George Eliot's reluctance to write a positivist novel was clearly documented in his letters. His responses to Frederic Harrison's suggestion that "the great features of Comte's world might be sketched in fiction in their ordinary relations... under the forms of our home life" (Letters, IV, 287), are particularly unambiguous: "[if the fiction] goes anywhere from picture to diagram, it becomes the most offensive of all teachings." (Letters, IV, 300-301). Art, for Eliot, must work to "get the breath, the individual forms, and group them into the necessary relationships, so that the presentation grasps the emotions as a human experience." (Letters, IV, 300-301). A positivist novel like the one supported by Harrison would have condemned Eliot to a schematic structure, requiring her to neglect the multiple elements and infinite nuances that she recognized as constitutive of the human personality. Eliot is aware, in a way that is less evident in Auguste Comte, for example, of the limitless subtleties and gradations of human character: "Our vanities differ as our noses: every conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with presumption". minutes of mental structure in which one of us differs from the other." (Mediomarzo, 148). On the contrary, Comte believed that "a new doctrine" was capable of "embracing the entire range of human relations in the spirit of reality". ( General view, 5). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay. Implicit in Comte's observation is one of the fundamental conclusions of his Positive Philosophy: that the human nature and, beyond that, interactions between individuals can be reduced to what is scientifically determinable and definable reality, predicting that a young doctor whose intent was "to do a good little work for Middlemarch and a great work for the world" (147) would soon die, his crowning achievement "a treatise on gout"? (818). Likewise, would the application of universal laws have made it possible to determine that Fred Vincy would become a "theoretical and practical farmer"? (816). Presumably Comte would argue that, given enough information, and with that information distilled into laws, this would be possible. One would agree with Comte much of nineteenth-century thinking on the philosophy of science, particularly if one believes that Mill's deterministic notion that "human volitions and actions [are] necessary and inevitable" (System of Logic, 547) is axiomatic for those active in the field. Mill goes on to state that: "if we knew the person thoroughly, and knew all the incentives acting upon him, we could predict his conduct with as much certainty as we can predict any physical event." (System of Logic, 547).1 Mill's argument is undeniably powerful, and Eliot may be philosophically persuaded, or even "internally convinced," of it, but Middlemarch seems to deny its practical application (though I would acknowledge that Mill's reluctance Eliot's giving his characters much agency in any major project might suggest otherwise.) Eliot's insistence on the major consequences of small events, chance encounters, and delicate but significant details of personality argues against the possibility, on the basis of complexity alone, of exact predictions and predictions: "If we had a vision and a keen feeling of all ordinary human beings" life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and beatthe heart of the squirrel, and we will die of that roar that lies on the other side of the silence." 2 (Mediomarzo, 192). There are simply too many details. Does this then make the entire positivist project unsustainable? Is it fatal to it? Or does the project «will it lead us towards a social condition that is most in conformity with human nature, in which our characteristic qualities will find their most perfect expression? respective confirmation, their most complete mutual harmony and the freest expansion for each and all"? (Essential Writings, 306). Comte believes that, with the fullness of time, the culmination of the positivist project is inevitable; Eliot In Middlemarch, If one accepts the idea that George Eliot could never have written a positivist novel and, furthermore, that she remained suspicious of positivism's certainty of an available scientific approach to human nature, the question becomes: to what extent does Middlemarch Is it influenced by Positivism? As I have argued, I feel that in Middlemarch there is strong resistance to the project in its entire panoply. There are, however, powerful positivist themes in the novel and these, perhaps, are more easily addressed by considering the characters they display. something of the positivist spirit Clearly there is Lydgate but there is also Casaubon. There is a Comtian air to Casaubon's project: it is conducted on an almost scientific basis (Casaubon is interested in Dorothea for her "solid and attractive elements". [General View, 42] a phrase that could easily have emerged from the pages of a chemistry textbook) has its roots in the search for universal laws (the "Key to all mythologies" [Middlemarch, 486]), its precepts imply the need to "systematize" and "generalize" (General view, 3), and Casaubon is fully consistent in applying established principles to his studies. However, Eliot quickly reveals that Casaubon "floats" between "flexible conjectures" (472). He lacks the most vital attribute of the good positivist: "Unity in our moral nature is, therefore, impossible, except in so far as affection prevails over intellect and activity." (General view,16). Casaubon is without affection, he is all activity and intellect, there is no unity, he is one-dimensional: If we have been accustomed to deplore the spectacle, in the artisan class, of a worker occupied all his life with nothing other than making handles of knife or pinheads, we might find something equally deplorable in the intellectual class, in the exclusive use of a human brain in solving some equations or in the classification of insects. The moral effect is unfortunately similar in the two cases. This results in a miserable indifference to the general course of human affairs, so long as there are equations to be solved and pins to be made. (Essential Writings, 274). Casaubon cannot, or will not, go beyond purely theological speculations, through the sphere of the scientific, into the realm of the social where the unity required by Comtian's version of positivism reaches its apotheosis. Casaubon's vainglorious metaphysical conjectures recall Comte's condemnation of those who seek knowledge without considering its potential benefit to humanity constituted in "society": "Yet in this case, as in every other, there is a intense selfishness in the exercise of mental powers independently of all social objects." (General view, 18). Casaubon's is a "mind...very clever in some respects and monstrously incapable in all others" (Essential Writings, 274), and Eliot causes Casaubon to fail to recognize that "the only position for which the intellect is permanently adapted is to be the servant of social sympathies." (General view, 15). For Comte, if we abandon this position, we are inevitably dragged towards "deplorable disorder" (Visiongeneral, 15) of something like the French Revolution. This, on a less grand scale, is what surpasses Casaubon. Despite his overwhelming desire to classify and order, Casaubon's life descends into a kind of "deplorable disorder" as the ability to control his wife and her affections eludes him, and his life's work on which he had "risked all his selfishness" (Middlemarch, 471) begins first to atrophy 3 and then to disintegrate under the weight of his own futility and the critical scrutiny of his peers. Like Giacomo.F. Scott suggests that, rather than the positivist he might at first appear, Casaubon can be seen as a metaphysician of the type most thoroughly reviled by Comte: "Like all metaphysicians, as Comte saw them, Casaubon is a failed scientist, a thinker the whose rational capacities have been stifled by meaningless abstractions and discredited religious assumptions. Without the ability or honesty to subject his premises to scientific testing, he can do little more than collect large wads of worthless bills. Scott, 69).Casaubon, therefore, while at first appearing to embody some elements of positivism, quickly reveals himself to be trapped in an obsolete metaphysics. Lydgate, however, begins as a perfect positivist.4 He possesses: The imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any type of lens, but traced in the outer darkness through long paths of necessary sequence by the inner light which is the ultimate refinement of Energy. , capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. For his part, he had thrown away all the cheap inventions in which ignorance is at ease and at ease: he was in love with that arduous invention which is the very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to an ever greater accuracy of relationship; he wanted to pierce the darkness of those minute processes that prepare human misery and joy, those invisible paths that are the first hiding places of anguish, mania and crime, that delicate balance and transition that determine the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness . (Middlemarch, 163). In his early appearances in Middlemarch Lydgate is largely Harrison's prototype of the fictional positivist ideal: "a local doctor... a man of the new world with complete scientific and entirely moral ascendancy over both capitalists and workers". (Letters, IV, 287). As the Middlemarch passage quoted above shows, Lydgate has the potential to become one of the leading hierophants of Comte's "new priesthood" (General View, 384): his epistemology is essentially empirical, 5 he is committed to the absolute relativity of knowledge , depends on the scientific truth about "invariable relations of succession and similarity" (Essential Writings, 72), and presupposes that a sufficiently detailed scientific analysis of human behavior can lead to the resolution of social problems. Lydgate, in this incarnation, fits Mill's description of the positivist perfectly: "Whoever regards all events as parts of a constant order, each being the invariable consequence of some antecedent condition, or combination of conditions, fully accepts the way of positive thinking." (Comte, 15). Lydgate, both in his approach to medicine and its history, is at the forefront of contemporary positivist epistemology: "But [Lydgate] was not simply aiming for a more genuine kind of practice than the common one. He was ambitious of a wider effect: he was fired by the possibility of being able to elaborate the proof of an anatomical conception and create a link in the chain of discovery." (Mediomarzo, 144). Lydgate's "chain of discoveries" is exactly that sequence of invariable "relations ofsuccession and similarity" (General View, 75) traced by Comte in his description of the history and development of the sciences. Lydgate's approach recalls the positivist practice outlined by Mill: From this moment any political thinker who considers himself capable of doing unless a connected vision of the great facts of history, as a chain of causes and effects, must be considered below the level of the age; while the vulgar way of using history, looking for parallel cases in it, or as if in a single case, or even in many cases not compared and analyzed, could reveal a law, it will be more than ever, and irrevocably, discredited (Comte, 86). of historical interconnection and interdependence: "The more [Lydgate] became interested in particular questions of disease, such as the nature of fever or fevers, the more he felt the need for that fundamental knowledge of structure which at the very beginning of the century had been illuminated by short and glorious career of Bichat, who died when just thirty-one, but, like another Alexander, left a kingdom large enough for many heirs." (146). Lydgate is not only devoted to a positive scientific method, but is full of "affection" and is fully aware of the need to follow a path "that offers the most direct alliance between intellectual achievement and social good" (143). As Eliot makes abundantly clear, Lydgate fits Comte's criteria in this area: "he was an emotional creature, with a flesh of flesh." sense of sanguine communion that resisted all the abstractions of a special study. He dealt not only with "cases" but also with John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth." (143). Lydgate's downfall, however, is the result of his failure to apply his positivism to his life beyond his work: "He went home and read to the last minute, bringing to this pathological study a far more stimulating insight into details and relationships than he had ever thought necessary to apply to the complexities of love and marriage, subjects about which he felt amply informed from literature, and that traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial conversation of men." (162). Lydgate's relationship with Rosamond is conducted with a superficiality and a reliance on vague suppositions which would have been unthinkable to him in his work, and he recaps what he has been guilty of in the past: "As for women, he had already once been carried headlong by an impetuous madness" (149), his disastrous marriage could have been avoided with the application of positivist principles, he implies the novel. Likewise, Lydgate's financial difficulties and his fatal entanglement with Bulstrode and Raffles could have been avoided if the "points of commonality" (148), 6 which disfigure his attitude towards money and trade, had been eliminated by a coherent application permeated by the positivist spirit. Nowhere is this clearer than in the scenes in which Lydgate takes care of Raffles' medical needs in full accord with positivist methods, but completely neglects to apply the same principles to his interaction with Bulstrode, thus precipitating the disastrous chain of events with which the novel reaches its crescendo. Lydgate's downfall is, in some respects, linked to his upper-class background. As James Scott observes, Lydgate spends carelessly in a predictable aristocratic manner, marries a "status-conscious wife, and reacts to the lower orders of Middlemarch society with detached baronial haughtiness. Significantly, these are the personality traits that lead to his death. L 'overbearing attitude reduces his medical practice, his kind wife encourages him toliving beyond his means, and his mounting debts push him into a fatal dependence on Bulstrode. (Scott, 71-2). A thorough reading of positivism might have been enough to convince Lydgate of the need to renounce his aristocratic background, but "by being passionate about French social theories he had not carried away a burning smell". (344). Disbelief in the ability, or willingness, of the aristocracy to effect social change is a strong theme in Comte and is an idea with which Eliot seems to agree. As Comte observed: "[The upper classes] are all more or less under the influence of unfounded metaphysical theories and aristocratic egoisms. They are absorbed in blind political agitations and disputes for the possession of the useless remnants of the old theology and the military system Their action only tends to prolong the revolutionary state indefinitely and can never result in true social renewal." (General view, 318). Most of the upper classes and nobility of Middlemarch are involved in one way or another in the kind of activity described by Comte: disputes over succession to clerical "lives", Brooke's selfish dabbling in the politics of the Reform Bill of 1832, Mrs Cadwallader's inability to be "consciously influenced by the great affairs of the world" (58), Sir James Chettam's indifference to the living conditions of his tenants until the possibility of impressing Dorotea piques his interest (20 -21); I have already mentioned Casaubon's intricate metaphysics and Lydgate's "points of commonality." The Middlemarch aristocracy promotes little to no social change. As Eliot informs the reader: "The country gentry of the old days lived in a rarefied social air: scattered in their mountain-top posts they looked down with imperfect discrimination upon the belts of denser life below." (322). Eliot never abandons his art to the point of becoming a clumsy personification of the "positivist"; but it can certainly be argued that within Middlemarch there are all the elements necessary to create a fictional Comtean. An unholy union of Casaubon and Lydgate's characters might, in fact, be enough: Casaubon's application of his principles to all aspects of his life combined, perhaps, with Lydgate's commitment to a positivist approach in his Work. It is interesting, then, in light of the idea that Eliot could not accept postivism in its "systematizing" totality, to conclude that neither Lydgate, Casaubon nor the Middlemarch aristocracy are sufficiently positivists. This would, it seems, expose a paradox or at least an ambivalence at the heart of Middlemarch; something further complicated by the idea that Eliot's heroine, Dorothea, is herself something of a positivist, albeit an unconscious one. Clearly Dorothea possesses the fundamental positivist attributes: "a completely ardent, theoretical and intellectually consequent nature... What seemed best to her, she wanted to justify with the most complete knowledge." 8 (28). I would argue, therefore, that it is not positivism itself that Eliot resists, rather positivism is described as a valuable and morally desirable philosophy on which to base one's life, but as an absolute imprisonment of individuals within artificial philosophical systems; systems made necessarily crude by their inability to understand all the complexities of human nature. This conclusion not only reinforces Eliot's notion of opposition to systems, but also recalls his insistence on the image rather than the diagram. As Walter Pater later observed: "Such is the stuff of imaginative or artistic literature this transcription, not of mere facts, but of facts in its infinite variety, modified by human preference in all its formsinfinitely varied." (106). Sentiments that could easily come from Eliot herself, and are prefigured in her insistence on the necessary mediating function rooted in the artist's imaginative propensities: "As triumphant opinions originally spread, as institutions arose. .. which circumstances affecting individual lots result from the decay of long-established systems, all these great elements of history require the illumination of a special imaginative treatment.” (Pinney, 446). Further evidence of Eliot's reluctance to embrace totalizing systems emerges in his resistance to the alliance "between the priests of science and the captains of industry" (Scott, 70), a key element of the Comtean project. Comte argues that the new priesthood of scientists will need the support of the bankers if it is not to die out, deprived of an efficient administration. Such a relationship would "habitually" lead to "close relations between the priesthood and the bankers... so that the banking class [would be] the civic body to inaugurate the most important connections between science and industry." (System, IV, 71). As TR Wright concludes, however, Eliot does not allow a positivist alliance between capital and science to flourish in Middlemarch: “The doctor makes an alliance with the capitalist, but Bulstrodenon can escape his theological prejudices and Middlemarch is totally unprepared for the new ideas of Lydgate. Public opinion has the power to distance the hypocritical banker from his position, but it does not have the clarity necessary to accept scientific progress. Middlemarch is not ready for positivism." (268). For Eliot it is the twisted nexus of human frailties that causes the alliance to fail, Bulstrode's tangled past and Lydgate's inability to be a fully coherent positivist priest are only two contributing elements. As Middlemarch suggests: until all that can be known is known, systems fail and everything cannot be known at this stage of human development Eliot the briefest human interactions have ramifications of sufficient potential to destroy any system: “But anyone who carefully observes what is stealthy. convergence of human fate, sees a slow preparation of the effects from one life to another, which he tells as a calculated irony on the indifference or the cold gaze with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor. Fate remains sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in hand." (Middlemarch, 93). For Eliot the complexity of human nature and behavior, or "the interdependence of all human interests" (Pinney, 409), tends to working in opposition Society, in Middlemarch, is an organic entity built from countless millions of human interactions and possesses a degree of complexity absolutely resistant to imposed systems. Recent pragmatist such as Richard Rorty: "Our language and our culture are as much a contingency , as the result of thousands of small mutations that find niches (and millions of others that do not find niches), as are orchids and anthropoids". , 16). This comparison, however, must remain, if not incorrect, partial Eliot's interpretation, unlike Rorty's, presupposes a linear teleology in which the movement goes from the fragmentary to the whole, from the incomplete to the complete and from relative chaos to relative order: "One must let language grows in precision, completeness, and unity, as minds grow in clarity, comprehensibility, and sympathy" (Byatt, 128). Eliot's resistance to systems does not constitute, as some might argue, an anticipation of the poststructuralist reverberation of infinite meaning, echoing endlessly in the epistemological void. The world may not yet be ready for the positivist utopiaimagined by Comte, but such an ideal has meaning, is potentially “real,” and remains in view as an identifiable aspiration. These notions of "reality" and "meaning" are inherent in Eliot's synopsis of Dorothea's life: "Certainly those defining acts of [Dorothea's] life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling between the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the appearance of error and great faith the appearance of illusion”. (Mediomarzo, 821). this passage, the concepts of "right", "wrong", "truth" and "perfectibility" which the thrust of poststructuralist thought tends to reject as destructive of multiplicity, as guilty of promoting "the reassuring foundation" and as instigation " of the end of the game." (Derrida, 122). Eliot, however, remains a "realist", insists on the struggle to find a stable meaning and a permanent "truth": "May I aspire incessantly to strip everything around me of its conventional, human, temporary dress, to look at it in its essence and in its relationship with eternity". (Letters, I, 70). It is interesting to note that the metaphysical notions of "essence" and "eternity" are precisely the most execrated character of Comtian positivism, and this alone would probably be enough to disqualify George Eliot from the priesthood of positivism. As I have attempted to demonstrate, however, there is a significant degree of sympathy towards positivism in Middlemarch, in particular unconnection with the moral and social prescriptions of positivism. It is the deterministic and all-encompassing nature of positivism to which Eliot is most hostile. Eliot's suspicion of a pure determinism of the kind that suggests the possibility of exact prediction and foresight seems founded on the idea that, even if all existing phenomena are the result of antecedent phenomena, no system yet devised, or to be devised in the future, it is capable of encompassing all the minutiae of human activity; the minutiae that are constituted in the "non-historical acts" of "hidden" individuals: "But the effect of [Dorothea's] being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world depends in part on non-historical acts historians; and that Things between you and me are not as bad as they might have been, is partly due to the number of those who faithfully lived a hidden life and rest in unvisited graves." (Middle March, 822). If we see the world, as Eliot seems to do, as an infinitely sensitive and complex organism, susceptible to the smallest influences, the positivist project is simply not a delicate enough tool with which to expose all the universal laws that govern human behavior and interaction . . As in fiction, so in the artist's life: "At least I have so much to do to unravel certain human fates, and see how they were woven and intertwined, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed in that tantalizing range of appurtenances called the universe." (Middlemarch, 139). Note1 Mill's observations are used here as emblematic of a particular trend in nineteenth-century "scientism" but, clearly, he himself has doubts about the infallibility of the position: But as society proceeds in its development, its phenomena are determined, increasingly, not by the simple tendencies of universal human nature, but by the accumulated influence of past generations on the present. Human beings themselves, on the laws on whose nature the facts of history depend, are not abstract or universal human beings, but historical ones, already formed and made what they are by human society. This being the case, no power 76.2 (1981): 257-72.