A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

12.
realistic an appreciation of the immensity of the task to do that--but she
would have conourred "lith the underlying sentiment. She expressed herself
in agreement, for example, "lith the IIfundamental doctrine" of Charles
Bray's book, ~ Philosophy .2!. Necessity (1841), that "the mind presents
itself under the same condition of invariableness of antecedent and consoquentas
all other phenomena, 'I but qualified this with the rider that
mental phenomena are "proportionately difficult to discover as [}hey ar!J ~
more complex." 7 But she and Lewes were in the vanguard of nineteenthcentury
thought in their acceptance that the mind was subject to the
determining laws that obtained for the physical organism. Other thinkers
were more cautious. Nineteenth-eentury thinkers who were concerned with
the nature of the mind fall into two catEt8ories. The first were philosophers,
castigated by Francis Gall for working "in a closet." 8 In this
group belong Auguste Comte, the Mills, and Herbert Spencer. The other
group consists of scientists actively engaged in neurophysiological
experimentation and researoh. Lev.es is interesting because he initially
belonged to the first category but he was mortified by Huxley's description
of him as a mere ''book scientist" 9 and became increasingly cccupied
with genuine research.
Most nineteenth-century thinkers, philosophers or scientists, were
bedevilled by the basic assumption that the mind v~s
somehow a separate
entity, or even, as Lewes scathingly puts it, an "abstraction. 1t 10 Even
a brief survey of the development of nineteenth-century neurophysiology
reveals that as physical researoh into the function of the brain became
more detailed and acourate, the scientists had to struggle against their
wish to deny the evidence that the cerebral cortex was involved in the
sensory-motor functions of the body. G. H. Lewes stands out in this
connection for his unflagging missionary zeal to persuade his readers
to accept the mind as a "function of the organism." 11 In his 1845