In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art and Society in the Victorian Age (Science & literature series) Book

One of the preoccupations of victorian writers was the search for a philosophical replacement for romanticism. "In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture" traces the course of that search. As Peter Dale points out, two aspects of it are important: "One, of little practical relevance in its own time but extremely potent in ours, was that offered by Marx in deliberate opposition to the aesthetic and metaphysical totalities of the romantic period ...The other philosophical project for achieving totality in the postromantic period we hear relatively little of as a nineteenth-century phenomenon, though it made far more of an impact on the contemporary mind than Marxism". That project was positivism. Like Marxism, positivism was militantly realistic and antiromantic. Its realism, however, was based not on an analysis of history and economics, but on the structures of the natural world and the scientific method that seemed the only reliable way to understand those structures. Positivism became the dominant ideology of the later Victorian age, and Dale argues that because of its influence on both practical and contemplative life, it was the true intellectual successor to romanticism. Dale approaches positive through the writings of George Henry Lewes and extends his focus to George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, Darwin, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Freud in an effort to show an ongoing engagement between science and the imagination.Read More