A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

109 ..
to Lukes, is "the empiricist who holds that we know nothing beyond our
own purely subjective experience enclosed w'ithin the circle of the mind
and the sensations it receives." 1 .. 5 He claims, however, that there are
two crucial objections to such an extreme belief: an appeal to a shared
public world and a shared "intersubjective" language which is a preconditinn
of knowledge. 46 Epistemological individualism taken to its
limits may lead to total solipsism but even a more moderate position
makes apparent the underlying relativity of knowledge. Both T. H. Huxley
and G. H. Lewes recognised this problem. Huxley, for example, w~s
forced to acknowledge that scientific explanations of the world were
merely hypotheses to w~ich he had decided to give his assent. Alvar
Ellegarde describes Huxley' s relativistic posi tioxQ, ''He realized that
the fundamental difference betw~en
empiricist and idealistic views of
causation could not be resolved by logic or observation. It could not
be proved. that one was right and the other ,,;rong. He justified. his
choice of the empiricist view by pointing out that of the two, it was
the only one that made scientific inquiry and scientific progress possible.1I
47
Lewes, whom J. S. Mill described as having lIbuoynncy of spiritj' 48
,,;rote in 1837 when he was ~.that
"we arrive then at the conclusion
that we can never know but relative truth, our only medium of J.cr:.owledge
being the senses; and this medium, with regard to ~ without ~ being
forever a false one; but ?ei~ ~ !..2 ~ we may put confidence in
its relativity." 49 That this is not just youthful effusiveness is
apparent from the following criticism Lewes offers in Problems Ef. ~
~ Mind (1874) of those who "affecting to despise the certainty attainable
through Science, because it can never transcend the relative sphere,
yearn for a knovvledge which is not relative, and cheat themselves with
50
phrases."