ABSTRACT
On Saturday 21 June 1682, his appointed day of duty to the Royal Society, Robert Hooke presented a lecture on memory to his fellow members. The text was included in his Posthumous Works under the title ‘An Hypothetical Explication of Memory: how the Organs made use of by the Mind in its Operation may be Mechanically understood’.1
In his lecture Hooke maintained that purely material explanations may be given for all memory processes. It was a strange lecture in more than one respect. Hooke had never before taken up a psychological subject, nor did he afterwards; his theory of memory stands completely separate from his other work, which dealt with physics and matters mechanical. Second, Hooke’s theory of memory was virtually unanticipated, nor did he have any followers. Historian of psychology Graham Richards has said that Hooke’s theory ‘rests in glorious isolation as a one-off piece of proto-psychological theorizing of a kind for which the intellectual climate was quite unripe’.2 Equally enigmatic was a third aspect. In circles of the Royal Society metaphors were treated with suspicion or downright hostility. The preferred ‘manner of discourse’ was plain, simple, literal language. Hooke’s lecture, on the other hand, was a long sequence of metaphors, analogies, comparisons and similes. Hooke was acutely aware of the tension between his use of metaphors and the Royal Society’s view that nature would only reflect itself truthfully in literal language. He therefore had to negotiate his way out with a handful of defensive remarks on the kind of language suited for the description of memory. There is no doubt that Hooke spoke to a captivated audience. Some of the Fellows who had been unable to attend his lecture asked him to repeat it the following Saturday. And so he did.
