Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England

339 Pages·2002·1.172 MB·English

by  George Levine

Dying to Know

Dying to Know
Scientific Epistemology and Narrative
in Victorian England
(cid:2) (cid:3)
george levine
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
George Levineis the Kenneth Burke Professor of English at Rutgers Uni-
versity, where he directs the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contem-
porary Culture. An editor of the journal Victorian Studiesfrom 1959 to
1968, Levine is the author of Boundaries of Fiction, The Realistic Imagination,
Darwin and the Novelists,and Lifebirds.He is the editor of Realism and Repre-
sentationand Aesthetics and Ideology,among others.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2002 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2002
Printed in the United States of America
11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 1 2 3 4 5
isbn:0-226-47536-0 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Levine, George Lewis.
Dying to know : scientific epistemology and narrative in Victorian
England / George Levine.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn0-226-47536-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. English prose literature—19th century—History and criticism.
2. Literature and science—Great Britain—History—19th century.
3. Descartes, Rene, 1596–1650—Influence. 4. Knowledge, Theory
of, in literature. 5. Science in literature. 6. Science—Philosophy.
7. Narration (Rhetoric). I. Title.
pr788.s33 l48 2002
828(cid:2).80809356—dc21
2001006417
(cid:2)(cid:3) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of the American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ansi z39.48-1992.
Alla mia Vita Nuova
agli amici ed alla famiglia che l’hanno resa possibile

contents
Acknowledgments / ix
Introduction / Dying to Know / 1
1 / The Narrative of Scientific Epistemology / 17
2 / Dying to Know Descartes / 44
3 / Carlyle, Descartes, and Objectivity:
Lessen Thy Denominator / 66
4 / Autobiography As Epistemology: The Effacement of Self / 85
5 / My Life As a Machine:
Francis Galton, with Some Reflections on A. R. Wallace / 104
6 / Self-Effacement Revisited: Women and Scientific Autobiography / 126
7 / The Test of Truth: Our Mutual Friend / 148
8 / Daniel Deronda:A New Epistemology / 171
9 / The Cartesian Hardy: I Think, Therefore I’m Doomed / 200
10 / Daring to Know: Karl Pearson and the Romance of Science / 220
11 / The Epistemology of Science and Art: Pearson and Pater / 244
Epilogue / Objectivity and Altruism / 268
Notes / 285
Index / 317

acknowledgments
This is the first book I’ve written whose title preceded it. The title suggests a
pursuit that I felt myself living out in the writing—pursuit of completed
knowledge that kept asymptotically verging away. I have pursued the vari-
ous clues to utter comprehensiveness through what ultimately came to seem
zany urges rather than reasoned ambition. Certainly, the pursuit had a
chimerical aspect to it, as though I were obliged to explore everything, and
it has taken so long in development that it really did seem as though it would
leave me, literally, dying to know. But here it is: not compendious and uni-
versal but fragmentary and perhaps arbitrary. In its incompleteness, never-
theless, it owes a great deal to many innocent of its failures who have done
what they could to help me forestall the literal implication of the title.
I must begin by lamenting that it was only in the last weeks of the writ-
ing of this book that I had the privilege of reading the manuscripts of two
extraordinary works that would have influenced my thought much more
had I been lucky enough to see them sooner. Amanda Anderson’s The Pow-
ers of Distanceand Christopher Herbert’s Victorian Relativismbrilliantly reread
the Victorians, tracing two distinct yet closely related intellectual traditions
whose lineaments are oddly similar to those of the tradition I attempt to
trace in this book.
I have been lucky enough, in a term as Avalon Professor at Northwest-
ern University, to get to know Christopher Herbert well, and to know him is
to learn from him and, yes, to love him. What I owe Carolyn Williams, my
colleague at Rutgers and a constant adviser on my obsessions with objectiv-
ity, can only be hinted here. I have always been dying to know what she
thinks about my ideas, and she has given them and me life. Suzy Anger was
a generous sympathizer in the project and an acute critic of it, while also a
constant source of new ideas and information. Theodore Porter has helped
me enormously, with a truly unusual scholarly generosity, in my work on
Karl Pearson. Joe Vining, whose passion for knowledge and justice and
meaning marks all his work, has taught me much and inspired me yet more.
ix