This book redresses reductive misidentifications of “empiricism” with positivism, scientism, realism, and principles—objectivity, transparent experience, mimetic representation, and a clear distinction between self and world (28)—that many Victorian empiricists did not espouse. With “empiricism,” Peter Garratt denotes the “common, primary, deep-seated epistemological impulse” of a group of writers who “ask what it means to know, and to strive for knowledge from an always-limited consciousness, and to be situated yet aspire to see more reality than one perspective allows, and to experience not knowing” (21). George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, John Ruskin, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer reconceived embodiment, contingency, individuality, and “narrative unreliability” as necessary conditions or mediums of knowing instead of as impediments to knowledge.

British empiricism is not a consistent, identifiable movement—it applies to practices as different as Hobbes’s materialism, Hume’s skepticism, and Berkeley’s idealism—but it has always been attuned to models of subjectivity and sense perception. Reestablishing an associationist tradition from Hume through Scottish moral philosophers like Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart to William Hamilton, Garratt’s first chapter details how his set of Victorian empiricists allied their epistemology with associational consciousness. Associationism threatened to undermine free will and stable, cohesive selfhood, but reform-minded Victorians liked how it traded essentialism for the possibility of characterological reform. Garratt focuses on James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), an influential refashioning of Hume’s work that inspired psychophysiology in the 1860s and 1870s. Jointly revised and reissued by Bain and his son, John Stuart Mill, Mill’s Analysis articulated baseline Victorian assumptions about mental operation and learning: material, mechanistic principles of attraction conjoin causally (by contiguity or succession of time) or synchronously (by contiguity of place) the sensations and ideas continuously succeeding through the mind. For Garratt’s set of empiricists, these principles of attraction supplanted rational explanations of memory, imagination, induction, and perception.

For all its rhetoric of self-effacing submission to truth, John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843–60) dwells more on the process of mediating Turner’s landscape paintings than the paintings themselves. For Garratt, that is to say, Ruskin writes about the cultivation of perception rather than the objects perceived. Accordingly, Ruskin denigrates flawless imitation (trompe l’oeil) as a disingenuous, “doubly objectionable” practice (90). Art can only legitimately articulate truth by emphasizing its distance from reality (its status as representation) because that distance comprises the truth of art: knowledge not about things portrayed but of the impressions generated by things perceived. Thus Ruskin claims that “all ‘facts’ exist only in so far as they are embedded inside dynamic and relative processes of consciousness” (95). Tacitly concurring with generations of scholarship on literary realism, Garratt concludes that Ruskinian realism is “relational description” that “aims, ultimately, not for transparency, but for an aesthetic reproduction of the relational conditions that allow us to conceive of the idea of ‘reality,’ which rests in turn on the continued evidence of a conscious mind within the represented world” (96, 101).

Victorian Empiricism then explains how Lewes—and others, like Eliot and psychologist James Sully—depicted vision as “complex, indirect, inferential” and inseparable from “the personality of the spectator” (126). The magnifications, distortions, and estrangements of individual eyes and visual technologies had discomforted empiricists since at least Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia, but if Lewes “foregrounds sight precisely to call its rational clarity into question” (107), he does so at odds with predominant assumptions (consensual perspective, photographic realism) by which other scholars have distinguished his culture. An overpersnickety critic might cite a relevant reference or two missing from the most comprehensive bibliographies, but this chapter would have profited immensely from Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, 1990), which documents the manifest subjectivity of the most ostensibly mimetic visual technologies and the observers who used them.

But eyes are just one part of the “knowing body” (159) figured by Victorian empiricists. Rebutting the stereotypical empiricist aspiration for an objective vantage point, Alexander Bain claimed that “we know only by virtue of our embodiment” (160). Part of a Victorian revival of Spinoza’s monism, an undoing of mind/body dualism, Bain emphasized that all knowledge was embodied and that “our consciousness in this life is an embodied consciousness” (159). With strings, waves, chains, nerve networks, and metaphors of force, movement, and interrelation, Bain described “a body inscribed upon and altered in the course of its worldly experience” (159).

The final, fifth, chapter of Victorian Empiricism recounts how Herbert Spencer’s First Principles (1862) recognized that objective knowledge of material reality was an ineffable, unobtainable object and, in turn, legitimated contingencies of perspective and personality, impressions, associations, and conditional relations in what Lewes dubbed “the mighty web of things.” Extending insights from Christopher Herbert’s Victorian Relativity (Chicago, 2001), Garratt describes how the structure of First Principles, which is divided into “The Unknowable” and “The Knowable,” “reproduces the differential structure behind every act of knowing” (175). Spencer’s was an empiricism according to which all objects are “conditioned” by conscious subjects and their perception of relation, difference, and likeness. To illustrate, Garratt interprets Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859) as a painful experiment with knowing too much, knowing without “relational limitation” (183).

Victorian Empiricism too often rebukes popular and facile assumptions about Victorianism and empiricism expressed by scholars from different fields who are unlikely to read the book (e.g., 91, 109, 167); sustained discussions of nuanced accounts of photographic realism, perspectival consensus, or institutional instantiations of Victorian empiricism(s) would have constituted a more revealing counterpoint to the work of Lewes, Eliot, Spencer, Bain, and Ruskin. The prolific, undisciplined range of these writers requires Garratt to be selective and restrained in his discussion of such varied and expansive topics—art, visuality, embodiment, cognition, representation. But like his subjects, Garratt wears these constraints lightly as mediums as much as limitations to knowledge production, and Victorian Empiricism insightfully and suggestively articulates the shifty and embodied experience of knowing for nineteenth-century Britons.