,
George Henry Lewes, 1840, graphite and watercolor. Lewes, age twenty three, "the most amusing little fellow in the whole world—if you only overlook his unparalleled impudence, which is not impudence at all but man of genius
bonhomie (Mrs Carlyle, Letters, 5 February 1849) From 1840 to 1850, Lewes supported himself by contributing to quarterly and other reviews, articles discussing a wide range of subjects, often imperfect but revealing acute critical judgment enlightened by philosophic study. The most valuable are those on drama, afterwards republished under the title
Actors and Acting (1875), and
The Spanish Drama (1846). In 1845–46, Lewes published
The Biographical History of Philosophy, an attempt to depict the life of philosophers as an ever-renewed fruitless labour to attain the unattainable. In 1847–48, he published two novels –
Ranthorpe, and
Rose, Blanche and Violet – which, though displaying considerable skill in plot, construction, and characterisation, have taken no permanent place in literature. The same is to be said of an ingenious attempt to rehabilitate
Robespierre (1849). In 1850, he collaborated with
Thornton Leigh Hunt in the foundation of
The Leader, of which he was the literary editor. In 1853, he republished under the title of ''Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences'' a series of papers which had appeared in that journal. The culmination of Lewes's work in prose literature is the
Life of Goethe (1855), probably the best known of his writings. Lewes's versatility, and his combination of scientific with literary tastes, eminently fitted him to appreciate the wide-ranging activity of the German poet. The work became well known in Germany itself, despite the boldness of its criticism and the unpopularity of some of its views (e.g. on the relation of the second to the first part of
Faust).
Science From about 1853, Lewes's writings show that he was occupying himself with scientific and more particularly biological work. He always showed a distinctly scientific bent in his writings, though he had not had technical training. More than popular expositions of accepted scientific truths, they contain able criticisms of conventionally accepted ideas and embody the results of individual research and individual reflection. He made several suggestions, some of which have since been accepted by
physiologists, of which the most valuable is that now known as the doctrine of the functional indifference of the nerves – that what were known as the specific energies of the
optic,
auditory and other nerves are simply differences in their mode of action due to the differences of the peripheral structures or sense-organs with which they are connected. This idea was subsequently proposed independently by
Wundt.
Philosophy In 1865, when
The Fortnightly Review began publication, Lewes became its editor, but he retained the post for less than two years, when he was succeeded by
John Morley. This marks the transition from more strictly scientific to philosophic work. Lewes had been interested in philosophy from early youth; one of his earliest essays was an appreciative account of
Hegel's
Aesthetics. Under the influence of the
positivism of
Auguste Comte and
John Stuart Mill's
A System of Logic, he abandoned all faith in the possibility of
metaphysics, and recorded this abandonment in his
History of Philosophy. Yet he did not at any time give unqualified assent to Comte's teachings, and with wider reading and reflection his mind moved further away from the
positivist stance. In the preface to the third edition of his
History of Philosophy he avowed a change in this direction, and this movement is even more plainly discernible in subsequent editions of the work. The outcome of his intellectual progress is
The Problems of Life and Mind. His sudden death cut short the work, yet it is complete enough to allow a judgment on the author's matured conceptions on biological, psychological and metaphysical problems. The first two volumes on
The Foundations of a Creed laid down Lewes's foundation – a
rapprochement between metaphysics and science. He was still positivist enough to pronounce all inquiry into the ultimate nature of things fruitless: what matter, form, and spirit are in themselves is a futile question that belongs to the sterile region of "metempirics". But philosophical questions may be susceptible to a precise solution through
scientific method. Thus, since the relation of subject to object falls within our experience, it is a proper matter for philosophic investigation. His treatment of the question of the relation of subject to object confused the scientific truth that mind and body coexist in the living organism and the philosophic truth that all knowledge of objects implies a knowing subject. In
Shadworth Hodgson's phrase, he mixed up the genesis of mental forms with their nature (see
Philosophy of Reflexion, ii. 40–58). Thus he reached a
monistic doctrine that mind and matter are two aspects of the same existence by attending simply to the parallelism between psychical and physical processes as a given fact (or probable fact) of our experience, leaving out of account their relation as subject and object in the cognitive act. His identification of the two as phases of one existence is open to criticism not only from the point of view of philosophy but from that of science. In his treatment of such ideas as "sensibility", "sentience" and the like, he does not always make it clear whether he is speaking of physical or of psychical phenomena. Among other philosophic questions discussed in these two volumes the nature of causal relation is perhaps the one which is handled with most freshness and suggestiveness. The third volume,
The Physical Basis of Mind, further develops the writer's views on
organic activities as a whole. He insists on the radical distinction between organic and inorganic processes and the impossibility of explaining the former by purely mechanical principles. All parts of the nervous system have the same elementary property; sensibility. Thus sensibility belongs as much to the lower centres of the spinal cord as to the brain, the former, more elementary, form contributing to the
subconscious region of mental life, while the higher functions of the nervous system, which make up our conscious mental life, are more complex modifications of this fundamental property of nerve substance. The nervous organism acts as a whole, particular mental operations cannot be referred to definite regions of the brain, and the
hypothesis of nervous activity by an isolated pathway from one
nerve cell to another is altogether illusory. By insisting on the complete coincidence between the regions of nerve action and sentience, that these are but different aspects of one thing, he was able to attack the doctrine of animal and human
automatism which affirms that feeling or consciousness is
merely an incidental concomitant of nerve action in no way essential to the chain of physical events. Lewes's views on
psychology, partly explained in the earlier volumes of the
Problems, are more fully worked out in the last two (3rd series). He discussed the method of psychology with much insight. Against Comte and his followers he claimed a place for introspection in psychological research. As well as this subjective method there must be an objective one, a reference to nervous conditions and socio-historical data. Biology would help explain mental functions such as feeling and thinking, it would not help us to understand differences of mental faculty in different races and stages of human development. The organic conditions of these differences will probably for ever escape detection, hence they can be explained only as the products of the social environment. The relationship of mental phenomena to social and historical conditions is probably Lewes's most important contribution to psychology. He also emphasised the complexity of mental phenomena. Every mental state is regarded as compounded of three factors in different proportions – sensible affection, logical grouping and motor impulse. But Lewes's work in psychology consists less in discoveries than in method. His biological experience prepared him to view mind as a complex unity of which the highest processes are identical with and evolved out of the lower. Thus the operation of thought, or "the logic of signs", is a more complicated form of the elementary operations of sensation and instinct or "the logic of feeling". ==Death==