Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain, Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot (review)

In Edward Burne-Jones’s “The Baleful Head” (1886–87), the cover illustration for Peter Garratt’s Victorian Empiricism, Perseus holds high the “baleful head” of the slain Medusa so Andromeda can view its reflection in the watery surface of a well. The image is especially well chosen for Garratt’s volume, which seeks to explain the ways in which debates over empiricism in the mid-Victorian period took an increasingly skeptical view of scientific observation and objectivity. Rather than revealing a comfortable faith in positivistic science—as in Samuel Johnson’s stone-kicking invocation of common sense—the period is marked by an epistemological “crisis,” in which, as George Henry Lewes insisted, “the nature and limits of Knowledge became the most urgent topics” (qtd. in Garratt 133). In Burne-Jones’s painting, the head of the Gorgon can be seen by the mortal Andromeda only indirectly, mediated by the water’s reflection and her lover’s presence. To see the Medusa is to be cast to stone. The painting, then, depicts the visual initiation into a kind of knowledge dangerous to the self. Burne-Jones’s careful rendering of interwining leaves suggests his engagement with scientific modes of visual observation—and, as the art historian Caroline Arscott has ingeniously suggested, the surface of the marble font resembles images of the microscopic view in scientific literature. Empiricism in the mid-Victorian period, in Garratt’s account, is likewise centrally concerned with a tension between a commitment to scientific observation grounded in sense perception and the threat to the self engendered by the pursuit of knowledge.

Garratt’s study opens with an account from Lewes’s Physiology of Common Life (1859–60) of a Frenchman who decides to pursue knowledge even to self-annihilation— he incorporates his own death into a scientific experiment, recording the experience of his gradual asphyxiation in ten-minute intervals. Garratt offers the experiment as an image of empiricism: it “follows an almost fanatical commitment to the idea that knowledge begins in the direct experience of observable reality” (14). The story serves as a narrative of a mid-Victorian drive to know, revealing that the contingent self is viewed as the route to knowledge and also its obstacle. Focusing on Alexander Bain, Lewes, Herbert Spencer, John Ruskin, and George Eliot, Garratt considers the ways in which the empiricist commitment to experience as “the sole origin of knowledge” (Spencer’s phrase) lay in tension with an increasing awareness of “the problematic nature of observation itself” (qtd. in Garratt 16, 16). Empiricism, he argues, did not undergird a “naive representationalism” or signal a “commitment to transparent or pre-given facts” (18, 29); instead, it focused on the limits of knowledge and “troubled the neat ontologies of self and world implicit in such a view” (18). At issue in the mid-and late-nineteenth century was how reality is “thought into being by constructive and imaginative effort” (30).

Garratt makes a strong case for his account of empiricism in his first chapter, “The Ghost of David Hume.” He charts a complex constellation of ideas—neo-Kantian thought, the Scottish common sense school, British psycho-physiology, associationism—and returns repeatedly to Eliot to show the ways in which her work reflects these many influences. The focus of his study is not predominantly psychological, yet it is clear that the debates of the 1860s reflect the impact of the emerging discipline of empiricist psychology on theories of knowledge and representation. And indeed, Bain, Lewes, and Spencer—each of whom receive a chapter—have in recent years received repeated treatments in studies concerned with Victorian psychology. To my mind, then, one of the most compelling aspects of Garratt’s project is the central place his study gives to Ruskin and Baruch Spinoza—not obvious candidates for a study of Victorian empiricism.

Devoting his second chapter to “Ruskin’s Modern Painters...