Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Jonah Lehrer
on Thomson’s cosmic pessimism. Maxwell realized that Laplace’s omniscient demon actually violated the laws of physics. Since disorder was real (it was even increasing), science had fundamental limits. After all, pure entropy couldn’t be solved. No demon could know everything.
But Maxwell didn’t stop there. While Laplace believed that you could easily apply statistical laws to specific problems, Maxwell’s work with gases had taught him otherwise. While the temperature of a gas was wholly determined by the velocity of its atoms — the faster they fly, the hotter the gas — Maxwell realized that velocity was nothing but a statistical average. At any given instant, the individual atoms were actually moving at different speeds. In other words, all physical laws are only approximations. They cannot be applied with any real precision to particulars. This, of course, directly contradicted Laplace’s social physics, which assumed that the laws of science were universal and absolute. Just as a planet’s position could be deduced from the formula of its orbit, Laplace believed, our behaviors could be plotted in terms of our own ironclad forces. But Maxwell knew that every law had its flaw. Scientific theories were functional things, not perfect mirrors to reality. Social physics was founded on a fallacy.
An etching of George Eliot in 1865 by Paul Adolphe Rajon, after the drawing by Sir Frederick William Burton
Love and Mystery
George Eliot’s belief in positivism began to fade when she suffered a broken heart. Here was a terrible feeling no logic could solve. The cause of her sadness was Herbert Spencer, the Victorian biologist who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” After Eliot moved to London, where she lived in a flat on the Strand, she grew intimate with Spencer. They shared long walks in the park and a subscription to the opera. She fell in love. He did not. When he began to ignore her — their relationship was provoking the usual Victorian rumors — Eliot wrote Spencer a series of melodramatic yet startlingly honest love letters. She pleaded for his “mercy and love”: “I want to know if you can assure me that you will not forsake me, and that you will always be with me as much as you can and share your thoughts and feelings with me. If you become attached to someone else, then I must die, but until then I could gather courage to work and make life valuable, if only I had you near me.” Despite Eliot’s confessions of vulnerability, the letter proudly concludes with an acknowledgment of her worth: “I suppose no woman before ever wrote such a letter as this — but I am not ashamed of it, for I am conscious that in the light of reason and true refinement I am worthy of your respect and tenderness.”
Spencer ignored Eliot’s letters. He was steadfast in his rejection. “The lack of physical attraction was fatal,” he would later write, blaming Eliot’s famous ugliness for his absence of feeling. He could not look past her “heavy jaw, large mouth, and big nose.”* Spencer believed his reaction was purely biological, and was thus immutable: “Strongly as my judgment prompted, my instincts would not respond.” He would never love Eliot.
Her dream of marriage destroyed, Eliot was forced to confront a future as a single, anonymous woman. If she was to support herself, she had to write. But her heartbreak was more than a painful emancipation; it also caused her to think about the world in new ways. In Middlemarch, Eliot describes an emotional state similar to what she must have been feeling at the time: “She might have compared her experience at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on a new form, that she was undergoing a metamorphosis … Her whole world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew … This was the effect of her loss.” In the months following Spencer’s rejection, Eliot decided that she would “nourish [a] sleek optimism.” She refused to stay sad. Before long, Eliot was in love again, this time with George Henry Lewes.
In many important ways, Lewes was Spencer’s opposite. Spencer began his career as an ardent positivist, futilely searching for a theory of everything. After positivism faded away, Spencer became a committed social Darwinist, and he enjoyed explaining all of existence — from worms to civilization — in terms of natural selection. Lewes, on the other hand, was an intellectual renowned for his versatility; he wrote essays on poetry and physics, psychology and philosophy. In an age of increasing academic specialization, Lewes remained a Renaissance man. But his luminous mind concealed a desperate unhappiness. Like Eliot, Lewes was also suffering from a broken heart. His wife, Agnes, was pregnant with the child of his best friend.
In each other, Lewes and Eliot found the solution for their melancholy. Lewes would later describe their relationship as deeply, romantically mysterious. “Love,” Lewes wrote, “defies all calculation.” “We are not ‘judicious’ in love; we do not select those whom we ‘ought to love,’ but those whom we cannot help loving.” By the end of the year, Lewes and Eliot were traveling together in Germany. He wanted to be a “poet in science.” She wanted to be “a scientific poet.”
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It is too easy to credit love for the metamorphosis of Eliot’s world-view. Life’s narratives are never so neat. But Lewes did have an unmistakable effect on Eliot. He was the one who encouraged her to write novels, silencing her insecurities and submitting her first manuscript to a publisher.
Unlike Spencer, Lewes never trusted the enthusiastic science of the nineteenth century. A stubborn skeptic, Lewes first became famous in 1855 with his Life of Goethe, a sympathetic biography that interwove Goethe’s criticisms of the scientific method with his romantic poetry. In Goethe, Lewes found a figure who resisted the mechanistic theories of positivism, trusting instead in the “concrete phenomena of experience.” And while Lewes eagerly admitted that a properly experimental psychology could offer an “objective insight into our thinking organ,” he believed that “Art and Literature” were no less truthful, for they described the “psychological world.” In an age of ambitious experiments, Lewes remained a pluralist.
Lewes’s final view of psychology, depicted most lucidly in The Problems of Life and Mind (a text that Eliot finished after Lewes’s death), insisted that the brain would always be a mystery, “for too complex is its unity.” Positivists may proselytize their bleak vision, Lewes wrote, but “no thinking man will imagine anything is explained by this. Life and Being remain as inaccessible as ever.” If nothing else, freedom is a necessary result of our ignorance.
By the time Eliot wrote her last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), she had come to see that Laplace and Spencer and the rest of the positivists were wrong. The universe could not be distilled into a neat set of causes. Freedom, however fragile, exists. “Necessitarianism,”* Eliot wrote, “I hate the ugly word.” Eliot had read Maxwell on molecules, even copying his lectures into her journals, and she knew that nothing in life could be perfectly predicted. To make her point, Eliot began Daniel Deronda with a depiction of human beings as imagined by Laplace. The setting is a hazy and dark casino, full of sullen people who act, Eliot writes, “as if they had all eaten of some root that for the time compelled the brains of each to the same narrow monotony of action.” These gamblers are totally powerless, dependent on the dealer to mete out their random hands. They passively accept whichever cards they are dealt. Their fortune is determined by the callous laws of statistics.
In Eliot’s elaborately plotted work, the casino is no casual prop — it is a criticism of determinism. As soon as Eliot introduces this mechanical view of life, she begins deconstructing its silly simplicities. After Daniel enters the casino, he spies a lone woman, Gwendolen Harleth. “Like dice in mid-air,” Gwendolen is an unknown. Her mysteriousness immediately steals Daniel’s attention; she transcends the depressing atmosphere of the casino. Unlike the gamblers, who do nothing but wait for chance to shape their fate, Gwendolen seems free. Daniel stares at her and wonders: “Was she beautiful