George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Psychology

Exploring the Unmapped Country

Michael Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351934039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In his study of Eliot as a psychological novelist, Michael Davis examines Eliot's writings in the context of a large volume of nineteenth-century scientific writing about the mind. Eliot, Davis argues, manipulated scientific language in often subversive ways to propose a vision of mind as both fundamentally connected to the external world and radically isolated from and independent of that world. In showing the alignments between Eliot's work and the formulations of such key thinkers as Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and G. H. Lewes, Davis reveals how Eliot responds both creatively and critically to contemporary theories of mind, as she explores such fundamental issues as the mind/body relationship, the mind in evolutionary theory, the significance of reason and emotion, and consciousness. Davis also points to important parallels between Eliot's work and new and future developments in psychology, particularly in the work of William James. In Middlemarch, for example, Eliot demonstrates more clearly than either Lewes or James the way the conscious self is shaped by language. Davis concludes by showing that the complexity of mind, which Eliot expresses through her imaginative use of scientific language, takes on a potentially theological significance. His book suggests a new trajectory for scholars exploring George Eliot's representations of the self in the context of science, society, and religious faith.

Chapter 1
The Mind and Body

In the opening chapter of Middlemarch, Dorothea remarks to her sister: ‘Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another’ (p. 12). This physical image operates on a metaphorical level, expressing the variations of colour and texture between different ‘souls’, but also on a more literal level. It points to an issue which, for a writer as keenly aware as is Eliot of developments in contemporary psychology, must be closely pertinent to any question raised about the mind: that of the intimate, complex relationship between the self and physical being. For Eliot, the ‘complexion’ of the ‘soul’ and the wider physical self are inseparable, and she seeks constantly to explore and define the relationship between the two in her fiction. It seems most useful, therefore, to begin our exploration of her representations of mind by focusing on this area.

The question of the relationship between the mind and body assumes a particular urgency for Eliot because of the centrality of the body to her ethical vision. As Dorothea prepares for her forthcoming marriage, Eliot describes how her heroine aspires to make intellectual knowledge intimately part of her emotional and physical self:

All her eagerness for acquirement lay within that full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses were habitually swept along. She did not want to deck herself with knowledge - to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action…But something she yearned for by which her life might be filled with action at once rational and ardent. (p. 86)

Her vision of a combination of the ‘rational and ardent’, of reason with emotion, is an expression of Eliot’s ideal of sympathy, a concept at the centre of her ethical thinking because it underlies ethically positive understanding and action. Dorothea’s sympathetic engagement, with sources of knowledge from the past and with the society around her in the present, is necessarily not only rational and emotional but also physical. The metaphors of emotional experience - ‘that full current of sympathetic motive’, ‘impulses’, ‘nerves and blood’ - also carry a literal meaning, pointing to the necessary involvement of the body, and specifically of the physical processes which underlie the operations of the mind, in any thought or action. Eliot’s sense that the mind and body are mutually bound up raises fundamental questions about exactly how the mind is related to physical life and, conversely, about the limitations of each as a means of understanding the other. As her description of Lydgate’s scientific ambition suggests, the ‘obscurity’ of the ‘minute processes’, which take place in the mind, creates the difficulty not only of observing and understanding the mind’s physical aspects, but also of relating these to the ‘anguish, mania, and crime’ (p. 165), and other manifest mental phenomena, which they seem to produce. As a young woman, through her friendship with Charles Bray, Eliot became interested in the science of phrenology, and later had her head ‘read’ by the famous phrenologist George Combe.¹ She shared phrenology’s concern with the relationship between the mental and the physical, but her fiction suggests that the mind is far too complex to be mapped out in terms of discrete, static regions as Combe and others claimed to be able to do. Like Lewes, therefore, Eliot acknowledges the usefulness of phrenology in stimulating further scientific enquiry about the mind, but, as she insists in a letter of 1855 to Bray, cannot continue to accept its tenets.² Instead, her concept of the mind/body relationship draws on the dynamic, relational models of mind, based on modern physiology, which were formulated by contemporary scientists.

Eliot draws on and adapts the scientific language of physical being as a rich medium through which to describe and explore the complexities of the mind. But in doing so, I want to argue, she is also situating her representations of mind in the context of a central debate in contemporary scientific psychology. Her engagement with this debate does not take the form of partisanship or dogma, but instead serves to widen the resonances of her novelistic language, and to increase her own, and readers’, sense of these complexities. As we shall see, to describe the mind, in her writing, is also often to show that the mind threatens to resist any full description and comprehension, whether in physical or other terms. The first part of my discussion will focus on Eliot’s representations of the relationship between the mind and the body as a whole. She insists that the energies of physical being have positive ethical potential, but also an equally real potential dangerously to fragment and undermine any notion of a unified, controlling and, therefore, predictable and comprehensible, subject. I shall then turn to the mind in its own right, and to the wide range of physical images, more or less metaphorical or literal, and more or less closely echoing those of scientific language, which Eliot deploys as a means of pointing to the intimate connection between the mental and the physical, but also as a medium through which to explore the paradoxes which characterize the mind as it interacts with, and develops in, the world.

Eliot asks questions about the mind throughout her fiction. In her later novels, she describes and explores the workings of the mind in ever greater detail, but at the same time questions urgently whether it can be adequately represented and understood. In this first chapter I shall trace this ongoing anxiety by comparing some examples of Eliot’s descriptions of mind from her earliest two works of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life and Adam Bede, with examples from Middlemarch. In some respects, it is in that late, unprecedentedly rich and multi-faceted novel that Eliot’s unease about the difficulties of representing the mind reaches its height, but it is important not to overstate this point.³ This unease, and the sense of the sheer complexity of the mind which goes with it, are emphatically present from the beginning of Eliot’s writing career, and it will be one aim of this, and subsequent, chapters to examine areas of Eliot’s interest in the mind which she explores in many of her novels.

Two theories of mind, one scientific and one philosophical, which had a particular significance for her personally, are both deeply concerned with the mind/body connection and help to shed especially interesting light on Eliot’s representations of their relationship in her fiction. Lewes’s The Study of Psychology, which formed part of his multi-volume work Problems of Life and Mind, is his most sustained and concentrated account of his theory of mind.⁴ Eliot herself edited the last two volumes of Problems, including Psychology, after Lewes’s death in 1878. His book expounds a distinctive model of the relationship between the mind and the body. He is concerned not simply with which physiological processes and anatomical components are associated with particular mental events - an area of science in which, then as now, knowledge was far from complete - but, just as importantly, with the exact nature of the link between the two. Lewes’s thinking about psychology, as we shall see, is fundamentally shaped by his sense of the importance of describing the mind in physical terms, but he is also acutely aware of the limitations of such terms in describing the complexity of human subjectivity. By the time Eliot completed the first English translation of Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics early in 1856, both she and Lewes had had a longstanding interest in his writings, and Lewes, especially, did much to introduce Spinoza to an English-speaking readership.⁵ As members of the circle of radical thinkers who championed modern developments in biblical criticism, both were drawn to a philosopher who was in some respects the forebear of Strauss and Feuerbach. But Spinoza is also an important figure for Lewes and Eliot specifically in terms of the ways in which he writes about the self. He too sees the mind and body as inseparable. Like Eliot, he therefore sees the relationship between them as crucial to understanding human actions and motivations. Eliot’s novelistic representations of mind display a considerable scientific knowledge, but she is also a deeply committed ethicist, and Spinoza’s concept of the mind and body provides a powerful model of their dangerously varied possibilities.

The Power of the Body

Before we turn to the novels under discussion, I want briefly to outline the key points in Lewes’s thinking on the mind/body connection, so as to give a sense of the scientific context of Eliot’s writing in this respect, and to point to some of the features of Spinoza’s model of mind that made it so compelling for both her and Lewes. The central tenets of Lewes’s theory inform - and grow out of - his exploration of issues in physiology and psychology throughout Problems, but it is in the early chapters of volume IV, The Study of Psychology, that he sets out his ideas most fully. He makes the key contention that we exist both as physical organisms, part of whose anatomy is the brain, and as thinking subjects:

We say that we are both Body and Mind. We know that we exist as objects, perceptible to our senses, and to the senses of others; and as subjects, percipient of objects, and conscious of feelings. We live, feed, and move. We feel, think, and will. The solidity, form, colour, weight, and motions of the Body constitute the objective, visible self…The sensations, ideas, and volitions constitute the subjective, intelligible self. (Problems, IV, p. 10)

Thus, when considering any phenomenon, including the mind itself, it follows that:

All that we have felt, or may feel,…[science]…ranges under two aspects: the subjective and personal, the objective and impersonal. Every event, every feeling, has this twofold aspect, is indissolubly objective and subjective, according to the mode of its apprehension. (Problems, IV, p. 49)

Lewes’s theory means that any event, whether it take place within the organism or in the external world, must be viewed in terms both of its physical characteristics and of its significance in subjective experience. Any psychological investigation should therefore take into account these two aspects: a mental phenomenon must be considered both objectively, as a series of physiological events within an anatomical context, and in subjective terms, just as an event in the physical world may be seen in terms of a subject’s perception of it as well as in physical terms.

Spinoza’s mind/body theory, of course, is grounded in a philosophical framework radically different from Lewes’s nineteenth-century positivism, but the parallels between their respective discussions of this issue are striking, and at least partly explain the interest that his writings held for both Lewes and Eliot. Spinoza shares their view that the mind and body are inextricably linked:

the mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension. Hence it comes, that the order or concatenation of things is one, whether nature be conceived under the one or the other attribute. (p. 95)

At the centre of Spinoza’s view of the world is a God in whose ‘attributes’ are contained the ‘formal essences’ of all things, and whose ‘infinite intellect’ perceives those essences (pp. 47, 48). The ‘essence’ of a particular thing may be considered either as a mode of ‘extension’, that is, as a material object, or as a mode of ‘thought’, that is, as an idea (p. 48). Thus, Spinoza states, ‘a mode of extension and the idea of that mode is one and the same thing’ (p. 47), as both are part of the same essence. There can be, by definition, no disjunction between physical phenomena and the ideas of them. Applied to the human organism, this means that the mind and body are simply two aspects of the same thing. Though Lewes, as a scientist committed to a physiological understanding of the mind, has no such ‘infinite intellect’ as a final point of reference, there is an interesting analogy to be drawn between Spinoza’s categories of ‘thought’ and ‘extension’ and Lewes’s ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ categories. The terms ‘thought’ or ‘idea’ denote an abstract dimension of essence with absolute reality; this contrasts with the purely human, or human and animal, subjectivity signified in Lewes’s category of the ‘subjective’, but both sets of oppositions assume the oneness of body and mind. In his essay on Spinoza which forms part of his History of Philosophy, Lewes himself objects to the metaphysical basis of Ethics but nonetheless highlights Spinoza’s concept of thought and matter as having ‘equal reality’.⁶ Edward. S. Reed, in fact, calls Lewes’s theory ‘half-Spinozist, half-positivist’ (p. 149) because it broadly recasts Spinoza’s view of the mind and body as aspects of the same thing in the light of contemporary physiological and anatomical knowledge which Lewes was largely responsible for introducing from Germany to Britain.⁷

The novelty of Lewes’s argument becomes clear if we compare his model with that of his better-known contemporary, T. H. Huxley. In his 1874 essay, ‘On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History’, Huxley insists that ‘the brain is the seat of all forms of consciousness’ (p. 205), and that the nervous system as a whole plays no part in it; this view, as Reed points out, was dominant among scientific theorists of mind at the time.⁸ In effect, this idea separates the mind from the body, as for Huxley, and for many other scientific writers, the conscious mind amounts to much the same thing as the mind in general. As Huxley makes clear in his discussion of reflex actions, however, consciousness does not imply control. He quotes Descartes, who affirms that reflex actions are caused by ‘the mechanism of our body’ rather than by the ‘soul’. Huxley qualifies this view, pointing to the advances in knowledge about reflex actions which have occurred since Descartes’ time, but nonetheless endorses the main thrust of his argument. He refers to the work of Sir Charles Bell, who discovered, as did the French scientist François Magendie independently, that ‘anterior’ spinal nerve roots govern movement, while the ‘posterior’ are associated with sensibility.⁹ Despite this more recent scientific discovery, which gave the impetus to the study of reflex actions, and of their place in mental life, throughout much of the century, Huxley asserts that Descartes’ ‘fundamental conception’, which sees reflex actions as functions of physical being rather than of any independent mind, remains valid. Huxley sees humans and other animals as conscious automata, insisting that conscious mental phenomena, such as sensations, thoughts and emotions, are the results of physical changes in the brain, and that the conscious self simply expresses these changes and cannot exert any control over them.

Lewes’s view is radically different. In his 1859 book, The Physiology of Common Life, in which he sets out some of the key psychological ideas which Problems would later explore in greater detail, he states that an organism differs from any other kind of mechanism in that it is ‘vital’, and has ‘Sensibility’.¹⁰ This implies that an organism’s reflex structures, such as the spinal cord, which we might expect to function in an invariable, mechanical way, are in fact capable of some kind of subjective feeling, even though the conscious subject may not always be aware of it. The mind, Lewes reasons, cannot therefore be based solely in the brain, but must extend into the body’s nervous system. In the same work, Lewes contends that the brain is ‘only one organ of the mind’ because the mind extends over the whole living being:

[Mind] includes all Sensation, all Volition, and all thought: it means the whole psychical Life; and this psychical Life has no one special centre, any more than the physical Life has one special centre: it belongs to the whole and animates the whole. (II, p. 5)

Lewes rejects the scheme of cerebral localization proposed by phrenologists, but also points specifically to their failure to explain why different parts of the brain, which are alike in structure, perform different functions: Lewes, in his holistic model of the self, states that the function of a particular part of the brain is defined by its connection to specific parts of the body, and thus by its role within the self as a whole. The body, conversely, is more than simply a mechanism, isolated from any properly ‘mental’ action, and is instead an integral part of the mind, though it may act without the subject’s conscious awareness. In the third volume of Problems, The Physical Basis of Mind, Lewes returns to this idea. He uses the same scientific evidence as Huxley, including, for example, observations of the ability to negotiate obstacles of a frog whose brain had been removed, to come to very different conclusions. He insists that Huxley’s findings point to the occurrence of subjective - and therefore properly ‘mental’ - feeling in the body, whereas Huxley sees the same bodily actions as bodily only, and not playing a part in the mind.¹¹ To support his argument, Lewes refers to the recently published work of the physiologist David Ferrier, whose The Functions of the Brain was a major step forward in the localization of particular mental functions to particular areas of the brain.¹² Lewes cites Ferrier’s experiments on hearing in a monkey, which found that its responses to sound changed over time in a way that a purely mechanical being’s responses, in the absence of any subjective feeling, would not.¹³ The wider importance of Ferrier’s work to Lewes was that it represented, as Young points out, the extension of the sensory-motor paradigm to the highest parts of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Mind and Body
• 2 The History of the Self: The Formation of Mind
• 3 The Possibilities of Emotion
• 4 The Will, Consciousness, the Unconscious
• 5 The Science of ‘Spirit’: The Mind and Religious Experience
• Conclusion: ‘Separate yet Combined’
• Bibliography
• Index