George Henry Lewes: a man of his time.

Abstract

The twentieth century has not been kind to the memory of George Henry Lewes. At best, he is remembered as the husband of George Eliot, the novelist. Nevertheless, Lewes remains a fascinating figure in nineteenth-century intellectual history. Fluent in both French and German, he was attuned to every change, Literary and scientific, on the Continent. Carlyle called him "the prince of journalists," but Lewes was much more than that; he was one of the most important middlemen of ideas in the nineteenth century, in the best sense of that term. Until he was about forty, Lewes spent his adult life writing for various literary journals. His early affiliation with positivism had, however, engendered in him a deep love for scientific knowledge. The positivist penchant for specific laws that bind the universe together had convinced Lewes, living in an intensely scientific age, that these laws were to be discovered in the sciences in general, and in the biological sciences in particular. As early as 1846, writing in 7he Biographical History of Philosophy, Lewes had seen the change in philosophical thought as a progressive step. The development of philosophy was to culminate, Lewes felt, in scientific philosophy, or, in other words, in a knowledge bound by the limits of scientific laws. In this paper I attempt to reveal the correspondence between the transformation of ideas in the work of a single amateur scientist and the simultaneous change in the general scientific attitude of the age. I argue that the dependence of nineteenth-century science upon metaphysics for its paradigms diminished after the advent of the Darwinian theory of evolution. And I also show that this early reluctant movement of the age is clearly revealed in the work of G. H. Lewes, a lesser-known scientist of the period, a point exemplifying George Herbert Palmer's dictum that "tendencies of an age appear more distinctly in its writers of inferior ranks than [in] those of commanding genius."' It appears likely that the same reasons which prevailed upon the age to adopt the