The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

by Annie Murphy Paul

Then, as the eighteenth century was drawing to a close, the Romantics arrived on the scene. This band of poets and painters and musicians worshiped originality, venerated authenticity. They rejected all that was old and familiar and timeworn in favor of what was inventive and imaginative and heartfelt. Their insistence on originality came in response to two major developments of the age. The first of these was industrialization. As factories rose brick by brick, an aesthetic countermovement mounted in tandem: machines could stamp out identical copies; only humans could come up with one-of-a-kind ideas. A particular sort of machine occasioned the second major development of the time: a flood of texts produced by the newly common printing press. More than any generation before them, the thinkers of the Romantic era bore what literary critic Walter Jackson Bate called “the burden of the past,” as masterworks from earlier eras became widely available for the first time. Immersed in a sea of their predecessors’ words, they felt an urgent need to create something new and fresh and never before said.