Abstract

abstract:

The judgment that George Eliot’s lover, G. H. Lewes, was the first to formulate and name the scientific concept of emergence is now widely accepted. When she edited the final volume of his last work, Problems of Life and Mind, which was published shortly after his death in 1877 and before hers in 1880, she both helped ensure a place in scientific history for Lewes as the first theorist of “emergence” in the nineteenth century, and provided the world with a philosophical introduction to the rich array of emergent themes that helped to make her novel Middlemarch one of the finest works of Victorian realism.

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