for the first time she saw the possibility of shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of her own desires—of taking her stand out of herself
—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss we do indeed continuously stand apart from ourselves, appraising. Every higher act of the mind, intellectual, aesthetic, or moral, is, paradoxically, also an exercise in self-doubt, self-scrutiny.
—Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind Throughout her literary career, George Eliot closely followed the cultural debates
attending the emerging field of empirical psychology. This science sought an objective
explanation of mental activity as a cumulative assemblage of empirical data, as directly caused by the evolution of mechanical, neurological structures, attempting to bypass how human subjectivity colors accounts of the world.1 Many opposed these claims, especially those in what we now call humanities—philosophy, creative literature, and religion. These discourses prioritize subjectivity, often describing the experiences of mind and conscience as inexplicable or divine.
Traditional Christianity saw the human soul as divinely created with innate mental faculties;
knowing the soul required introspection and self-reflection. Empirical psychology challenged such methods, seeking to replace introspection’s unreliable subjectivity with more objective methods of deterministic measurement.2
Eliot not only followed but also contributed to these debates when she finished and published the last two volumes of her partner George Henry Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind (1874-1879) after his death. Over two decades before that, she signaled her growing interest in the field when she wrote that evolutionary psychologist Herbert Spencer would be remembered for giving “a new impulse to psychology” and for thus ensuring its advancement as a science
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(letter to Sara Hennell, July 10, 1854, Cross 1: 234).3 These interests also influenced Eliot’s novels, which were prominent among Victorian novels that contributed to “popularising the science of the mind” (Nestor, “Science” 267; cf. George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists vii).4 An overwhelming amount of scholarly work has documented Eliot’s investments in psychology and other scientific developments and how they influenced her writings. Middlemarch (1871- 1872) most frequently appears in these studies, acclaimed as the “most scientific” of Eliot’s novels. Its narrator assumes an objective stance to document with intense realism the social web of provincial life; its language invokes scientific concepts and imagery; and it overtly contrasts different scientific pursuits in the natural historian Farebrother and the natural scientist and physiologist Lydgate (Postlewaite 99, 114; Rylance 149, 151, 192-93; Logan ch. 7; Michael Davis 11-13). Many approach Eliot’s perspectives on psychology by tracing connections between Middlemarch and Lewes’ Problems of Life and Mind.5
This scholarly interest in Eliot and science fits comfortably with Western secularism, but largely overlooks how Eliot sees a less definite divide between science and its perceived
opposite, religion, than is often assumed. This gap is partly understandable given Eliot’s early turn away from Evangelicalism. Some scholarship has revisited her continued religious
investments;6 however, with a few exceptions,7 it often tends not to engage with Eliot’s definite interests in science, further perpetuating a division that Eliot herself did not maintain. I want to show how Eliot sustains these interests as part of her multi-discourse approach to writing, where alongside the scientific language of evolutionary psychology, religiously-inflected language intimates the irreducible wonder of ethical subjectivity.8 For text and method, I expand on Eliot’s own cue in how she describes her novel The Mill on the Floss (1860) to her publisher John Blackwood: she sees it as offering an “ethics of art” that seeks to “correspond with a widening
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psychology” (Cross 2: 190). I suggest that The Mill on the Floss offers Eliot’s most balanced exploration not just of scientific but also of religious language to speak to the ethical
implications of the cultural debate attending psychology. Instead of rehashing the already extensive body of scholarship on Mill’s investments in science and evolutionary psychology, I focus on revaluing a crucial scene of the novel that such scholarship frequently overlooks or dismisses—Maggie’s reading of the religious divine Thomas à Kempis. This religious
perspective offers Maggie language capable of articulating the excessive ethical experience that empirical psychology was finding itself inadequate to define without remainder: self-reflective mind or soul and conscience. This scene suggests that Eliot did not see psychology as an infallible objective authority necessarily invalidating subjective experience. Rather, even as she acknowledges Maggie’s materially and socially determining circumstances, Eliot emphatically retains a religiously-inflected language to describe the introspective, subjective account of mind and conscience as something exceeding scientific discourse.
Underscoring this religious language as part of Eliot’s multi-discursivity is important for several reasons. First, it resists retrospectively imposing modern entrenched disciplinary
divisions onto the nineteenth century, when these disciplines were still fluid and only in the early stages of formation. Second, the questions that psychology debated then continue unresolved, despite phenomenal advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and despite the self- assured claims of modern evolutionary psychology (Rylance 2).9 We need language that can address these questions—the experience of consciousness and its relation to the experience of conscience or ethical freedom. We need to deliberately reflect on how different discourses value, interpret, and shape these experiences. To better show how Eliot’s valuing of religious language acknowledges this persistent excess of ethical subjectivity, I invoke a thinker from our own day:
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novelist, religious philosopher, and essayist Marilynne Robinson, who has been called “a contemporary George Eliot” (O’Rourke).
Like Eliot, Robinson’s novels demonstrate extraordinary intellectual range, employ an acutely realist method, and invite readers into sympathetic imagination. To my knowledge, no studies have thoroughly examined Eliot and Robinson together, besides these swiftly pointed affinities in their novelistic aims and methods.10 Much work remains to be done fleshing out these comparisons between Eliot’s and Robinson’s fiction. For my purposes of examining the implications of how Eliot consistently values ethical subjectivity, though, I turn to Robinson’s non-fiction essays, where she most explicitly argues for the need to revalue these old questions of subjective experience. I focus especially on Absence of Mind (2010), her series of essays for Yale University’s Terry Foundation Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and
Philosophy. The very title of this lecture series suggests its inheritance from the Victorian era of the perceived tension between these discourses. Here Robinson critiques how assumptions and arguments from these nineteenth-century debates have become uncritically reified in modern popularized evolutionary psychology, which she calls “parascientific” (66). She outlines the pervasive binary that labels humanist and especially religious defenses of subjective
introspection as reactionary while labeling scientific defenses of objective psychological mechanism as progressive. She argues that this politicized binary is not inevitable, that it is a historically constructed opposition with unfortunate implications for ethics. She critiques how evolutionary psychology remains compromised by racist assumptions, and how its parascientific popularizers make exaggerated claims about its social implications unjustified by actual
science’s modesty and rigor. She advocates recovering a language capable of taking seriously the wonder of ethical subjectivity, the experiences of mind and conscience. By mind she means the
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experience of self-reflexively saying I, perceiving ourselves as free and responsible. This consciousness is also conscience, which means that we in our perceived freedom are capable of standing apart from our own needs to evaluate others’ needs and choose altruism. Not simply reacting to external stimuli, we perceive our interior experience as multiple and ethically obligated.
For Robinson, recuperating language that adequately values how such ethical subjectivity exceeds objective explanation can shape how we see and treat others as sharers in this
paradoxically unique and universal human experience of mind and conscience. She highlights various humanistic discourses, including that of the aesthetics of language and art, but she most often argues for religious language as especially capable of contributing to this revaluing of mind and conscience. Rather than simply repeating Victorian religious reactions against evolutionary psychology, she, like Eliot, humanizes religion, underscoring how its language values ethical subjectivity as real and worthy of wonder and respect, not as an illusion to be dismissed by overreaching parascientific polemics, but as something that would offer ethical traction against dehumanizing, oppressive ideologies. The clarity of Robinson’s argument helps me show how Eliot models such language in The Mill on the Floss and why it still matters to acknowledge it.
Adding to the studies already showing how Mill manifests Eliot’s investments in science, I highlight a perspective that has not received enough emphasis: even as she engaged with evolutionary psychology, Eliot continued to invoke language and imagery specific to religious discourses to describe the wonderous excess of ethical subjectivity: mind and conscience.
I will first review Eliot’s interest in social and psychological evolution, then focus on the primary critiques debated over evolutionary psychology’s account of subjective experience, as Robinson shows. Next showing how Robinson and Eliot intervene in this debate by challenging
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the explanatory sufficiency of psychology and affirming humanized religious language will serve as a basis for my close reading of how The Mill on the Floss uses such language to value the excess of ethical subjectivity.
George Eliot and science: “social & psychological evolution”
Many have studied how Eliot’s interest in science influenced her own essays and novels, often engaging with various evolutionary models.11 Such scholarship demonstrates that Eliot’s literary interests focused on the humanistic questions and social implications attending science (McDonagh), but it overlooks her continued investment in religious discourse about ethical subjectivity. Even if scholarship briefly acknowledges such discourse, or more often describes it as metaphysical, it mostly narrates Eliot as moving away from religion toward biological
materialist language. This oversight is perhaps understandable because Eliot is not known for overtly invoking orthodox religious arguments, given her rejection of Evangelicalism. As early as 1883, George Willis Cooke claimed that Eliot found in Darwin’s and Spencer’s evolutionary theories “perfectly satisfactory” answers to her metaphysical questions, which in turn determined her view of human subjectivity, that “Man is not only the product of nature, but, according to this theory, nature limits his moral capacity and the range of his mental activity” (219-20). Much scholarship follows this cue. However, Eliot’s position is more nuanced; she remained alert to the ethical implications of scientific theories in ways that suggest she did not assume these theories conclusively limited or discredited ethical subjectivity.
A mid-1870s notebook not published until 1966 offers a fascinating range of entries showing how integrated her interests were. “Ethics is a mixed science,” she writes, “to which conduct is the corresponding art.” Moral discourse’s traditional focus on conduct or action
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should be accompanied by “the scientific point of view,” which studies the material forces and energies that enable action. She underscores the urgency of bringing these advances to bear on ethical questions: “it seems an unfruitful attempt now to consider ethics apart from social &
psychological evolution,” she ponders. “Of what use is it to consider ‘ends’ & the motives for seeking them, unless we can assure ourselves that the motives (or forms of force) in question will continue to be generated?” (Pinney 364). At first this may sound like orthodox physiological psychology—that motives for ethical action are traceable to forces that can be objectively analyzed. But she does not specify that these forces are necessarily exclusively material. Simon Calder explicates this notebook entry as indicating that Eliot invites readers to alternate between scientific objectivity and “anthropocentrism” or the “sympathetic impulse,” a balance he sees as borne out in The Mill on the Floss (63). The two extremes are historically exemplified by figures such as Comte and Mill on the one hand and Aristotle and Feuerbach on the other (70). Eliot leaned more toward the latter; in contrast to positivist rationalism—Auguste Comte’s “religion of humanity” that envisions science as the teleological end of all human endeavor—Eliot’s
“anthropocentrism” privileges how Feuerbach reimagined religion in The Essence of
Christianity, which she translated and published in England in 1854. In a letter from that year, she wrote, “with the ideas of Feuerbach I everywhere agree” (Letters 2: 153, qtd. in Anger,
“George Eliot” 79). For Feuerbach, religion projects and idealizes ethical human qualities as divine, especially sympathy (Essence 54, 82, 158, 184). Thus while Eliot rejects the literalness of specific Christian doctrines, she retains the centrality of ethical subjectivity as a religious
orientation (Cooke 221; Halder 11). Building on this context, to balance out the scholarship focused on scientific discourses in The Mill on the Floss, I focus on religiously-inflected descriptions of the experience of mind and conscience. I show how Eliot suggests not conflict
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but collaboration between two simultaneously available and not necessarily exclusive methods of approaching questions about human psychological experience. When in this notebook entry she asks “Of what use is it,” she is not saying that the old ethical questions of ends and motives are no longer relevant, but rather that all available discourses with ethical implications should be integrated: any insights psychology may offer about how cultural and physical embodiment impacts ethical experience should be accepted as part of understanding such experience.
In this notebook entry, Eliot specifies two scientific fields whose bearing on ethics she particularly considered, both connected through evolutionary models. The first is “social evolution.” Much scholarship prioritizes Darwin’s model, and she did recognize his Origin of Species as making an “epoch” in the field, though she also thought its style unimpressive and found its lack of “illustrative facts” troubling (Dec. 5, 1859 letter to Barbara Bodichon, Cross 2:
108; cf. Beer, Darwin’s 146). But Eliot was also familiar with other evolutionary models propounded throughout the nineteenth century. For example, she knew Comte’s theory of the evolution of society toward a positivist or scientific end, though she hesitated to endorse it as a new religious system.12 She read and responded to Spencer’s work building on Darwin with varying degrees of approval and resistance.13 But Eliot’s sense of social evolution is more specific than Spencer’s application of Darwinian evolution to human societies to justify the competition that ensures the “survival of the fittest” (Principles of Biology 444, 455-57, 468, 474). Rather, she prioritized the cumulative effect of human actions as inescapably impacting any given individual’s range of choices and capacities for future action; this is less a narrative of origins than of current processes. For Eliot, society is a living organism that evolves over time and constitutes human life as an “organic form” within itself.14 So in The Mill on the Floss, Eliot describes the social web of Maggie’s family and neighbors as cohering less through consciously-
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held religious beliefs and more through “hereditary custom”; their environment is such as
“science” shows to be a “unity,” since such science links “the smallest things with the greatest”
in its “large vision of relations” and sees everything as embodying “a vast sum of conditions”
(Mill 273). Eliot well conveys how the inhuman natural forces and pitiless social webs around the single person can seem overpowering. Such materially-bounded organicism connects with her view of perception as physically limited, as in Daniel Deronda (1876) when the narrator asks, “who can all at once describe a human being?” (91), or in Middlemarch when the narrator describes the fortunate physiological filtering system that preserves us from being
psychologically overwhelmed by the growth of the grass and the beating heart of the squirrel and
“that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (124).15 These limitations on human perception can facilitate or hinder communication and inevitably impact social evolution.
The second form of science with a bearing on ethics that Eliot specifies in her notebook entry, building on social evolution, is “psychological evolution.” At one level, this could simply refer to a type of sociology, tracking the psychological changes in society over time. But it could also refer to the emerging field of evolutionary psychology, which applies principles of evolution to understand the materiality of human mental and emotional experience as the product of
biological adaptations over time. Eliot closely followed as this field sought to define itself against older accounts of psychological experience.16 Before she wrote The Mill on the Floss, Eliot was reading work like Franz Joseph Gall’s foundational text on phrenology, Anatomy and Physiology of the General Nervous System and of the Brain (1810), and William Carpenter’s Comparative Physiology (1839), as she wrote in an October 16, 1855 letter to Sara Hennell (Cross 1: 279).17 She was also reading and corresponding with Spencer about his work The
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Principles of Psychology (1855), an early attempt to bring a Lamarckian evolutionary model to bear on empirical psychology.
Spencer interpreted psychological concerns through a biological evolutionary model to extrapolate human nature, dismissing the deceptive, imprecise subjective methods of
introspection. For example, he concludes his work by explaining how “freedom of the Will” is an “illusion” because, from the objective scientific view, it is simply “determined by those psychical connections which experience has generated” (Principles of Psychology 500). Some have argued that Eliot subscribed to such determinism,18 but a closer look shows there is greater distance between Eliot and these Spencerian assumptions.19 Scholarly disagreement about the extent to which Eliot supported or rejected Spencer’s arguments suggests that, while she was clearly familiar with his contribution to evolutionary psychology, she also was not his unthinking disciple.
Besides Spencer, another major figure in developing evolutionary psychology with whom Eliot closely interacted is, of course, G. H. Lewes. After publishing The Mill on the Floss, Eliot followed Lewes through his years of writing Problems of Life and Mind, a series running to five volumes that likewise asserts the physiological basis of the mind but more ambiguously
alternates between Lamarck and Darwin and places more emphasis than Spencer did on the social situatedness of mental life (Postlewaite 107; Rylance 223, 260, 262, 284, 299). Lewes’s last two volumes especially emphasize the physiological and social interconnectedness of mental experience and envision thought as a metaphorical “stream of Consciousness,” an image more frequently credited to William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) (Lewes 5: 366; James 1:
224, 239; Holland 37-38). Eliot defended Lewes against critics, and as she edited these final two volumes for publication after his death, she further exhaustively studied the psychologists that
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Lewes was responding to, not just Spencer but also figures such as Grant Allen, Alexander Bain, Henry Sidgwick, James Sully, T. H. Huxley, and others.20 Many of them read Eliot, too; James Sully praised her writing in two articles published by the psychological journal Mind, “Art and Psychology” (1876) and “George Eliot’s Art” (1881).21 These figures shaped the developing field of evolutionary psychology that would resurface with Neo-Darwinism in the later twentieth century (Rylance 80).
Given that Eliot shared an interest in evolutionary psychology with Lewes more closely than with Spencer, scholars often emphasize the continuity between their thought.22 As Eliot edited and revised Lewes’s last two volumes of Problems of Life and Mind, she sought to be true to his intentions, but she also signaled her own humanistic priorities.23 De Sailly suggests that Eliot’s manuscript edits indicate that her attention gravitated toward “aesthetics and metaphysics rather than biology” (145). However, she argues that her revisions also led Eliot to depart
somewhat not only from Lewes but also from her own meliorist views of morality familiar in her fiction. The case is built on a passage in the fifth volume of Problems of Life and Mind that describes how evolution makes people more dependent on each other and hence more
sympathetic by force of habit, but such sympathy can be exposed as only a subjective illusion masking a manipulative survival mechanism, enabling “more elaborate forms of egoism, and civilised man is still a beast of prey directing murderous artillery for the satisfaction of his more highly differentiated greed” (Lewes 5: 387; qtd. in De Sailly 148-49). This passage, De Sailly claims, shows a pessimistic turn in late Eliot that also emphasizes the “dark side” of Lewes’s work (147). I think the lack of corresponding pessimism in Eliot’s own published work, along with her effort to study Lewes’s sources to preserve his intellectual context and intentions in these volumes (Collins 463-65), suggest that this claim of a pessimistic turn is too strong. I want