Reading with the Senses in Victorian Literature and Science

David Sweeney Coombs

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780813943428
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813943435
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: Literature

The nineteenth-century sciences cleaved sensory experience into two separate realms: the bodily physics of sensation and the mental activity of perception. This division into two discrete categories was foundational to Victorian physics, physiology, and experimental psychology. As David Sweeney Coombs reveals, however, it was equally important to Victorian novelists, aesthetes, and critics, for whom the distinction between sensation and perception promised the key to understanding literature's seemingly magical power to conjure up tastes, sights, touches, and sounds from the austere medium of print. In Victorian literature, science, and philosophy, the parallel between reading and perceiving gave rise to momentous debates about description as a mode of knowledge as well as how, and even whether, reading about the world differs from experiencing it firsthand.

Examining novels and art criticism by George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Vernon Lee, and Walter Pater alongside scientific works by Hermann von Helmholtz, William James, and others, this book shows how Victorian literature offers us ways not just to touch but to grapple with the material realities that Clifford Geertz called the "hard surfaces of life."

1

Knowing Things by Description in Victorian Science

A feeling feels as a gun shoots. If there be nothing to be felt or hit, they discharge themselves ins blaue hinein. If, however, something starts up opposite them, they no longer simply shoot or feel, they hit and know.

—William James, “The Function of Cognition”

Three-volume novels and cheap yellowbacks, parliamentary blue books and double-entry ledgers, illuminated Kelmscott editions and The Illustrated London News: Victorians enjoyed the kind of constant intimacy with print that we have with the digital devices we keep on our persons at all times. It is no surprise, then, that for Victorian studies it has become a truth universally acknowledged that, as Benjamin Morgan puts it, “Victorians read books with their bodies.”1 Nicholas Dames, for instance, has leveraged this insight into the bodily nature of how Victorians read into an account of a lost theory of the novel, one that flourished during the nineteenth century before it was supplanted in the twentieth by the New Criticism and its successors. Victorian novelists and novel critics, Dames suggests, conceived of the novel form in the terms of nineteenth-century physiology. “In ways both obvious and hidden,” he writes, “physiology was the metalanguage of nineteenth-century novel theory, as perhaps linguistics is of twentieth-century literary theory.”2 Dames shows just how critically important the sciences of the nervous system and sense perception were to the Victorian novel. Here I build on Dames’s work by restoring a bit of reciprocity into the relationship between literature and physiology. If it seemed so natural to Victorian critics and writers to conceive of reading in the terms of physiology, this was partly because Victorian physiologists conceived of perception in terms of reading.

This chapter sketches the history of how Victorian scientists came to think of perception as analogous to reading. Since my account here relies on technical terms, a brief summary of the historical narrative here may help to orient readers (a glossary of the main technical terms can be found with the reference matter). Beginning in the late eighteenth century, philosophers and scientists began distinguishing between sensations and perceptions. Sensations became identified with bare intuitions of sensory stimuli, like the experience of a blue patch in our field of vision or of a single auditory tone. Perceptions, on the other hand, became identified with the conscious mental apprehension of the objects supposed to be the source of those sensory stimulations, like a blue ball or a note played on a guitar. New experiments in neurophysiology ratified and even aggravated this basic distinction by revealing that even highly fragmentary and unstable sensory stimulations are still consciously perceived as consistent and relatively detailed fields of objects (a phenomenon now referred to as perceptual constancy). Victorian scientists thus came to think of perception as the act of reflexively inferring the presence of objects from sensory intuitions, a process they called unconscious inference. For nineteenth-century empiricists, in consequence, experience cleaved into two fundamentally different components—sensation and perception, intuition and inference—each one requiring its own specific mode of explanation. Repurposing the trope of the Book of Nature, philosophers and scientists began to account for the relationship between these two components by comparing it to reading—sensations were natural signs, and perceptions were their interpretations.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, however, these “theories of sensation-based perception” came in for systematic criticism by emerging scientific and philosophical schools.3 Gestalt psychology and phenomenology, for instance, developed from the insight that sensation-based accounts of perception had things exactly backward—that our bodily engagement with perceptual forms shapes our sensory experience and not the other way around. Instead of rehearsing the familiar history of phenomenology, however, this chapter explicates the critique William James made of sensation-based theories as part of his late turn to a radical empiricism. The second section of this chapter surveys the evolution of that radical empiricism from James’s own sensation-based account of perception in his 1890 Principles of Psychology. With his radicalization of empiricism, I suggest, James reconfigures the terms of Victorian perception science—sensation and perception, intuition and inference, knowledge by acquaintance, and knowledge by description—in ways that shaped the subsequent history of perception science as well as the philosophy of language. This chapter shows how, by refusing to give either sensation or perception priority over the other, James opens up possibilities for imagining the difference between verbal description and direct sensory experience as one of degree rather than kind. In this regard, apart from its place within a broader intellectual history, Jamesian radical empiricism also reveals an important dimension of Victorian literary history. Specifically, James provides us with a conceptual framework within which we can begin to see how Victorians’ reading books with their bodies enabled them to explore the continuities between descriptive and empirical knowledge. Taken together, I argue in the ensuing chapters, these wider experiments in a radical literary empiricism deserve attention from contemporary literary study as it tests out new methods that explore possible affiliations between reading and scientific observation.

Sensation and Perception: Reading the Book of Nature in Nineteenth-Century Science

The origins of the importance of reading to nineteenth-century physiology lie in the eighteenth century, when Thomas Reid laid the foundations for Victorian physiological psychology with an account of perception that emphasized its similarity to language. Reid undertook a simple but devastating attack on eighteenth-century empiricism by prying open a gap between what John Locke defined as simple and complex ideas in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). For Locke, simple ideas are the sensory atoms out of which we compose our knowledge of the world. The softness and warmth of a piece of wax, the coldness and hardness of a piece of ice, the whiteness and smell of a lily, each distinct, irreducible sensation is a simple idea that we usually encounter bundled together into larger complex ideas—in these cases, the ideas of wax, ice, and lily.4 Locke was not particularly concerned with specifying the precise mechanism involved in bundling simple ideas together or with how exactly a simple idea (the sensation of a particular shade of whiteness) spontaneously generates a complex one (our perception of the lily). But Locke had followers who did try to fill in these missing details.

One of the most famous was David Hartley, who argued that simple ideas generate complex ones through association. In the account Hartley offers in his Observations on Man (1749), simple ideas that are similar to each other or that we repeatedly encounter in quick succession (like the sensation of the lily’s smell that quickly follows the sensation of the lily’s color) become linked to each other in the mind, so that one simple idea easily calls to mind its associates. What’s more, Hartley speculated that association had a material basis in the nervous system. A given visual or olfactory stimulus supposedly creates vibrations that travel along a particular route to and within the brain, and these vibrations shape the brain in ways that allow each stimulus to trigger vibrations in an associated neural pathway so as to make possible the economical generation of complex ideas.5 Hartley’s speculations about neural vibrations quickly fell victim to advances in physiological knowledge, as the current consensus that nervous impulse transmission is an electrochemical process began to take shape in the nineteenth century. His theory of the association of ideas, however, was able to dominate Anglo-American psychology for the next century and a half.

Nonetheless, Hartley’s association of ideas and his neural vibrations both left Reid unmoved. Reid rejected Locke’s argument that perception is mediated by ideas or images, advocating instead for a direct perceptual realism. Hence no amount of backfilling could fix the main problem he saw with Locke’s account of simple and complex ideas—that Locke made a category error when he referred to simple and complex ideas as ideas. By categorizing both simple and complex ideas as ideas, Locke had suggested that the only possible difference between them was the relative one of their complexity. In contrast, Reid argued that Locke’s simple and complex ideas were two entirely different things. In An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (1764), Reid proposed a different terminology, renaming simple ideas as sensations and complex ideas as perceptions, although he worried even that act of rechristening didn’t make the distinction he was drawing obvious enough:

The same mode of expression is used to denote sensation and perception; and therefore we are apt to look upon them as things of the same nature. Thus, I feel a pain; I see a tree: the first denoteth a sensation, the last a perception. The grammatical analysis of both expressions is the same: for both consist of an active verb and an object. But if we attend to the things signified by these expressions, we shall find, that in the first, the distinction between the act and the object is not real, but grammatical; in the second, the distinction is not only grammatical, but real.6

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see Reid groping here for the concept that a hundred years later Franz Brentano would term “intentionality”—a kind of aboutness that Brentano describes as “reference [or] direction to an object.”7 Simply put, Reid argues that perceptions refer to objects out there in the world, while sensations do not. The tree I perceive refers to something really existing in the world, but the pain I sense does not refer but simply is.

Reid’s introduction of a distinction between sensation and perception was a momentous event in the history of psychology, one whose importance is hard to overstate. As the psychologist Edward Reed observed, it was Reid who sharpened psychology’s foundational categories of stimulus, sensation, and perception into their modern form, making the later development of the discipline possible.8 Reid himself doubted that there could be any convincing account of the causal mechanisms that somehow transform a physical stimulus into a sensation and a sensation into a perception. “Can any man tell me,” he asks, “how, in vision, the rays of light act upon the retina, how the retina acts upon the optic nerve, and how the optic nerve acts upon the brain? No man can” (303). Undeterred, nineteenth-century scientists adopted just this challenge as a core research question for optics, physiology, and psychology. Even so, each of these fields not only adopted Reid’s terminology but also discovered that advances in neurophysiological knowledge ironically confirmed Reid’s arguments that there was only a weak causality leading from stimulus to perception. Victorian neurophysiology and psychology demonstrated experimentally that even very impoverished stimuli could still yield relatively richly detailed perceptions; the mind seemed to be filling in gaps in some way, and to explain how this might take place scientists appealed to what they saw as the similar power of language to conjure up vivid mental images from similarly minimal visual or auditory stimuli. Here too, nineteenth-century scientists followed Reid, albeit in a way he would have disagreed with.

When Reid identified something like intentionality as the hallmark of perception, he effectively redefined perception in terms of reference. As a result, nineteenth-century perception science and the philosophy of language met on intimate terms over their shared concern with how words and percepts signify things. It is thus no accident that perception is central to the two most influential philosophical accounts of reference to come out of this period, Gottlob Frege’s “On Sense and Reference” and Bertrand Russell’s “On Denoting.” Well aware of his argument’s implications, Reid made the connection explicitly himself, claiming that “there is much greater similitude than is commonly imagined, between the testimony of nature given by our senses, and the testimony of men given by language . . . [because] the signs by which objects are presented to us in perception, are the language of nature to man” (295–96). When we perceive things, Reid suggests, we are simply reading the Book of Nature in the way that Francis Bacon had advocated in The New Organon. According to Reid, the universality and divine origins of that book guarantee the truth of our readings despite our inability to specify the precise chain of causes and effects leading from a physical stimulus to a perception. The Book of Nature was legible to us, he maintained, because God had created us to perceive a world in common and to have an irresistible belief in the reality of what we perceive. Reid thus didn’t see reference or signification as a problem that should lead us to doubt the potential accuracy or truth of what we perceive; instead, he argued that science and philosophy should take the reality of our perceptions for granted as a premise derived from common sense.

It is one of the ironies of nineteenth-century intellectual history that the main arguments Reid enlisted to support his direct perceptual realism—his distinction between sensation and perception and his notion that perception was the interpretation of signs—undermined that realism for the Victorian scientists and philosophers who followed him. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the uncertain causal relationships leading from stimulus to perception that Reid himself had emphasized began to suggest to investigators that there was too much interpretation in perception—that the mind saw less what was there than what it wanted or expected to be there. As perception came to be understood as a kind of reading, its interpretations of nature acquired the same liability to misreading that had long haunted the novel in the figures of fantasy addicts like Emma Bovary and Don Quixote. The epistemologically troubling dimensions perception assumed for Victorian science become clear if we turn to William Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840). Whewell wanted to renovate Francis Bacon’s inductive method—the systematic process of carefully extrapolating general truths “from sense and particulars”—and to reaffirm its status as the scientific method for the Victorian era.9 To do that, though, Whewell had to reconcile Baconian induction with new theories of perception that emphasized its tendency to impose preexisting ideas onto concrete particulars.

Whewell in fact reconceptualized induction in terms of the distinction between sensations and perceptions.10 Reid had defined sensations as essentially self-contained and nonreferential, in contrast to perception’s intentionality (its constant direction toward real objects in the world). Whewell, on the other hand, underscored the origins of sensations as reflexive responses to material forces. Because they occur at the level of neurophysiological response below the threshold of mental activity, sensations functioned for Whewell as a crucial interface with the material world. At the same time, Whewell foregrounded the interpretive aspects of perception, defining it as the mental act of ordering sensations: “Sensations cannot become perceptions of objects, without some formative power of the mind. By the very act of being received as perceptions, they have a formative power exercised over them, the operation of which might be expressed, by speaking of them . . . simply as formed.”11 Whewell thus reimagines Baconian induction as the productive antithesis of sensations and perceptions, or, as he also puts it, “things” an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Knowing Things by Description in Victorian Science
• 2. Getting Acquainted with Description in Romola
• 3. Reading in the Dark: Sensory Obscurity in The Return of the Native
• 4. Tagging the Vatican Museum with Vernon Lee: Description and the Aesthetic Movement
• 5. The Sense and Reference of Sound; or, Walter Pater’s Kinky Literalism
• Epilogue
• Glossary of Selected Technical Terms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index