Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Jonah Lehrer
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.
— Jane Austen, Emma
GEORGE ELIOT WAS A WOMAN of many names. Born Mary Anne Evans in 1819, the same year as Queen Victoria, she was at different times in her life Mary Ann Evans, Marian Evans, Marian Evans Lewes, Mary Ann Cross, and, always in her art, George Eliot. Each of her names represented a distinct period of her life, reflecting her slightly altered identity. Though she lived in a time when women enjoyed few freedoms, Eliot refused to limit her transformations. She had no inheritance, but she was determined to write. After moving to London in 1850 to become an essayist and translator, Eliot decided, at the age of thirty-seven, to become a novelist. Later that year, she finished her first novella, The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton. She signed the story with her new name; she was now George Eliot.
Why did she write? After finishing her masterpiece Middlemarch (1872), Eliot wrote in a letter that her novels were “simply a set of experiments in life — an endeavor to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of.” Eliot’s reference to “experiments” isn’t accidental; nothing she wrote was. The scientific process, with its careful blend of empiricism and imagination, fact and theory, was the model for her writing process. Henry James once complained that Eliot’s books contained too much science and not enough art. But James misunderstood Eliot’s method. Her novels are fiction in the service of truth, “examination[s] of the history of man” under the “varying experiments of time.” Eliot always demanded answers from her carefully constructed plots.
And while her realist form touched upon an encyclopedia of subjects, her novels are ultimately concerned with the nature of the individual. She wanted “to pierce the obscurity of the minute processes” at the center of human life. A critic of naïve romanticism, Eliot always took the bleak facts of science seriously. If reality is governed by mechanical causes, then is life just a fancy machine? Are we nothing but chemicals and instincts, adrift in an indifferent universe? Is free will just an elaborate illusion?
These are epic questions, and Eliot wrote epic novels. Her Victorian fiction interweaves physics and Darwin with provincial politics and melodramatic love stories. She forced the new empirical knowledge of the nineteenth century to confront the old reality of human experience. For Eliot, this was the novel’s purpose: to give us a vision of ourselves “more sure than shifting theory.” While scientists were searching for our biological constraints — they assumed we were prisoners of our hereditary inheritance — Eliot’s art argued that the mind was “not cut in marble.” She believed that the most essential element of human nature was its malleability, the way each of us can “will ourselves to change.” No matter how many mechanisms science uncovered, our freedom would remain.
Social Physics
In Eliot’s time, that age of flowering rationality, the question of human freedom became the center of scientific debate. Positivism — a new brand of scientific philosophy founded by Auguste Comte — promised a utopia of reason, a world in which scientific principles perfected human existence. Just as the theological world of myths and rituals had given way to the philosophical world, so would philosophy be rendered obsolete by the experiment and the bell curve. At long last, nature would be deciphered.
The lure of positivism’s promises was hard to resist. The intelligentsia embraced its theories; statisticians became celebrities; everybody looked for something to measure. For the young Eliot, her mind always open to new ideas, positivism seemed like a creed whose time had come. One Sunday, she abruptly decided to stop attending church. God, she decided, was nothing more than fiction. Her new religion would be rational.
Like all religions, positivism purported to explain everything. From the history of the universe to the future of history, there was no question too immense to be solved. But the first question for the positivists, and in many ways the question that would be their undoing, was the paradox of free will. Inspired by Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity, which divined the cause of the elliptical motions found in the heavens, the positivists struggled to uncover a parallel order behind the motions of humans.* According to their depressing philosophy, we were nothing but life-size puppets pulled by invisible strings.
The founder of this “science of humanity” was Pierre-Simon Laplace. The most famous mathematician of his time, Laplace also served as Napoleon’s minister of the interior.† When Napoleon asked Laplace why there was not a single mention of God in his five-volume treatise on cosmic laws, Laplace replied that he “had no need of that particular hypothesis.” Laplace didn’t need God because he believed that probability theory, his peculiar invention, would solve every question worth asking, including the ancient mystery of human freedom.
Laplace got the idea for probability theory from his work on the orbits of planets. But he wasn’t nearly as interested in celestial mechanics as he was in human observation of those mechanics. Laplace knew that astronomical measurements rarely measured up to Newton’s laws. Instead of being clocklike, the sky described by astronomers was consistently inconsistent. Laplace, trusting the order of the heavens over the eye of man, believed this irregularity resulted from human error. He knew that two astronomers plotting the orbit of the same planet at the same time would differ reliably in their data. The fault was not in the stars, but in ourselves.
Laplace’s revelation was that these discrepancies could be defeated. The secret was to quantify the errors. All one had to do was plot the differences in observation and, using the recently invented bell curve, find the most probable observation. The planetary orbit could now be tracked. Statistics had conquered subjectivity.
But Laplace didn’t limit himself to the trajectory of Jupiter or the rotation of Venus. In his book Essai sur les Probabilités, Laplace attempted to apply the probability theory he had invented for astronomy to a wide range of other uncertainties. He wanted to show that the humanities could be “rationalized,” their ignorance resolved by the dispassionate logic of math. After all, the principles underlying celestial mechanics were no different than those underlying social mechanics. Just as an astronomer is able to predict the future movement of a planet, Laplace believed that before long humanity would be able to reliably predict its own behavior. It was all just a matter of computing the data. He called this brave new science “social physics.”
Laplace wasn’t only a brilliant mathematician; he was also an astute salesman. To demonstrate how his new brand of numerology would one day solve everything — including the future — Laplace invented a simple thought experiment. What if there were an imaginary being — he called it a “demon” — that “could know all the forces by which nature is animated”? According to Laplace, such a being would be omniscient. Since everything was merely matter, and matter obeyed a short list of cosmic laws (like gravity and inertia), knowing the laws meant knowing everything about everything. All you had to do was crank the equations and decipher the results. Man would finally see himself for “the automaton that he is.” Free will, like God, would become an illusion, and we would see that our lives are really as predictable as the planetary orbits. As Laplace wrote, “We must … imagine the present state of the universe as the effect of its prior state and as the cause of the state that will follow it. Freedom has no place here.”
But just as Laplace and his cohorts were grasping on to physics as the paragon of truth (since physics deciphered our ultimate laws), the physicists were discovering that reality was much more complicated than they had ever imagined. In 1852, the British physicist William Thomson elucidated the second law of thermodynamics. The universe, he declared, was destined for chaos. All matter was slowly becoming heat, decaying into a fevered entropy. According to Thomson’s laws of thermodynamics, the very error Laplace had tried to erase — the flaw of disorder — was actually our future.
James