Knowlton Chapter 17
Seventeen: To Astonish the World
At length my great end and aim was to astonish the world, and become even far more famous than John Locke ever was, by publishing a work containing the only true explanation of the intellectual phenomena of man that had ever been given. So I sold all out, collected all the money I could, and went to North Adams, thinking that there was the place to get out my book, because a little weekly newspaper, with some six hundred subscribers, was printed there!
Charles and Tabitha stayed in Hawley three more winters, and then they sold everything and moved west. Charles worked hard in the years after his release from the Worcester County Jail, to build a medical practice in the remote little hill-town. But Moses Smith had been a leading citizen of Hawley for years and had all the best families as his patients. Smith lived in the main town, “with a farm to help him live, and a wife of influence to help him to business.” The patients Charles managed to pry away from Smith were often people the old doctor didn’t have the time to see. They were usually far from town, “and in the habit of paying but small fees for medical services.”
Travel was difficult. Hawley is located on top of a high hill that gives the town’s residents spectacular views of Mount Wachusett seventy miles away in central Massachusetts, and even of Mount Monadnock in southern New Hampshire. The elevation also exposes Hawley to extreme weather, especially in the winter. Charles found that the residents of his hamlet on the road into town were not only “generally healthy,” they were “more in the habit of hiving up and letting the roads alone than they were in breaking them out” after a storm. The snow piled up and people simply stopped going out. Hawley residents spent their winters close to their hearth-fires, “and all the business done in town in the winter season, was the business of consuming what had been accumulated in the warm season.” There was almost no travel within the town, and no way at all to leave.
So Charles spent his winters trapped in his office, reading and writing to his heart’s content but earning no money to support his family. As he read, Charles felt more and more strongly that the materialist ideas he’d formulated during his time in jail were unique and important. “At the time of entering the jail,” Charles said, “I firmly believed in the existence of souls, and although I supposed them to be formed by the brain, I believed that something which I may call myself, will exist in a state of consciousness, immediately as it respects time, after Charles Knowlton dies. I did not know that any man ever doubted the existence of soul.” A year earlier, Charles had considered trying to explain the source of human passions in his Hanover medical dissertation, before deciding to write about dissection. But he “soon met with insurmountable difficulties—the soul appeared to be much in my way.”
Lying in his jail cell, with little to eat and nothing to do but think, Charles had a breakthrough:
At last thinks I, as I lay on my couch one night, what if I should put soul entirely aside for the present—say that an action of the brain was a thought, and an action of the brain and the nerve together, a sensation; and see how we can explain matters and things upon the supposition? Good George! How things were altered—everything was now plain and easy; the very facts which before puzzled me, now helped me. I lived light and regularly, took no stimulus, my brain was in an excellent thinking condition; and I soon hit on several of the more important principles of this work. I supposed I had made a new discovery; yet I could hardly believe that I had hit upon a truth which thousands of learned searchers had failed to discover.
Charles believed he had seen a truth that few people had recognized before—or if they’d discovered it, had hidden in mazes of qualification and complicated language. He would state it simply and directly: “there is no such thing as a mind (either material or immaterial) distinct from the brain.”
Alone in his Hawley office, Charles pushed this idea further, comparing it to traditional explanations of thought, sensation, will, and knowledge described in his books. He soon had the outline of a theory he believed would change both medicine and philosophy. Charles started writing. Often a winter week would go by when he didn’t take his horse out of the barn, but Charles was hard at work. He’d earned just enough, the rest of the year, to feed his growing family. But they were shut in and isolated for much of the winter, while Charles thought and wrote. And when Tabitha had their first daughter, Lucy Melvina, in August, 1826, the small cottage became even more cramped.
The Knowltons sold their home in Hawley, scraped together their savings, and moved to the western edge of Massachusetts with about five hundred dollars in their pockets. The family was in a much better financial condition than they’d been a few years earlier when Charles had arrived empty-handed in Hawley. Charles believed the town of North Adams would offer him more opportunity as a doctor and also a chance to finish and publish his book. In addition to a newspaper and a small publishing business, the area was home to Williams College and to a new Berkshire Medical Institution attached to the College. Charles may have imagined himself teaching there one day, and went to the trouble of getting another medical certificate from the Institution, to add to his M.D. from Hanover.
Unfortunately, with a medical school in the neighborhood, the North Adams area was already flooded with doctors. And Charles didn’t try that hard to build a business. “My mind being all engaged about my metaphysics,” he said, “I got only a little practice, and most of this among those who never paid me.” But that didn’t matter, because Charles believed he was going to change the world with his book, and get rich too.
Charles planned to sell his medical-philosophical book by subscription. Pre-selling a forth-coming book at a discount from its published price was a common practice at the time. A short prospectus allowed an author to offer a book directly to interested readers, and often to collect some money up front to help get the book printed. Subscriptions worked best when an author was well known and readers could be confident that the book would be published when promised, and that they would want to read it. Charles Knowlton was an unknown doctor with a strange theory, who could offer no assurances of either. So although Charles circulated a prospectus claiming he was about to start a revolution in the way physicians and philosophers understood consciousness and thought, he had few subscribers. Reaching the end of the family savings, Charles sold his horse to raise money for the project. But he took a promissory note for the horse instead of insisting on cash, and the man Charles trusted for the money disappeared along with the horse, leaving him holding a worthless piece of paper. Charles was empty-handed once again.