“Let them run out, and entertain themselves”

Scholarship on the popular psychology of the early modern period has not infrequently neglected the English treatise on the government of thoughts, despite how prolific this species of writing came to be by the end of the seventeenth century. This literature was written by a highly diverse and eclectic group of authors, ranging from Cambridge theologians to High-Anglican clergymen and from natural philosophers to astrologer-physi­cians. It includes works by William Perkins (1607), Thomas Cooper (1619), Thomas Goodwin (1637), Robert Boyle (1645), Edward Reyner (1656), John Angell (1659), William Shewen (1679), William Penn (1682), Richard Saunders (1682), Richard Allestree (1694), John Sharp (1694), George Tullie (1694), and William Chilcot (1698). In this article, I look at two early treatises by Reformed theologians Perkins and Goodwin, and two late High-Anglican works by Allestree and Sharp. My aim is to reconstruct the precise concep­tion of human “thoughts” foregrounded in this literature and examine two important consequences that stem from this articulation: (1) the elevation of the imagination to the status of an “arch-faculty” of the mind that participates in all other operations of the soul and (2) the tension between depravity and diversion that shapes the practical rules for self-government offered in this lite­rature. I explore these alternatives to the standard faculty psychology and moral instruction found in competing genres of popular psychology and practical moral philosophy at the time, with the aim of complicating more traditional historical interpretations of Protestant self-regulation.