What if poetry invented consciousness? While I hyperbolize, this is the ultimate claim of Timothy M. Harrison’s Coming To. Joining a growing wave of scientifically minded studies of Renaissance literature, Harrison finds real conceptual work in literature. As the shadow of STEM looms over the humanities, Harrison’s book is a timely reminder that literary scholarship can historically analyze scientific concepts without sacrificing its distinctive concerns for value and form. In fact, he shows the mimetic, particularizing character of literature to be a prerequisite for consciousness to emerge at all. One can thus read Harrison’s study methodologically, as intellectual history, or as close reading of two important poets. Most will come to Coming To for John Milton but should stay for Thomas Traherne.Coming To argues that “the birth of consciousness as a concept was intimately and paradoxically grounded in the consciousness of birth” (250). Harrison sketches a semantic drift whereby the notion of conscientia (conscience), associated with “evaluative connotations” of praise and blame (10), slowly and even fortuitously gathers a new set of nonevaluative ideas to itself, including experience, thought, and ego. Predictably, Descartes turns out to be a key player. His characterization of thinking as the essence of the human, with the corollaries that we always think and that all modes of thought (among them sensation) are equal, makes consciousness a necessary feature of all “mental presence” (2). Since the Renaissance conceived of understanding in terms of origins, then, our first natal sensations became paramount to an understanding of human nature.Enter poets. Harrison argues that poetic depictions of human life “[flaring] into existence” (1), namely, Milton’s depictions of Adam and Eve’s awakening in Paradise Lost and Traherne’s narration of his time in the womb, became necessary supplements to the theoretical account of consciousness. These presentations of “originary experience” opened onto “the experience of human nature itself” (4, 17). A tautology lurks: seeking an experience of human nature turns human nature into experience. Descartes’s theoretical claim that consciousness accompanied all thought helped produce poetic depictions of it, which were then fed back into philosophy as evidence. Ultimately, John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding enshrined the modern notion of consciousness as the ground of personal identity.Harrison’s account exposes a paradox at the heart of contemporary neuroscience: our modern sense of consciousness is private—it is, in Thomas Nagel’s (1979) phrase, “what it is like” to experience something—and this personal character makes it hard for philosophers to theorize about in the abstract. Hence not only does consciousness encourage mimetic depiction, but, since it “is a concept that acquires meaning on the horizon of particularity, it is perhaps uniquely suited to mimetic representation” (251–52), and so “poetry . . . played a major, even necessary role in the emergence of that concept” (3). That such necessity is baked into the very concept of private experience is a stunning claim for the influence of literary technique in intellectual history. It also, as Harrison rightly notes, renders hopeless neuroscientific attempts to reduce all phenomenality to brain states. Consciousness is less a thing than a mutant concept, with both a contingent and an extrascientific history.The chapters trace this history through three authors—Milton, Traherne, and Locke—whose turn to natal or “originary experience” both responds and contributes to the gradual slide of conscientia from moral conscience to phenomenal consciousness. Harrison weaves these authors seamlessly into contemporary debates about embryology, empiricism, and the substance of thought. Indeed, so impressive are his genealogies of philosophical concepts like “experience” and “subject” that they could almost be plucked for separate encyclopedia articles. While these interludes always funnel back into the literature, they have a digressive character that makes the chapters hard to summarize.Chapter 1 dwells on Adam and Eve’s awakening in Paradise Lost to argue that Milton nudges conscientia from its older, moral meaning toward its modern, phenomenal meaning. Until the seventeenth century experience retained its Aristotelian sense as collective. Depicting their first moments from the inside, Milton gives Adam and Eve what Harrison calls “neonatal maturity” (35), or full capacity to reason and speak from their inception. They are Aristotelian in their embodied cognition and slow progress toward generalized experience. Yet Eve’s assertion that a single “experience” of the alluring apple grounds knowledge (PL, 9.807–10; Milton 2007) “begins to transfer the semantic force of experience into the orbit of something approximating consciousness” (66). It is Milton’s achievement, then, to separate thought from collective experience: Eve’s “unexperienced thought” (PL, 4.457) is consciousness.Chapter 2 shows Milton’s originality in inhabiting Edenic experience from the inside and with ordinary developmental capacity, in sharp contrast to most depictions of that time, which tended to display Adam and Eve from without and give them “cognitive superpowers” (121). These shifts suggest Milton’s motivation: to reduce the distance of our first parents, defamiliarizing Eden such that we recognize Adam and Eve as versions of ourselves and paradise as operable here and now.1 Harrison gets there by highlighting Milton’s monism: Adam is created a totus homo, body and spirit together; all thinking is embodied. This claim implies others. Since the “I” wells up from organic matter, it cannot have innate ideas: Adam does not know God; he cannot fear death, and so self-preservation is not his primary drive. His experience is thus freed to reach outward toward its objects; and he can reject the Satanic position that we are “self-begot,” because his feeling spills out beyond his knowledge, toward God and world.An early and attentive reader of Paradise Lost, Traherne transposed Milton’s scenes of Edenic awakening onto his own prenatal experience in the womb. Chapter 3 is a general overview of Traherne’s philosophical positions. More a Cartesian dualist than Milton, Traherne in fact radicalized Descartes’s notion that a person is a thinking thing, a res cogitans. For Traherne, Cartesian thought elevates experience as the goal of all life; the world proffers itself before us to be sensed and enjoyed. Human thoughts carry the additional feature of ekstasis; they “always project one outside of oneself: the ego exists beside or beyond itself because it exists where and when it is carried by its thoughts” (142). This feature, through the medium of mimetic fiction, allows Traherne access to his own origin.Chapter 4 turns to Traherne’s engagement with the embryological literature of his day, especially the work of William Harvey. The main debate was whether a fetus could sense, and if so, in what way. Harrison provides a genealogy from Aristotle through the Cartesians. For Descartes, the equation of thought with being meant that one always thinks, and so a fetus must sense, even if not aware of it. Traherne picks this up, arriving at “a semi-Pelagian view of human nature” (192), in which the infant soul is pure, free of original sin, which enters in only when the child learns customary language. Traherne’s iterative now of poetic address returns the reader to that moment of origin.Chapter 5 positions Locke as the inheritor of Milton’s and Traherne’s problem as well as its solution. The paradox is by now familiar: if all knowledge is experience, you both need and cannot have its origin to explain it. Locke is thus forced to take up fiction, structuring his treatise as a “skeleton narrative” of the growth of a child’s mind (213), which Harrison calls a “slippage from reason to revelation, from philosophical abstraction toward a minimally mimetic philosophical poiesis” (243). Locke’s phenomenology cements experience within the cluster of terms cohering around the concept of consciousness, as its result and feature. We arrive, at last, at our modern notion of consciousness: “a nonformalized, nonevaluative, and self-referential form of awareness that is an immanent and necessary part of all mental activity” (226–27).A brief coda reminds us that concepts, like fetuses, are made: indeed, the Latin root conceptus “originally meant fetus” (251). As such, any concept has a history and carries forward its founding assumptions as it develops. Harrison notes that the gendered premise of originary experience, in which “a lone thinker, subjectivity, consciousness, Dasein, or living body encounters itself and the world—never anything less than universal, always silently male” (255), recurs in contemporary neuroscience and philosophy. He concludes by glancing at Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poem “To a Little Invisible Being Who Is Expected Soon to Become Visible,” offering a different, more communal view of life’s beginning. Harrison’s final admission of his chosen object’s limitations is a welcome one, though I wish it had appeared sooner and more often.Coming To is a signal contribution to Milton studies and perhaps a watershed in the history of Traherne’s fortunes. Milton, whose poetry is often set against the Royal Society and Galilean astronomy, headlines the show, neither mere participant in nor mere critic of an existing scientific enterprise but a champion of poetry’s experimental power. Harrison’s study should also spark a surge of new interest in Traherne by embedding him in a philosophical (rather than devotional) tradition, and especially by replacing Plato with Aristotle as the poet’s ultimate source.In my view, Harrison presents an overly empirical Milton. While his arguments center on Adam and Eve’s awakening, and thus rightly stress Milton’s attempts to render them exemplary and ordinary people, Paradise Lost is huge, with vestiges of his early Neoplatonism that are irreducible to Harrison’s Heideggerian earthiness. Consider Adam’s supplication to God for a mate: God needs no mate, for he is “already infinite, / And through all numbers absolute, though one” (PL, 8.419–21). Adam reveals a sophisticated knowledge of infinity, as the unity of all (otherwise uncountable) numbers within a single concept. It is hard to see how Adam’s limited experience could afford this insight. Conversely, Harrison seems to attribute too much force to language when he calls it “Milton’s eyes, a vibrant force for good that opens the possibility of understanding and communication” (196). Harrison’s gloss of Adam’s instinctive speech is persuasive, but Adam at that point is still unfallen; Harrison cites Milton’s early “At a Vacation Exercise” in support, yet Maureen Quilligan (1979) and Stephen M. Fallon (1991) argue that Milton’s attitude to language changed after the Civil War, when Eikon Basilike turned Charles into a martyr. Indeed, what of Satan’s martial rhetoric in hell, or his Petrarchan flattery of Eve? The narrative of the Fall also presents versions of consciousness that are almost solipsistic: soliloquies crop up for the first time, and Eve engages in a striking counterfactual account of “Adam wedded to another Eve” (PL, 9.828), who yet would not replace her. Eve is only her experience, and her commitment to preserving it mandates Adam’s fall.These complications do not, ultimately, tarnish Harrison’s addition to the study of consciousness, rich and welcome especially for its forceful if implicit case for literary criticism’s contribution to the interdisciplinary study of concepts. One implication is that some of the detritus packed into or even discarded by the concept of consciousness during its inception may, once released by genealogy, be recovered for our modern use. Most important, Harrison’s point that conscientia was initially evaluative, and poetry “a vehicle for praise and blame” (20), suggests that we may view consciousness as a kind of world-making gift. In Traherne’s terms, we enjoy, therefore we are—and therefore the world is. Harrison’s remarkable book lends history to, yet delicately preserves, what we might call the last miracle.