The vast Enlightenment discourses of nerves, spirits and fibers feeding into the cults of sensibility had been plural rather than single. That is, they had been polyphonic rather than monophonic, in our postdisciplinary sense for the diversity of their narrators' voices; and they touched on all aspects of human life, not merely expressive and representational gestures; and they also shaped the concepts of belief that infiltrated manners and morals. My cluster of topoi in the 1960s and 1970s — nerves, spirits and fibers — had also been embedded in narrative discourse and ordinary speech-acts. But it would have been unthinkable that mood and emotion, even consciousness itself, could have been framed along these lines two centuries earlier, in the 1550s rather than the 1750s. By the eighteenth century the "I" was fully capable of describing itself as a "nervous subject" and expounding precisely what that entailed. The more that animal spirits became taken for granted as a type of Enlightenment DNA, and lorded over by commanders in the nervous system, the more they themselves — these anatomical captains — became hard-wired into cultural discourse. By the 1780s "delicate nerves' became the fully-formed emblems of rank and class. They touched all aspects of life: for example, medical education and sectarian religion, where sermonists routinely referred to them, as well as the developing science of sex that would be so important in the century leading to Freud and psychoanalysis.