Abstract
This article positions George Henry Lewes and George Eliot within nineteenth-century psychology’s methodological shift. In the Victorian period, the study of mind was transitioning from metaphysical philosophy’s subjective introspection to experimental psychology’s objective analysis. Both philosophers and psychologists attempted to theorize human agency and volition within a materialist paradigm, searching for a midpoint between free will and mechanistic determinism. In Problems of Life and Mind, Lewes posits his theory of “facultative action,” his physiological explanation for a human being’s limited range of agency and choice, which are conditioned by experience, within an otherwise determined world. Eliot takes this theory, gives it a moral urgency, and applies it to human interaction, most evident in the climax of Middlemarch. Complicating the familiar reading of Dorothea and Rosamond’s final encounter as the most mature moment of sympathetic connection in Eliot’s work, this article demonstrates how their encounter unfolds as a moment of misreading, rather than connection. Eliot’s late realism reveals how facultative action allows human beings to interpret connections with others, despite the inevitable failure to surpass the physiological limitations of embodied experience.
