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MAKING IT WHOLE a Victorian Circle and the Shape of Their World

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MAKING IT WHOLE a Victorian Circle and the Shape of Their World MAKING IT WHOLE A Victorian Circle and the Shape of Their World Diana Postlethwaite OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS MAKING IT WHOLE Every thought involves a whole system of thoughts, and ceases to exist if severed from its various correla­ tives. As we cannot isolate a single organ of a living body and deal with it as though it had a life indepen­ dent of the rest; so from the organized structure of our cognitions, we cannot cut one, and proceed as though it had survived the separation. Herbert Spencer, First Principles MAKING IT WHOLE A Victorian Circle and the Shape of Their World Diana Postlethwaite OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS : COLUMBUS J, JKJ Copyright © 1984 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Postlethwaite, Diana, 1950— Making it whole. Includes bibliographies and index. 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Philosophy, British— 19th century. 3. Philosophy in literature. 4. Great Britain—Intellectual life—19th century. 5. Eliot, George, 1819-1880. Middlemarch. I. Title. PR469.P45P67 1985 820'.9'008 84-20677 Cloth: ISBN 0-8142-0372-8 Paper: ISBN 0-8142-0401-5 FOR MY FATHER R. Deane Postlethwaite (1925-1980) CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Preface xi Prelude. Polarities: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Theory of Life (1817-1818) as Victorian Cosmology 2 CHAPTER ONE Foundations: John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte 24 I. Universal Causation—John Stuart Mill: A System of Logic (1843) 25 II. The Positive Plan—Au­ guste Comte: Cours de philosophie positive (1830­ 1842) 39 CHAPTER TWO Applied Science—Phrenology and Evolu­ tion: George Combe and Robert Chambers 58 I. A "Positive Psychology" 59 II. The Third Apostle and His Two Gospels—George Combe: The Constitution of Man in Relation to External Objects (1835) 71 III. More Than Metaphor: Phrenol­ ogy as Mental Geology 83 IV. "One Majestic Whole"—Robert Chambers: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) 91 CHAPTER THREE New Faiths—The Philosophy of Neces­ sity, "Force," and Mesmerism: Charles Bray and Harriet Martineau 110 I. Necessity: Victorian Headaches and Eighteenth- Century Optimism 111 II. The Rational Roman­ tic—Charles Bray: The Philosophy of Necessity: or, the Law of Consequences; as Applicable to Mental, Moral, and Social Science (1841) 122 III. Mind Over Matter: "Force" and the Mesmeric Mania 132 IV. Mate­ rialism and Spiritualism—Harriet Martineau and Henry George Atkinson: Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development (1851) 141 CHAPTER FOUR Synthetic Philosophy: George Henry Lewes and Herbert Spencer 164 I. The Heart and the Brain—George Henry Lewes: "Spinoza's Life and Works" (1843) 165 II. The Foundations of a Friendship—Herbert Spencer: So­ cial Statics (1851) 178 III. Statics and Dynamics— Transcendental Anatomy and the Development Hypothesis—Spencer and Lewes: Essays, 1851­ 1857 190 IV. Life and Mind—Herbert Spencer: The Principles of Psychology (1855) 201 V. The Knowable and the Unknowable—Herbert Spencer: "Progress: Its Law and Cause" (1857) 210 Finale. "The Many in the One, the One in the Many": George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-1872) as Victorian Cosmology 232 I. Borthrop Trumbull's Auction 233 II. A Vic­ torian Sensibility: the Poetry of the Real 237 III. Building a Novel: the Part and the Whole 246 Bibliography 267 Index 275 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Although this book is the product of a long evolutionary process, its origin can be dated with certainty to the day a de­ cade ago that I left a warehouse sale at the Yale University Press, happily burdened with seven blue-covered volumes: Gordon Haight's edition of The George Eliot Letters. Free from library due dates, I indulged in the luxury of reading them from cover to cover. It was therein that I met the members of this Victorian circle, and began to sense the rich interrela­ tionships of their world. In the Letters and in his biography, Professor Haight first gave us the historical George Eliot; his meticulous scholarship has been a continuing inspiration to me. If Gordon Haight introduced me to the facts, J. Hillis Miller introduced me to the theories. My gratitude to him for stimulating my interest in the Victorians, and for his support and advice in my early researches. Thanks are also due to Elisabeth Helsinger for her helpful reading of the manuscript, and to Robert Richards for encour­ agement at a crucial juncture. My greatest academic debt is un­ questionably to my students. As I have taught them, they have taught me; time and time again, they have sustained me emo­ tionally as well as challenged me intellectually. Among so many, I must single out Meri-Jane Rochelson Mintz, Jim Har­ baugh, Evy Asch, Bill Kuhn, Sharon Walsh, and Dan Whit- more. I wish I could name them all. The love, strength, and faith of my husband, Paul Thibou­ tot, have been the gift of grace that made it whole. PREFACE In the Victorian age, the humanist and the scientist still spoke a common language. A logician could read contempo­ rary poetry; a novelist could debate the latest development in evolutionary theory. The increasingly alienated discourses of the twentieth century have created an intellectual climate that mediates against an accurate reflection of the Victorians. To­ day, the literary critic and the historian of ideas often move in different worlds; the investigator of popular culture may be given short shrift by the more traditional historian of the pe­ riod; science and literature share little common ground. This study attempts to bridge some of these distances, and to achieve a most Victorian ambition: to make it whole. The pages that follow will depict a Victorian circle whose members are drawn from a diverse range of intellectual voca­ tions: John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte; George Combe and Robert Chambers; Charles Bray and Harriet Martineau; George Henry Lewes and Herbert Spencer; George Eliot. They number among them respected scholars and inflamed ideo­ logues, novelists and philosophers of science; men of letters, renegade industrialists, and bluestockings. They are not the Bloomsbury group or the Cambridge Platonists; neither a cozy biographical circle of intimate friends nor a united band of sec­ Xll PREFACE tarian disciples. Yet the biographical interrelationships among them are intricate and important. In some cases they were drawn together by friendship or love; in all cases they were bound by a shared set of beliefs. As their circle takes shape in these pages, it encompasses a vision distinctively Victorian. What ultimately unites these thinkers is a Victorian frame of mind. George Eliot's heroine Dorothea Brooke finds herself amidst a prototypical Victorian cosmos: "Her world was in a state of convulsive change."1 Jerome Buckley opened his study of The Victorian Temper with the assertion that "the Victorian pe­ riod achieved little of the stability we have learned to associate with a semi-mythical classical culture. It moved from form to form, and nothing stood. Almost every Victorian thesis pro­ duced its own antithesis, as a ceaseless dialectic worked out its designs."2 Although stability may have eluded the collective sensibility of what John Stuart Mill characterized as an "age of transition," individual Victorians of widely-varied persua­ sions strove arduously for the third term of that great nine­ teenth-century dialectic: synthesis. Transition points toward resolution. The "transitional period" of "weak convictions, paralysed intellects, and growing laxity of principle" will ter­ minate in a "renovation .. in the basis of .. belief, lead­ ing to the evolution of some faith, whether religious or merely human, which they can really believe."' Mill's words are apt: all of these Victorians had faith in evo­ lution, and all of them evolved new faiths—hardly orthodox, yet more than "merely human." Walter Houghton draws at­ tention to the note of Evangelical fervor that can be heard in the new rationalist affirmations of faith: "Though for them the revelation was not religious but scientific, the same note of joy, part relief, part excited hope of discovering a new philos­ ophy of man and the universe, is found among the rational­ ists."1 It could be said of the Victorians in this circle that the revelation was both religious and scientific. Intellectually, the men and women in my circle are the heirs of British empiri­ cism, sons and daughters of Francis Bacon and John Locke, PREFACE Xlll eighteenth-century rationalism and association psychology. Yet they are fascinated by the unknowable, the intuitive, the transcendent. They did not consider the material and the spir­ itual irredeemably alienated. Although none were orthodox believers (and all were, in varying degrees, denounced as spir­ itually subversive by their critics), every member of this circle believed, ardently and unwaveringly, in a via media. For them, to explore the mechanisms of the human brain or the progres­ sive development of the natural world was not to deny man's moral and spiritual nature. Although their efforts to conciliate science and faith are not always persuasive, they are unerringly sincere. This intellectual temperament had its roots in romantic pre­ cursors of the preceding generation. In his survey of the tran­ sition From Classic to Romantic, Walter Jackson Bate argued that "nothing is more characteristic of British thought as a whole than its simultaneous confidence, not only in the em­ pirically concrete, but also in an almost intuitional absorption of the experience of concrete phenomena, and in the exclusive working of that intuition through the empirically known."5 Bate's work provided a lively formulation of an intriguing par­ adox: the romantic emphasis on feeling and imagination was a product of the mechanistic eighteenth-century psychology of Locke and Hartley. M. H. Abrams elaborated on these truths in The Mirror and the Lamp: "[Although] almost all the im­ portant romantic theorists commented on the disparity be­ tween imagination and scientific perception.
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