Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Jonah Lehrer
casino to remind us that we are also mysterious, a “secret of form.” And because Gwendolen is a dynamic person, her own “determinate,” she will decide how her own life unfolds. Even when she is later entrapped in a marriage to the evil Grandcourt — “his voice the power of thumbscrews and the cold touch of the rack” — she manages to free herself. Eliot creates Gwendolen to remind us that human freedom is innate, for we are the equation without a set answer. We solve ourselves.*
While George Eliot spurned the social physics of her day, she greeted Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the start of a new “epoch.” She read On the Origin of Species when it was first published in 1859 and immediately realized that the history of life now had a coherent structure. Here was an authentic version of our beginning. And while positivists believed that the chaos of life was only a façade, that beneath everything lay the foundation of physical order, Darwinism said that randomness was a fact of nature. In many ways, randomness was the fact of nature.* According to Darwin, in a given population sheer chance dictated variety. Genetic mutations (Darwin called them saltations) followed no natural laws. This diversity created differing rates of reproduction among organisms, which led to the survival of the fittest. Life progressed because of disorder, not despite it. The theologian’s problem — the question of why nature contained so much suffering and contingency — became Darwin’s solution.
The bracing embrace of chance was what attracted Eliot to Darwin. Here was a narrative that was itself unknowable, since it was guided by random variation. The evolution of life depended on events that had no discernible cause. Unlike Herbert Spencer, who believed that Darwin’s theory of evolution could solve every biological mystery (natural selection was the new social physics), Eliot believed that Darwin had only deepened the mystery. As she confided to her diary: “So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty! But to me the Development theory [Darwin’s theory of evolution] and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the process.” Because evolution has no purpose or plan — it is merely the sum of its accumulated mistakes — our biology remains impenetrable. “Even Science, the strict measurer,” Eliot confessed, “is obliged to start with a make-believe unit.”
The intrinsic mystery of life is one of Eliot’s most eloquent themes. Her art protested against the braggadocio of positivism, which assumed that everything would one day be defined by a few omnipotent equations. Eliot, however, was always most interested in what we couldn’t know, in those aspects of reality that are ultimately irreducible: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” she warns us in Middlemarch, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” Those characters in her novels who deny our mystery, who insist that freedom is an illusion and that reality is dictated by abstract laws (which they happen to have discovered), work against the progress of society. They are the villains, trusting in “inadequate ideas.” Eliot was fond of quoting Tennyson’s In Memoriam: “There lives more faith in honest doubt, /Believe me, than in half the creeds.”
Middlemarch, Eliot’s masterpiece, contains two reductionists searching for what Laplace called “the final laws of the world.” Edward Casaubon, the pretentious husband of Dorothea Brooke, spends his days writing a “Key to All Mythologies,” which promises to find the hidden connection between the varieties of religious experience. His work is bound to fail, Eliot writes, for he is “lost among small closets and winding stairs.” Casaubon ends up dying of a “fatty degeneration of the heart,” a symbolic death if ever there was one.
Dr. Tertius Lydgate, the ambitious country doctor, is engaged in an equally futile search, looking for the “primitive tissue of life.” His foolish quest is an allusion to Herbert Spencer’s biological theories, which Eliot enjoyed mocking.* Like Casaubon, Lydgate continually overestimates the explanatory power of his science. But reality eventually intrudes and Lydgate’s scientific career collapses. After enduring a few financial mishaps, Lydgate ends up becoming a doctor of gout, and “considers himself a failure: he had not done what he once meant to do.” His own life becomes a testament to the limits of science.
After Casaubon dies, Dorothea, the heroine of Middlemarch, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Eliot, falls in love with Will Ladis-law, a poetic type and not-so-subtle symbol of free will. (Will is in “passionate rebellion against his inherited blot.”) Tragically, because of Casaubon’s final will (notice the emerging theme), Dorothea is unable to act on her love. If she marries Will, who is of low social rank, she loses her estate. And so she resigns herself to a wid-owed unhappiness. Many depressing pages ensue. But then Will returns to Middlemarch, and Dorothea, awakened by his presence, realizes that she wants to be with him. Without freedom, money is merely paper. She renounces Casaubon’s estate and runs away with her true love. Embracing Will is her first act of free will. They live happily ever after, in “the realm of light and speech.”
But Middlemarch, a novel that denies all easy answers, is more complicated than its happy ending suggests. (Virginia Woolf called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”) Eliot had read too much Darwin to trust in the lasting presence of joy. She admits that each of us is born into a “hard, unaccommodating Actual.” This is why Dorothea, much to Eliot’s dismay, could not end the novel as a single woman. She was still trapped by the social conventions of the nineteenth century. As Eliot admonishes in the novel’s final paragraphs, “There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.”
In her intricate plots, Eliot wanted to demonstrate how the outside and the inside, our will and our fate, are in fact inextricably entangled. “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending,” Eliot confesses in Middlemarch. Our situation provides the raw material out of which we make our way, and while it is important “never to beat and bruise one’s wings against the inevitable,” it is always possible “to throw the whole force of one’s soul towards the achievement of some possible better.” You can always change your life.
The Brand-New Mind
If science could see freedom, what would it look like? If it wanted to find the will, where would it search? Eliot believed that the mind’s ability to alter itself was the source of our freedom. In Middlemarch, Dorothea — a character who, like Eliot herself, never stopped changing — is reassured that the mind “is not cut in marble — it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing.” Dorothea finds hope in this idea, since it means that the soul “may be rescued and healed.” Like Jane Austen, a literary forebear, Eliot reserved her highest praise for characters brave enough to embrace the possibilities of change. Just as Elizabeth Bennet escapes her own prejudices, so does Dorothea recover from her early mistakes. As Eliot wrote, “we are a process and an unfolding.”
Biology, at least until very recently, did not share Eliot’s faith in the brain’s plasticity. While Laplace and the positivists saw our environment as a prison — from its confines, there was no escape — in the time after Darwin, determinism discovered a new stalking-horse. According to biology, the brain was little more than a genetically governed robot, our neural connections dictated by forces beyond our control. As Thomas Huxley disdainfully declared, “We are conscious automata.”
The most glaring expression of that theme was the scientific belief that a human was born with a complete set of neurons. This theory held that brain cells — unlike every other cell in our body — didn’t divide. Once infancy was over, the brain was complete; the fate of the mind was sealed. Over the course of the twentieth century, this idea became one of neuroscience’s fundamental principles.
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