Empiricism, one of Raymond William's keywords, circulates in much
contemporary thought and criticism solely as a term of censure, a
synonym for spurious objectivity or positivism. Yet rarely, if
ever, has it had this philosophical implication. Dr Johnson, it
should be recalled, kicked the stone precisely to expose
empiricism's baroque falsifications of common sense. In an effort
to restore historical depth to the term, this book examines
epistemology in the narrative prose of five writers, John Ruskin,
Alexander Bain, G. H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and George Eliot,
developing the view that the flourishing of nineteenth-century
scientific culture occurred at a time when empiricism itself was
critically dismantling any such naive representationalism. Dr.
Garratt argues that by the 1860s empiricism was both a dominant
cultural language and a reflexive epistemic theory, producing a
model of contingent self hood conceived simultaneously as the route
towards knowledge and its obstacle. For this reason, Victorian
empiricism predicated its search for knowledge on a profound
instability, one embodied within the textual language through which
it sought its articulation.By examining familiar works, such as
Ruskin's Modern Painters and George Eliot's fiction, alongside the
voluminous psychological and philosophical prose of Bain, Lewes,
and Spencer, he illustrates, using detailed examples, how the
imperatives of empiricist thought shaped the aesthetic of realism,
as well as nineteenth-century views towards perception, human
embodiment, and relativism. In all cases, their works give shape to
empiricism's skeptical impulse. In Ruskin, for example, the
narrative journey into knowledge is one of haphazard progress and
fraught autobiographical engagement; in Bain's psychology it forms
a story of precarious accumulation; in Lewes and Spencer, sprawling
form expresses the proliferating potential of knowledge itself.
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