by the time of Bishop Berkeley, it was possible to refer to the conundrums of reality versus Platonic idealism with his famous quip “What is mind, no matter. What is matter, never mind.”
Makari's previous book, Revolution in Mind, has been widely and justly acclaimed for its history of the Freudian era. In this next book, Makari presents a prequel to that first volume, offering his account of the Scottish and British and then French and German Enlightenment, from Thomas Hobbes to Immanuel Kant.
Reading this book I was reminded of the pitfalls of the choice in English of a reifying noun (“mind”) to denote the aggregate of all our mental functioning. Thoughts, of course, aren't actually in our minds. Thoughts (if we were linguistically and logically consistent) would reflect our “minding” functions rather than reified pebbles in a box we call “mind” (for a discussion of this general point of view, see White 1938). The same fallacy in the psychoanalytic world has clouded our use of a noun, the “ego” (and its functions), and led to numerous reminders in our literature that we must guard against reification of “the” ego. Again thanks to Makari, I now realize that there is no truly equivalent term for