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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Victorian Empiricism: Self, Knowledge, and Reality in Ruskin, Bain, Lewes, Spencer, and George Eliot
ISBN# 9780838642665
Reviewed by: Roger Ebbatson
Metascience online November 29, 2011 |
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In recent decades, under fire from a variety of post-structural positions -- feminist, post-colonial, deconstructive, and so on -- British Empiricism has had a bad press. In his thoroughgoing and persuasively argued study, Peter Garratt attempts to reverse this trend, suggesting that the widespread understanding of empirical theory as proposing that knowledge begins in the direct experience of observable reality is undermined in the Victorian period by a sense of profound instability. The relation between knowledge and the knower came to be seen as highly problematic, the act of observation itself being interpreted as necessarily incomplete, partial and circumscribed by personal factors. For Garratt's well-chosen exemplars -- Ruskin, G.H. Lewes, George Eliot, Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer -- knowledge acquisition was characterised by 'relational cognitive action' so that, in Spencer's memorable phrase, 'to think is to condition', or as Bain would put it, we 'know only relations.'
Overall, Victorian Empiricism more than succeeds in convincing the reader of the interest and vitality of a nineteenth-century empirical tradition which was far more complex and culturally resonant than has been allowed by its theoretically inclined detractors. This is... an outstanding and thoroughgoing work of intellectual recuperation, and one which corrects many prevailing assumptions. In sum, Victorian Empiricism is a study which will be of interest to all concerned with the complex map of Victorian thought.
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