Sean Silver's The Mind Is a Collection traces the evolution of the metaphor of its title, and, in so doing, illuminates the development of modern theories of the mind. Through attention to the writings of a wide array of eighteenth-century philosophers, artists, novelists, natural historians, and physicians, Silver explores the ways in which these thinkers linked the workings of the mind to the accumulation of collections. The book begins in John Locke's library, the first of many repositories that serve as “the husks of once living cognitive practices, the idiosyncratic spaces of thought” (7). Silver analyzes how collections of books, prints, coins, and kidney stones facilitated particular sets of mental habits and ways of ordering the world.

This engaging book (and an associated digital museum currently accessible at www.mindisacollection.org) is organized as a museum containing twenty-eight exhibits arranged in six cases, labeled “Metaphor,” “Design,” “Digression,” “Inwardness,” “Conception,” and “Dispossession.” These umbrella terms, when manifested by particular objects or collections of objects, help us to understand the spaces of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mentation. The influence of John Locke is felt nearly everywhere in these museum rooms. The Digression case, for example, recalls Locke's musing on non-methodical sallies of the mind and goes on to evoke Jonathan Swift's reference to an Iliad in a nutshell, a figure of containment that, as Silver notes, became “a warmed-over chestnut, a well-known and oft-repeated figure for the compression implied in a storage model of intellection” (112).

The second exhibition in this case (eleventh in the book as a whole) is the full-stop punctuation mark presented at different magnifications in Robert Hooke's Micrographia. Hooke was the first keeper of the Repository of the Royal Society, a space he internalized, Silver suggests, as a model of intellection. Silver compares Hooke in his repository to Locke in his library, Milton in his bed (subject of exhibit number two), a fish in water, and a bird in air. The first three spaces, he argues, act as ecologies of cognitive life, spaces crafted to enable certain modes of thinking in the same way that air and water support fish and bird endeavors. The notion of cognitive ecologies—spaces conducive to, or malleable enough to be enlisted in, intellectual and creative work—is an appealing one (no matter that it makes me view my office—scattered papers, cracking plaster—with concern). As we continue through the Digression case, Silver reads Hooke's microdot as revealing a history of “thinking about the possibilities of small writing and small reading” (121), and he characterizes the contents of the Micrographia as a series of studies that illustrate the “looping, labyrinthine way of thinking” that Hooke labels “excogitation” (122). Silver then moves on to Hooke's successor as secretary at the Royal Society, Robert Plot, a man for whom Roman tumuli (mounds of earth) served as opportunities to contemplate classical burial rituals.

Silver's book rewards both the linear and the lackadaisical reader. His overarching argument about the centrality and staying power of the “mind is a collection” metaphor gains strength as examples accrue in varied contexts. However, just as one experiences sensory overload while passing through museum galleries, no matter how impressive the art on display, so, too, does fatigue occasionally intrude on the reading experience. At such moments, some of the connections between exhibition displays may start to seem forced. Silver's Conception case brings together the blank page in Tristram Shandy, William Hunter's anatomical drawings of human gestation, a painting attributed to Giulio Romano of the Triumph of Galatea that was in Joshua Reynolds' possession, and a portrait by Reynolds of William Hunter—all in the service of limning the notion of conception. Silver writes, “In what he thought was a Giulio, Reynolds had a chance to witness a painter of particularly fertile invention handling a theme that is itself about conception: the very birth of the principle of the artistic conception itself” (218–19). Silver further links Reynolds' fascination with the problem of conception as a principle of artistic production to Hunter's attempt to display the gestational process, which he depicted in reverse order, retreating to its absent origin. As I explored the Conception case, I enjoyed the ingenious workings of Silver's argument without entirely trusting the links he forges.

I happily followed Silver into the farthest reaches of the most obscure gallery, that is, into a room that once served as the culmination of a tour through Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill. In case four, exhibit eighteen, Silver introduces us to a certain blue-bound copy of Walpole's The Mysterious Mother, a play printed in a tiny edition of 50 copies, one of which was tucked away in a nearly inaccessible part of Walpole's house. Silver contrasts the “narrative of inwardness” experienced by those who toured Walpole's home with the play's dramatic withholding of its ending (185). Silver argues that forestalling its secret is the play's only dramatic resource, and he carries out such an artful reading of this closeted drama's role in the Strawberry Hill tour that one wishes more of his book's exhibition space had been devoted to literary criticism.

Silver does not let us forget that construing the mind as a collection presupposes that one has the resources to accumulate and archive material goods, a level of affluence unavailable to many. In the book's sixth and final case, Dispossession, Silver begins by noting that not every mind had a cabinet, and he goes on to analyze moments when the “space of mentation” was “cobbled together out of public goods,” as in the instance of the entrepreneurial Jonathan Wild, who, in 1714, opened in the low-rent district surrounding the City of London a chain of shop-front operations that became known as the Lost Property Office (259).

Thoughtfully curated, elegantly written, and expansively researched, Sean Silver's The Mind Is a Collection reveals how a view of the mind as a cabinet pervaded Enlightenment philosophy, and how, even now, as we accrue new tools for thinking, we continue to deploy this suggestive metaphor.