Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Literature by Lynn M. Maxwell

Author:Lynn M. Maxwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030169329
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Impression fails to explain sense perception for Cavendish because it does not adequately take into account the problem of objects acting over a distance, and because it relies on “constraint and force.” 18 When she discusses hearing later, she makes more explicit her objection to the idea that sensation might occur via concussions, explaining “I fear, if the Ear was bound to hear any loud Musick, or another sound a good while, it would soundly be beaten, and grow sore and bruised with so many strokes; but since a pleasant sound would be rendred very unpleasant in this manner, my opinion is, that like as in the Eye, so in the Ear the corporeal sensitive motions do pattern out as many several figures, as sounds are presented to them.” 19 If every sensation is an impact, surely such impacts would cause damage. Much more plausible for Cavendish is the possibility that sensitive organs are responsive to external stimuli but self-moving.

Similarly, Cavendish rejects Hobbes’s claim that imagination and memory are decayed sense perceptions. For Cavendish sensation is double because all nature is composed of rational and sensitive matter and “these self-moving parts … caus[e] a double perception in all Creatures, whereof one is made by the Rational corporeal motions, and the other by the Sensitive.” 20 Where sense perception is a double perception, memory occurs when rational matter alone repeats those figures that were once copied out in both sensitive and rational matter, thus “the figure patterned out in the sensitive organs, being altered, and remaining onely in the Rational part of matter, is not so perspicuous and clear, as when it was both in the Sense and in the Mind.” 21 Thus, while perception, memory, and imagination all depend on self-moving matter taking up new figures, they differ in their composition of rational and sensitive matter and the extent to which their figure has an external reference. For “a Man may Imagine that which never came into his Senses,” while memory depends on sensation for its initial shape. 22 In this early discussion of patterning, Cavendish does not tackle the physics of impression or invoke the materials commonly associated with it, such as wax, except in passing, when she takes up the possibility that air might make impressions on sensitive organs “as a seal do[es] print another body,” before discarding it as unlikely. 23

However, when Cavendish takes up Descartes and his theories of motion she revisits classic examples of impression, including the signet–seal trope to argue that impression itself should be understood as patterning. She begins by asking, “when a bodies figure is printed on the snow, or any other fluid or soft matter, as air, water, and the like; whether it be the body, that prints its own figure upon the snow, or whether it be the snow, that patterns the figure of the body?” 24 She then answers that it is “the snow that patterns out the figure of the body.” 25 The snow is not a passive recipient in this account since, for Cavendish, all matter is capable of self-motion and perception.

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