Writer, born in London, UK. He left school at an early age to enter first a notary's office, then the house of a Russian merchant. In London, after a stay in Germany, he started writing for the Penny Encyclopaedia and other journals, edited the Leader (18514) and founded and edited the Fortnightly (18656). He was married, with a family, when he began a lifelong affair with George Eliot in 1854. His works, as well as a tragedy and two novels (18418), include The Spanish Drama (1846), Life and Works of Goethe (1855), and Problems of Life and Mind (18749).
George Henry Lewes (April 18, 1817–November 28, 1878) was an English philosopher and literary critic.
He was born in London, a grandson of Charles Lee Lewes, the actor. Finally he devoted himself to literature, science and philosophy. As early as 1836 he belonged to a club formed for the study of philosophy, and had sketched out a physiological treatment of the philosophy of the Scottish school. Two years later he went to Germany, probably with the intention of studying philosophy.
He married a daughter of Swynfen Stevens Jervis, and during the next ten years supported himself by contributing to the quarterly and other reviews. These articles discuss a wide range of subjects, and, though often imperfect, reveal acute critical judgment, enlightened by philosophic study. The combination of wide scholarship, philosophic culture and practical acquaintance with the theatre gives these essays a high place among the best efforts in English dramatic criticism.
In 1845–1846 Lewes published The Biographical History of Philosophy, an attempt to depict the life of philosophers as an ever-renewed fruitless labour to attain the unattainable. In 1853 he republished under the title of Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences a series of papers which had appeared in that journal.
The culmination of Lewes's work in prose literature is the Life of Goethe (1855), probably the best known of his writings. Lewes's versatility, and his combination of scientific with literary tastes, eminently fitted him to appreciate the wide-ranging activity of the German poet. From about 1853 Lewes's writings show that he was occupying himself with scientific and more particularly biological work.
He always showed a distinctly scientific bent in his writings, and his closer devotion to science was the logical follow-on from his early impulses. Of these the most valuable is that now known as the doctrine of the functional indifference of the nerves — that what are known as the specific energies of the optic, auditory and other nerves are simply differences in their mode of action due to the differences of the peripheral structures or sense-organs with which they are connected. In 1865, on the starting of the Fortnightly Review, Lewes became its editor, but he retained the post for less than two years, when he was succeeded by John Morley.
This marks the transition from more strictly scientific to philosophic work. Lewes had been interested in philosophy from early youth;
Yet he did not at any time give an unqualified adhesion to Comte's teachings, and with wider reading and reflection his mind moved away further from the positivist standpoint. The final outcome of this intellectual progress is given to us in The Problems of Life and Mind, which may be regarded as the crowning work of his life. Of his three sons only one, Charles Lewes survived him;
Philosophy
The first two volumes on The Foundations of a Creed lay down what Lewes regarded as the true principles of philosophizing--he tried to effect a rapprochement between metaphysic and science. Thus, since the relation of subject to object falls within our experience, it is a proper matter for philosophic investigation. It may be questioned whether Lewes is right in thus identifying the methods of science and philosophy. Philosophy is not a mere extension of scientific knowledge; In any case Lewes cannot be said to have done much to aid in the settlement of properly philosophical questions.
His whole treatment of the question of the relation of subject to object is vitiated by a confusion between the scientific truth that mind and body coexist in the living organism and the philosophic truth that all knowledge of objects implies a knowing subject. Thus he reaches the "monistic" doctrine that mind and matter are two aspects of the same existence by attending simply to the parallelism between psychical and physical processes given as a fact (or a probable fact) of our experience, and by leaving out of account their relation as subject and object in the cognitive act.
His identification of the two as phases of one existence is open to criticism, not only from the point of view of philosophy, but from that of science. Among the other properly philosophic questions discussed in these two volumes the nature of the casual relation is perhaps the one which is handled with most freshness and suggestiveness.
The third volume, The Physical Basis of Mind, further develops the writer's views on organic activities as a whole, lie insists strongly on the radical distinction between organic and inorganic processes, and on the impossibility of ever explaining the former by purely mechanical principles. Thus sensibility belongs as much to the lower centres of the spinal cord as to the brain, contributing in this more elementary form elements to the "subconscious" region of mental life. The higher functions of the nervous system, which make up our conscious mental life, are merely more complex modifications of this fundamental property of nerve substance.
Closely related to this doctrine is the view that the nervous organism acts as a whole, that particular mental operations cannot be referred to definitely circumscribed regions of the brain, and that the hypothesis of nervous activity passing in the centre by an isolated pathway from one nerve-cell to another is altogether illusory. By insisting on the complete coincidence between the regions of nerve-action and sentience, and by holding that these are but different aspects of one thing, he is able to attack the doctrine of animal and human automatism, which affirms that feeling or consciousness is merely an incidental concomitant of nerve-action and in no way essential to the chain of physical events. Lewes's views in psychology, partly opened up in the earlier volumes of the Problems, are more fully worked out in the last two volumes (3rd series).
He claims against Comte and his followers a place for introspection in psychological research. Biological knowledge, or a consideration of the organic conditions, would only help us to explain mental functions, as feeling and thinking;
This idea of dealing with mental phenomena in their relation to social and historical conditions is probably Lewes's most important contribution to psychology. But Lewes's work in psychology consists less in any definite discoveries than in the inculcation of a sound and just method. Thus the operations of thought, "or the logic of signs," are merely a more complicated form of the elementary operations of sensation and instinct or "the logic of feeling."
The whole of the last volume of the Problems may be said to be an illustration of this position. It is a valuable repository of psychological facts, many of them drawn from the more obscure regions of mental life and from abnormal experience, and is throughout suggestive and stimulating. To suggest and to stimulate the mind, rather than to supply it with any complete system of knowledge, may be said to be Lewes's service in philosophy. The exceptional rapidity and versatility of his intelligence seems to account at once for the freshness in his way of envisaging the subject-matter of philosophy and psychology, and for the want of satisfactory elaboration and of systematic co-ordination.
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