CHAPTER
‘The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their
appearance; pass, repass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures
and situations’ (1739, I.iv.6). This is how the Scottish empiricist philosopher David
Hume described the mind, and the idea of the mind as a theatre has a natural
appeal. In Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, we humans do not directly see real-
ity but are like prisoners in a dark cave who can watch only the shadows of people
outside moving in front of a fire. Two thousand years later, many psychological
theories make use of the same metaphor. Yet Hume urged caution: ‘The compar-
ison of the theatre must not mislead us’, he said. However much we may want
to attribute simplicity and identity to the mind, it is a constant flux of transitory
impressions: ‘They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind;
nor have we the most distant notion of the place where these scenes are repre-
sented, nor of the material of which it is composed’ (1739, I.iv.6). In this chapter
we will consider not just those places and materials but the lure, and the dangers,
of the theatre metaphor.
I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic,
and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool
takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that
the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out,
or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a
difficulty in laying his hands upon it.
(Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet, 1887)The theatre of the mind