After dark, during the evening of June 9, 1854, Mrs. Mary Ann Brough, by all accounts a loving mother of seven children, took her husband’s razor and cut the throats of her six children then sleeping at home. She then cut her own throat. All six children died, but she survived. Recovering strength, she called a neighbor. She then insisted on giving a statement to the police constable who came to the house:

How were the mother’s Victorian contemporaries to understand “one of the most shocking circumstances that it has even been our lot to record”?² Such past events also shock readers today. The circumstances, and their interpretation, raise many large, wide-ranging questions. I shall focus on the suggestion that just such highly public occurrences informed the Victorian intellectual, moral, and emotional imagination for automaton-like human conduct. This imagination crossed then-developing boundaries between scientific or medical expertise, philosophical or jurisprudential reflection, and public or lay narratives about individual activity.

The vocabulary of the automaton, to my knowledge, was not used at the time in reference to this or other contemporary cases. Such language, in the legal setting, emerged in criminal courts at a somewhat later date. Joel Eigen, for instance, gives the date 1876 as the first time in which there was recognition in London’s Old Bailey, later the Central Criminal Court, of a verdict of “not guilty on grounds of unconsciousness.”³ This, incidentally, was the same year in which, in France, Eugène Azam presented the clinical case of Félida X and initiated the famous discussion of multiple personality.⁴ There is clearly much to say about the relation between descriptions of unconscious events and descriptions of automatism, though I largely leave this to one side. The debate about automatism familiar to historians of science, however, took place in the context of public argument over evolution and physical theories of life in the late 1860s and in the 1870s.⁵ Nevertheless, many of the elements of factual evidence and conceptual argument that went into the debate in the 1870s and afterwards – debate explicitly referencing automatism as a way of understanding human conduct – appear in the criminal case from the 1850s (and in other and earlier criminal cases, in other countries as well as in England). We may put such cases alongside social movements such as mesmerism, the entertainments of hypnotizers, table-turning, and spiritualism, all of which drew extensive public attention to automaticity, or purposeful activity without the apparent involvement of conscious mind, in human life.⁶ As Suzy Anger notes, historians of relations between psychology and literature have sometimes been unclear about whether, in drawing out the relation, they refer to specific borrowings in literature from psychology, or whether they think psychology, developing as an academic specialty in the Victorian period, and literature shared common roots.⁷ Naturally, there may have been cases of the former; but I think the latter more important. This chapter supports the argument by pointing to the way spectacular cases of “automatism,” avant la lettre, informed the public imagination.

Nineteenth-century discussion of the existence and nature of free will was strikingly inconclusive at all levels of intellectual sophistication – as public and expert discussion of the topic continues to be. A substantial reason for this lay in the confusion – the interweaving – of terms appropriate for philosophical argument, the empirical terms appropriate for science, and the moral terms appropriate for a culture in which free will existed as a social, not “natural,” fact. Victorian (and later) complexities in debate about free will in significant part stemmed, I argue, from lack of clarity and agreement about what sort of debate this actually was. Statements about scientific findings, propositions for or against arguments incorporating religious faith, logical and conceptual discussions of the meaning of references to free will, determinism, automatic or machine-like human deeds, moral norms and proposals for cultivation of the good life, and judgments of social responsibility and obligation all had a place.

Legal cases can be a gold mine for historians because they leave extensive records. Mrs. Brough’s trial for murder, before the Assizes in Guildford, Surrey, took place within a couple of months of the crime. The newspapers reported it; medical journals weighed in; and scholars in jurisprudence had their say. Her defense lawyer called as witnesses both her local doctor and a specialist in mental diseases, Forbes Winslow, who confirmed his colleague’s observations, that Mrs. Brough had had symptoms of disorders, including high blood pressure, speech impediment, and a degree of hemiplegia, or paralysis on one side, since the birth of her last child. The expert, who owned private madhouses, edited his own journal on psychological medicine, and frequently appeared in trials in which there was a question of insanity, stated: “Cases of temporary insanity resulting in a desire to commit murder or suicide are very common.”⁸ Eight years later, after Mrs. Brough had died in Bethlem Hospital’s criminal lunatic wing, where she was sent after the verdict of “not guilty, on the ground of insanity,” the autopsy found blood clots in the brain, and these were thought to confirm the diagnosis made at the time of the trial.⁹ For one body of medically informed opinion, then, the case showed that the disordered brain, not the moral will or legally binding intent, had caused the killings. The person was, we might say, an automaton and not an agent at the actual time of the crime.

Yet the issues were by no means so clear-cut at the trial. As a consequence, the historian can use the case to illuminate the content, or burden, of emotive and moral meaning in debates about behavior that appears to be automatic. Reaction to the killings, mediated and channeled into the court case, the verdict, and commentary on the verdict, was an extended public performance to make sense of a monstrous event and dampen the fear it had generated. Each attempt at meaning-making in the terms of free will versus causal determinism then available appeared to have its problems. In the social performance, the controversy gave views about the nature and implications of seemingly automatic human activity an accessible, visible public presence.

Mrs. Brough killed her children not randomly but at a particular and significant moment for her. There was a history of marital conflict. She murdered on the eve of her husband’s return with a legal document initiating a separation, which the wife knew had been obtained as a result of evidence confirming her adultery. She appeared to have anticipated that he would eject her from the house, deny her access to the children, and leave her without any means of support. He would have been within his legal rights. The first step in what modern writers see as the reform of English divorce laws was taken in 1858; before then, divorce was theoretically available but nearly impossible except on special occasions for the very rich; moreover married women had no property of their own.¹⁰ Somewhat more accessible to a person of Mr. Brough’s income and class – he was in royal service, as keeper of the ornamental waters and fishponds at Claremont Palace, then on loan to French royals – was the option of suing his wife’s paramour for “criminal conversation” (“crim. con.”), that is, for damages. This in fact he did do successfully after her trial, adding weight to an interpretation of the events that found the wife at fault: She was indeed adulterous. (Interestingly, the local paper reported that the man involved had left his home because neighbors held him responsible and threatened him for having brought about the terrible events.) Mrs. Brough bitterly expressed the view that she was not at fault in relation to her husband. She even took steps, trivial but symbolic, to try and ensure that her modest jewelry would go to her eldest daughter (working in service away from home) not to her husband.

The husband had hired a detective to have his wife followed to London where she had entered a “questionable house” with Mr. Woodhatch, the butcher from the village of Esher in which they both lived.¹¹ All this gave ample resources for a moralistic account of the killings: She preferred to deny the husband the children than to face the exercise of his rights and the consequences of her own failings. In addition, there was evidence that she was aware of what she was doing: She carried out the killings on the particular evening in question; she searched for the razor by first finding a key; she intended suicide; and she wrote a note to the daughter about the jewelry: “Her father is only seeking to get money from them as never injured him or done him any harm, so help me GOD.”¹² Following up this judgmental line of reasoning after the trial, a London medical journal fiercely attacked both the expert evidence and the verdict:

There was reason for public debate to take the form of discussion about the responsibility of a person for the consequences of her or his actions; that is, the consequences of a person not being an automaton.

In legal terms, however, the question facing the court was not anything so vague or abstract as choice versus automatic movement or free will versus determinism. The issue was (and still is in Anglo-American law) whether the defendant had, as a matter of empirical fact, the state of mind at the time of the killings necessary for a jury to determine her or his guilt. The court posed the issue as a question of fact for the jury to decide, not as a philosophical conundrum. By the 1850s, it was standard practice for prosecution and defense to call medical witnesses to assist knowledge of state of mind in the particular case (often enough, it may be said, implicitly if not explicitly linked to claims about states of mind in general). The jurisprudential issue was, which states of mind exculpated, that is, prevented or destroyed the mental capacity (mens rea) required for a guilty verdict? Were such states present with childhood, senility, alcohol abuse, epileptic attacks, mania, being hypnotized, “the black cloud” of a brain disorder, or something else? The court operated within the framework given by precedent and by the McNaughton Rules (1843), in which the key provision concerned defendants not knowing the nature and quality of what they were doing at the time of the crime. The formal rules did not hinge on a finding about lack of control; yet, in a fair number of cases, as in Mrs. Brough’s case, it is hard not to think that decisions resulted precisely from a jury thinking in terms of a defendant’s loss of control, that is, acting without mental supervision, or acting automatically. As the defense lawyer summarized Mrs. Brough’s case for the jury: “Was it not clear that some mysterious agency, which none of them could divine, must have been at work to have occasioned this dreadful tragedy? And was it possible for them to believe that the prisoner was mistress of her actions at the time she committed such a dreadful deed?”¹⁴ The attribution of absence of control at this time, we should note, did not use the physiological language of automatic nervous functions (e.g., there was no reference to reflex action). Indeed, in this case, as often in cases involving insanity, specifically medical factors may well not have been decisive.¹⁵

The problem for systematic jurisprudence, and the problem for everyday understanding of how people acquire habits and how people judge them, was that what began as a matter of individual choice might end as physiological compulsion. At what point of time did a person, perhaps the worse for drink, move from being a volitional agent to being an automaton? Structurally, the same question concerned children: When, legally, were they supposed to change from irresponsible to responsible agents? For conservative moralists, people had to be held responsible for their previous choices (Mrs. Brough for her adultery); for reform-minded doctors, once a medical condition was present (brain disorder), that condition, not moral judgment, should determine the decision about what to do. As it happens, the judge in Mrs. Brough’s case, Mr. Justice Erle, made a classic statement of the difficulties for reasoning in all of this:

Thus, the question about understanding a piece of behavior as a physiological process, and hence “automatic,” could not be detached from a temporal story about how that automatic process originated. Similarly, we might ask in a moral and political context: Though an automaton may perform without agency, through what agency did this come to be?

Though it is not possible to know for certain what persuades juries in particular cases, it appears Mrs. Brough’s jury agreed with the defense. I am inclined to look to the ordinary person’s discourse, actually made plain in a statement by the medical expert, Winslow: He saw “the act itself bearing insanity stamped on its very face.”¹⁷ This was indeed to use ordinary language, which it is tempting to think the jury would also have used: Activity so out of the normal range and so shocking was “mad.” It is also necessary to remember yet another dimension. There was a mandatory sentence for a conviction for murder: death by hanging. Though many capital sentences, most of all those involving women and children, were commuted by the Home Secretary, it was widely believed that juries took decisions influenced by their views about the appropriateness of hanging in particular cases. The emotiveness of the possible sentence certainly colored public debate. Winslow thus later defended himself in the medical press: “Our opponents argue, in the first place, that she was not insane at all, and ought to have been hanged; secondly, that if she were insane, her mental derangement was the result of the immoral life she had led for years, and as her insanity was self-created, the gallows ought to have claimed her for its victim.”¹⁸ Such language both reflected and promoted polarities – guilty/not guilty, death sentence/hospital committal, moral choice/physical determinism. Major changes were subsequently to ease this polarity: the increased professionalization or administrative standardization of pre-court determinations of fitness to plead; the removal of capital punishment for murder from the statute book; and the introduction of the plea of diminished responsibility, with the flexibility it allowed to judges in sentencing. But, for the Victorians, the polarities were pressing. In this context, the decision about the insanity verdict in a particular case was something of a focus, or metonym, for conflict between conservative and reform-oriented politics in general.

Lastly, in considering the verdict, there is the question of gender. Almost no doctor at this time thought otherwise than in terms of the susceptibility of female bodies to disorder because of their reproductive functions. Mrs. Brough’s symptoms had come on and persisted since her last confinement, two years earlier. As a result of belief in female weakness, there seem to have been circumstances in which ordinary people, supported by the evidence of physicians, were reluctant to act harshly.¹⁹ Reactions to female “madness” were highly variable and context dependent.²⁰

The emotive factors and intense moral commitments embedded in decisions about how to describe human deeds significantly colored the language of free will and absence of free will, understood as social judgments about which deeds do and which deeds do not follow from choice and hence entail responsibility. This is also evident in the debate explicitly about human automatism in the 1870s, though the language then was abstract and not burned with the pathos of the particular. There was, I suggest, a deep Victorian ambivalence (much of which lasts into modern times). On the one hand, with almost no exceptions, social observers – whether conservative or reform-minded – stressed the importance of individual free will. On the other hand, observers, often the same ones, committed considerable intellectual and moral energy, whether through medical physiology or social commentary, to delineating limits to the will’s power. Trials like that of Mrs. Brough recreated the ambivalence as public theater. The debate on automatism in the 1870s had the public significance and resonance it did because the issues were already embedded in public life, in ways that sometimes had all the qualities of a theatrical tragedy. In this setting, commentary crossed frontiers of class, occupation, and gender. Mrs. Brough’s case is a rather spectacular and bloody introduction to the Victorian philosophical and practical culture of freedom of the will.

The circumstances of the case were very “Victorian,” not least in contemporary macabre descriptions of charabanc loads of sightseers traveling to Esher to see the bloodsoaked bedrooms where the killings took place. The issues as they concern a language of automatic behavior, summoning up “mysterious agency” at work in human life, cropped up, however, across Europe and North America throughout the nineteenth century.²¹ To make the point about the breadth of this reference, if only impressionistically, I give another example, this time from fiction and from Russia. It is from a short story by Chekov, “Ubiistvo” (“Murder”), dating from the last years of the century (1895). I choose a fictional story in order to suggest the degree to which there was public familiarity with “automatic” and/or “unconscious” violence.

The story recounted the lives of two Orthodox middle-aged brothers, Matvei and Yakov (Matthew and Jacob), living near a small town characteristic of European Russia. Matvei was lazy but pious, using his fine singing voice in the liturgy; Yakov, the elder brother, was financially cunning and hardworking, by which means he had accumulated relative wealth, though he was notably pious in his formal observances. They shared the family property, a house, which each wished to utilize in his own way. Resentment and finally hatred built up. One March day, at the end of a long, hard winter, while it snowed yet again, Yakov, interrupted in his morning prayers, denied his brother use of a horse. Instead, he started out himself, only to abort the journey in the harsh weather; he then spent a restless day increasingly conscious that he could gain no peace or pleasure from prayer. Late in the day, in the kitchen where their sister, equally resentful of Matvei, had been ironing and Matvei had been sitting doing nothing and complaining, there was an exchange of increasingly bitter insults among the three of them. When Yakov seized her brother, the sister hit Matvei with a bottle; holding his concussed brother up, Yakov then grabbed the iron and repeatedly hit Matvei with it, killing him. Before taking up the iron, Yakov pointed his finger at it, but there is no account of it in his hand, and it was only when blood flowed down his arm and a servant cried out that he became conscious of what he had done. He was not conscious of what he was doing at the moment of the violence. But he became conscious immediately afterwards, and, driven above all by the fear that the peasants would mock him as a man of prayer while being led away by the gendarme, he stupidly tried to disguise the killing by taking the body to the forest and pretending that it was the work of robbers.

Everything inevitably came out and the case quickly went to trial. There was no question of madness before the court, no discussion of medical evidence, and Yakov was summarily sentenced to twenty years convict labor in Sakhalin, in the Russian Far East. Though the author was himself a doctor, Chekov’s story was firmly about the extremity of the forces at work in the human soul, not about illness. And it was about the conditions of material, family, and social life, which acted on the soul and fostered violence. Nevertheless, it is interesting to put the description of Yakov’s state, his “automatism” while carrying through the killing, alongside Mrs. Brough’s description of the “nasty great black cloud.” Neither murderer let up until the violence had worked its course; both were in some sense not in a state of conscious awareness; “mysterious agency” drove both killings, though the linguistic rendering of that “agency” was in material terms in one case, and in nonmaterial, we might say “psychological,” terms in the other.²² Under certain conditions, it would seem, human violence could be like the violence produced by a moving machine. Chekov’s description of the uncontrolled and uncontrollable moment of hatred, though framed in “psychological” terms, posited events that were as automatic as brain events. This indeed was known: People sometimes did such things. The description did not require a theory of brain action to be persuasive. We may go further and enlarge the perspective and recognize a large theme in the generally acknowledged tragedy of human life in which events, though carried out by humans, often do not occur under human control.

There was widespread or common knowledge, or belief, in a human capacity for uncontrolled, and, apparently at the time events unfolded, uncontrollable movements. In another setting and at another time, such movements appeared as purposeful action. There was nothing essentially medical or esoteric about the sources of this knowledge, or belief; to the contrary, such belief shaped nineteenth-century psychological medicine. The early and mid-Victorian literature – both fictional and nonfictional – was replete with discussion of the acquisition and training of habits and skills, moralistically prompting readers to put in place patterns of activity that would then serve to take them through the shoals of moral life. The history of reflex action theories, much discussed at this time and central to the shaping of nervous physiology, is to a significant degree a history of the re-presentation of the everyday language of the formation and control of habits, and hence individual actions, in terms of nervous structures and functions.²³ The notorious Victorian emphasis on the freedom of the individual will has to be understood in relation to knowledge that there were conditions of ordinary life, as well as exceptional conditions, in which there was no will. The huge public preoccupation with alcohol – in Russia, for example, as well as Britain – enacted an unbounded morality play about what was at stake.²⁴ Crazes for mesmerism and table-turning presented moralists with the same challenges, as they appeared to cultivate the replacement of will by automatic behavior.

All the same, the description of “mysterious agency” in the language of the disordered brain made a noteworthy contribution to the naturalization of conceptions of the human in the Victorian period. Perhaps the spread of the specific word “unconscious” (as in W. B. Carpenter’s reference to “unconscious cerebration”)²⁵ and to the closely allied word, “automatism,” where there might earlier have been a phrase like “loss of will,” marked a step along this road. The new words belonged to a discourse taking mechanistic operations, whether in industry or in nature, as the reference point, while older phrases leaned semantically on reference to the intentional, moral mind.

Historians have paid close attention to the public lectures and exchanges in the periodicals in the 1860s and 1870s that promoted scientific naturalism. The most outspoken opponents of this cultural shift wheeled out the accusation of “materialism,” though it was widely appreciated that this denoted not so much an ontology restricting the stuff of the world to matter as determinism. The issue was confidence in Christian social practice as the basis of the moral life and social order. Prescription as to what it was right to do, it was thought, required description of a world in which human choice mattered. We may call to mind the geologist Adam Sedgwick’s outburst in the 1840s in reaction to The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation: “If the book be true, the labors of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a mass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labors for the black people of Africa were the works of madmen; and man and woman are only better beasts!”²⁶ As Gowan Dawson argues in connection with Darwin, references to determinism and materialism created associations with working-class, even bestial, and certainly disreputable, social strata, where it was said human conduct tended more closely to resemble the working of machines. Imagery that imputed a lack of free will appeared socially damaging to whomever it was applied, not only philosophically problematic. This gave statements about automatic behavior at one and the same time a social and a philosophical context – these contexts represented a kind of reference point for statements about and defenses of freedom of the will. Thomas Huxley’s simplistic but attention-grabbing rhetoric likening consciousness to ringing bells and whistling engines served in this way. So did W. K. Clifford’s statement dismissing belief that the mind could influence matter as “nonsense.”²⁷ All the same – it hardly needs emphasis – Huxley and Clifford were intense and powerful moralists, and their lives exemplified the exercise of the Victorian male moral will. This was John Tyndall at work, exhausted during a fearsome ascent of the Weisshorn in the Alps: “I thought of Englishmen in battle, of the qualities that had made them famous: it was mainly the quality of not knowing when to yield – of fighting for duty even after they had ceased to be animated by hope. Such thoughts helped to lift me over the rocks.”²⁸ What was so fearful about the imputation of automatism, and its apparent enactment in particular cases, I suggest, was the implication that, even in a culture – and an empire – where the moral will prevailed, its triumph was constantly and profoundly threatened. There was, to be sure, a shifting relationship between representations of the threatening forces as the wages of sin and the workings of a disordered body. But the spread of the naturalistic temper produced no break. Indeed, it is the continuity of moral culture from its Christian to its naturalistic forms that is striking. In the conditions of modern times, the body recreated the conditions of the Fall. The experience and language of deterministic automatism mediated this continuity.

It is necessary to add a comment about “determinism.” It was in fact substantially a new term in the 1860s; in philosophical discourse before this the common term was “necessity” or “necessitarianism” (this, e.g., was the language J. S. Mill used in his essay “On Liberty” in 1859).²⁹ The spread of references to “determinism” appears to have accompanied, and informed, the spread of argument over scientific naturalism. The word connoted the inescapable effect of physical causes; it connoted necessity in physical nature, as opposed to necessity in the God-given order of things; it connoted situations in which there was an absence of freedom of choice. Perhaps this also informed the spread of the actual language of automatism.

The emphatic writings of the specialist in nervous and mental diseases, Henry Maudsley, strike all historians. The language with which he expressed his mordant and pessimistic medical and social views stood out; moreover, he was widely cited as an authority across Europe and not just in the English-speaking world. (Tolstoy, e.g., referred to him.) His pessimism at times appeared to amount to a complete embrace of determinism in human affairs. He described one eight-year-old girl under his care as “a most mischievous little machine,” with the patent implication that it needed the intervention of an expert medical mechanic like himself to mind the machine.³⁰ All the same, not only was Maudsley yet another moralist, but he recreated in his medical language something of the imagination for human nature, determined by original sin, which marked the Methodist religious culture of the rural life into which he was born. In certain cases, he railed against Christian idealism for, in his view, holding even the mentally ill responsible for their crimes, and he earned a living (apparently a very good one) by acting, intervening, in families so as to accommodate mental illness, substituting his will for the will of patients.

There was an apparent inconsistency in writers formulating statements about determinism while acting as if free will was endemic: It was not contingent but fundamental. This has to be taken into account in any attempt to place references to automatism and to understand their Victorian significance. There was no resolution of debate about free will, no more than there had been throughout the centuries of the Christian tradition. Mrs. Brough’s case is a particular example of the way medical description – description of brain states as opposed to moral judgment – was acquiring a greater presence in social decisions. This contributed to the use and legitimacy of reference to automatic behavior. To be sure, this sometimes made a marked difference to an individual, changing the manner of ordering a moral life. Yet the pattern of human relations was not much disturbed collectively or practically, as opposed to the disturbance to the imagination, by the spectacular case. Whatever the awkwardness of statements of empirical facts, and the seeming difficulty of accounting for the utterly exceptional, or monstrous, in Mrs. Brough’s case, the court, and the system of social administration for which it was the visible face, reached a viable solution. She was not hanged, but nor was she allowed to continue as a freely acting member of society. She caused a scare; but she did not threaten the social order.

It seems reasonable to reach similar conclusions in cases that were in certain ways comparable. In 1845, for example, Martha Brixey, a domestic servant, cut off the head of a child in the house where she served, which seemed to threaten the safety of every respectable “hearth” in the land. She had purposefully obtained a knife, like Brough obtaining a razor. Yet, like Brough again, she was committed to Bethlem after a verdict of insanity. She was released thirteen years later, and she was described in her case notes as “a young woman of most interesting appearance and amiable expression of countenance with great propriety of manner and a pattern of retiring, modest behavior. There is no appearance of anything approaching insanity or delusion of any kind.”³¹ Medical evidence in this case confirmed the presumed weaknesses of a young woman’s constitution, and the description in the case notes and the later release disarmed the threat that she was initially said to have embodied. Once again, in Brixey’s case, there was an unconscious or automatic moment of violence; but it was contained; she came to act like a model young woman. Both Brough and Brixey appeared to conform to the description of “homicidal mania” found in the contemporary literature of psychological medicine. A private asylum superintendent, J. G. Davey, wrote in 1860:

References to absence of free will and to automatic behavior have traction not so much from defining certain states, and certainly not because words like “automatism” had definitions, but from words establishing differences between states. It is for this reason that I refer to a dialectic. Ascriptions of free will and its opposite, whether characterized as the consequence of sin or as the consequence of brain disorder, presupposed a semantic couple – thesis and antithesis. We may thus describe the practical social arrangements that balanced free will and its absence as a synthesis. Moreover – this is important – this synthesis not only made possible the viable resolution of a special criminal case but was an everyday achievement of social relations. The synthesis was embedded in the moral culture, exemplified in the lives of scientists and doctors and their practical discourse of learning from the laws and facts of nature. The synthesis was the social order, a system with a significant degree of flexibility, both highlighting individual responsibility and sensitive to the limits of attributing responsibility. That order was threatened by seemingly automatic behavior, whether commonplace (drunkenness, bad habits) or spectacular (murder under the influence of insanity, performance under hypnosis), but also by abstract theories or language that seemed to posit determinism as the norm.

Doctors, like Winslow in Brough’s case and like Davey, quoted for his description of homicidal mania, tended to slip into attributing the cause of horrific events to disease. Attacking the law for seeking to punish mad people with hanging, Maudsley and his coauthor referred to a situation in which “the lunatic is to be sacrificed to the vengeance of the law which not he, but his disease, has outraged.”³³ Descriptions of automatic behavior of all kinds enlarged the scope of causally attributing human life to physical events. That was redescription with normative content. But it belonged to a long-perpetuated, and in many respects still continuing, dialectic or negotiation of the attribution of responsibility on which social order was thought to depend. Moreover, the law, strictly speaking, was not concerned with causes but with the presence or absence of a legally defined state of mind. If physical causes were to be admitted as a reason for exculpation, then all human behavior would be without responsibility, since, after all, healthy and sane actions had physical causes as much as ill and insane ones.³⁴ Automatons were not the kind of being that could have responsibility.

Journalist Henry Blanchamp begins his Fortnightly Review article “Thoughts of a Human Automaton” (1892) with these pronouncements:

The hypnotized subject, acting automatically and without agency, becomes representative of all human behavior. Two decades after Thomas Huxley’s “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata” (1874), responses and sequels to it were still rolling in.

Solutions to the mind/body problem rarely escape the insulating bubble of philosophy to become common cultural vocabulary. In this chapter, I show how Thomas Huxley’s proposed answer to the mind/body problem – that humans are conscious automata – spread through the culture, significantly influencing conceptions of consciousness, freedom, responsibility, and human nature.² Huxley’s argument, which had remarkably strong appeal in late Victorian culture, lurks in the shadows behind a surprising range of thought and writing. We have lost contact with the effects of that argument and the responses it prompted. Huxley’s ideas crucially shaped the background for thinking about the place of the mind and the representation of consciousness in literary and nonliterary texts, as well as in the larger culture, in the final decades of the Victorian period.

Influences and Responses

Consciousness and its relation to the living body became a topic of critical interest in the late Victorian periodical press, pointing toward a widespread cultural engagement with the ways in which developments in science were forcing a reimagining of human mentality. To use Victorian terms, it had been well established that molecular changes in the brain are accompanied by changes in consciousness, but how to account for that association remained unclear. Theories of automatism, growing from theories of reflex action, were central to the new scientific psychology. Those theories acknowledged that some behavior and cognition that previously had been understood as volitional was unconscious and automatic. But what of a more extreme view, one that that regards all cognition as automatic and explains consciousness as no more than subjective feeling, wholly inefficacious in human behavior?

Ideas about both mechanism and unconscious action had been important in the culture for some time before Huxley delivered his somewhat misleadingly titled address “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History” at the 1874 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where it was read alongside John Tyndall’s infamous Belfast address supporting scientific materialism.³ Huxley traces the view back to Descartes’ seventeenth-century discussion of animal automatism, in constructing a genealogy that lends authority to his account. The idea that humans could sometimes behave as automata had been well established by discussions of mesmerism, sleepwalking, and other abnormal states of mind. Huxley gave another turn to the screw, radicalizing and extending the discussion for the Victorian public. Rather than trying to preserve a place for volition, he suggests that consciousness might not influence anything.

Conscious automatism understands consciousness as an inefficacious accompaniment of neurophysiological events, a mere by-product of mechanical physical processes. The causal relation between body and mind moves only in one direction: material processes affect the mental, but the mental does not act on the physical. The body, that is, is a machine and it operates without any influence from conscious cognition. We take conscious thought and volition to be directing the show, but they are in fact only like shadows, along for the ride. It is a dualist conception of mind – the mental and the physical are metaphysically distinct from one another – but the consciousness Huxley makes room for in his theory is limited to registering the “what it feels like to me,” what current philosophers call phenomenal consciousness. We are, Huxley concludes, “conscious automata.”⁴

Despite being a theory that was widely discussed, it is a difficult theory to wrap one’s head around. It seems easier to understand, in rough ways, the implications of the theory of evolution in its decentering of the human species than to understand the idea that consciousness does nothing. In a series of metaphorical articulations of the view, Huxley figures consciousness as the ringing of the bell or as “symbols” of brain states.⁵ In the best known of his analogies, he explains that consciousness has no influence on the physical world just “as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery” (575). The Victorian comparative psychologist George Romanes – although he opposed the theory – sums it up in this way:

Proponents of the view appealed to the conservation of energy for support; this principle, they argued, would be violated if the immaterial (consciousness) could produce physical effects. From the start, however, it was noted that Huxley’s steam-whistle metaphor did not work, given that at least some small amount of energy from the system must go to making the whistle shriek. Even if the whistle has no effect on the working of the steam engine, it has effects on other parts of the world: it uses steam, it produces sound, perhaps sending messages and even warnings. As philosopher James Ward protested: “Even shadows and sounds involve work.”⁷ The metaphor already suggests the difficulties of the view: how to conceive of a consciousness that does nothing? But the metaphor also points to the contexts of Huxley’s theory: the increasingly mechanical view of society brought by industrialism, the analogizing of steam power and mental work common in the period, and the mechanistic understanding of time that developed alongside the railway network. Perhaps Huxley, who acknowledged the early influence of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1831) on his thought, was implicitly answering a more than “indeed” to Teufelsdröckh’s hypothetical in the “Natural Supernaturalism” chapter: “unless, indeed, I am a mere Work-Machine, for whom the divine gift of Thought were no other than the terrestrial gift of Steam is to the Steam-engine.”⁸ James Paradis has persuasively argued that Huxley’s coining of “scientific naturalism” is a response to Carlyle’s “natural supernaturalism.”⁹

Drawing on laboratory research on the functions of the nervous system, Huxley reminds readers that psychophysiology has established that many cognitive processes are automatic, carried out without consciousness by something like reflex action, just as a frog continues to kick when placed in water after much of its brain has been removed.¹⁰ Huxley also dwells on the medical case of a soldier who, after suffering a brain injury, periodically began to act in ways that make him appear to be “a senseless mechanism” with no consciousness of what he is doing. Yet he was able to carry out complex behaviors, such as writing a letter, in an automatistic state.

Huxley’s theory that humans are automata was lent support by developments in scientific instrumentation and laboratory technologies. “Sensitive” apparatuses measured psychological processes and recorded the speed of nervous impulses involved in perception and other cognitive functions, bringing human mentality into the laboratory. Newly invented devices registered heat and light. Automatic registering instruments graphically recorded movement and sound. Machines seemed to be capable of sensing – hearing, seeing, and feeling – and able to do that better than humans, with “superior sensitivity.”¹¹ An 1879 article describes plans for an apparatus “which is to be to sound what the microscope is to sight, and will enable a whisper to be heard miles distant.”¹² Those advances in what seemed to be intelligent machines helped to give Huxley’s argument purchase in the culture of the time.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, conscious automaton theory came to be called epiphenomenalism, a term borrowed from medicine. The use of the term has been widely attributed to William James (who was also mistakenly credited for the term “stream of consciousness” for a number of years). In fact, others refer to consciousness as epiphenomenal at least as early as the 1880s.¹³ In one sense, conscious automatism is a theory that, like other metaphysical theories, has no real practical import. That is, if volition is an illusion, if consciousness in fact does nothing, there are no consequences for how we experience life. People will still feel that thought causes things.

In regard to our self-conception, it is an unsettling theory, in opposition to a Romanticism that would make the “human mind’s imaginings” central.¹⁴ It also takes a distinctly different turn from the mesmerism that enthralled the Victorian public and that, while acknowledging the force of automatisms, also posited mental causation at a distance. There have been many arguments against conscious automatism (though philosophers like Frank Jackson have recently defended versions of it and Huxley is always invoked in those contemporary discussions). For my purposes, what is important is that despite the decentering nature of the view, Huxley’s presentation of it gripped the Victorian imagination for the remainder of the century. Huxley is a wonderful stylist, and his prose no doubt contributed to the influence of his work. His use of metaphor was much remarked on by his contemporaries, and his rhetorical skills have been commented on by literary critics at least since Walter Houghton’s 1949 article.¹⁵ He was also a shrewd publicist, and arranged for his paper to appear in three separate journals, The British Medical Journal, Nature, and, with a few changes, the influential Fortnightly Review. Even before the outcry that developed in response to Huxley’s automata paper,¹⁶ he had made related claims in articles in widely read periodicals. It was not that others were not making similar arguments; the philosopher Shadworth Hodgson and Douglas Spalding, editor of the journal Nature, were committed epiphenomenalists. But Huxley’s public standing and his marshalling of the automaton metaphor worked to crystalize the debate, and made his version the one that it was de rigueur to answer. As William James put it his Mind article, “Are We Automata?” (1879): “Everyone is now acquainted with the Conscious-Automaton-theory to which Prof. Huxley gave such publicity in his Belfast address.”¹⁷ Huxley’s paper gave rise to literally hundreds of discussions in books and articles. The intense interest, and the perception that Huxley’s conclusion had to be addressed in any related discussion, continued into the early part of the next century. His arguments were supported by the mathematician W. K. Clifford, at least for a time, the psychologist Henry Maudsley, and the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson, among others.

The theory was also opposed by many, including the psychologists G. H. Lewes, William Carpenter, George Romanes, and William James. Carpenter, remembered now for his theorizing of “unconscious cerebration” (or automatist cognition), rejected the theory primarily on moral grounds.¹⁸ He conceded that automatisms play essential roles in mental life, but held on to the importance of conscious volitional agency and moral responsibility, considerations central to much Victorian psychological theory. Carpenter famously figures the mind’s “Volitional direction” as a skillful rider in control of a horse that represents the automatic mechanism.¹⁹ A horse will sometimes direct its own motions, plodding home without guidance while the rider daydreams, but the will can intercede to direct automatic activities by establishing habits. Carpenter’s arguments against conscious automatism are more measured than some notably agitated responses from those wanting to defend a traditional view of the soul. W. S. Lilly’s strident, circuitous article, “Materialism and Morality,” which appeared in the Fortnightly Review over ten years after Huxley’s article, charges that Huxley’s view undercuts not only morality, but also the unity of the self; it “reeks of the brothel, the latrine, and the torture trough.”²⁰ In the late 1890s, the idealist Ward expresses similar distaste in his Gifford Lectures (later collected in Naturalism and Agnosticism [1899]), attacking scientific materialism. He devotes a lecture to wrestling with Huxley’s “shallow and perverted psychology,” a psychology that makes mind “impotent” and reduces thinking to an “orderly raving” that “shadows” physiological processes.²¹ Ward exploits the language of disability and nervous system disorder to describe the theory: “A conscious automaton is thus like a paralytic and epileptic rolled into one, the impotent volitions of the first keeping step with the motor discharges of the second” (56).

For James and Romanes, the most compelling argument against conscious automatism is an evolutionary one: consciousness would not have developed if it had no efficacy. In his beautiful literary prose, James explains the theory in a series of compelling metaphors, which remind us that we always talk about consciousness in other terms: “Inert, uninfluential, a simple passenger in the voyage of life, it is allowed to remain on board, but not to touch the helm or handle the rigging.”²² For James, ultimately, we have no reasoned grounds for deciding for or against the epiphenomenal view of consciousness; instead, we make “an aesthetic choice.” “And now,” he asks “who shall decide between rival aesthetic needs?” (3).

Others opposed the theory by appeals to subjective feeling: we are convinced that our thought and volition matter. Even Romanes, employing a narrative that seems to borrow from George Eliot’s that I discuss later in this chapter, advances such an objection:

The painter John Collier, who married two of Huxley’s daughters (not simultaneously, of course), expressed a similar contention in a letter to Charles Darwin:

The force of the conscious automata theory, however, is that the subjective feeling that one is acting freely does not guarantee its truth. Henry Maudsley pointed that out with his typical expressiveness, in words that Thomas Hardy copied into his literary notebooks. Drawing an analogy with the unreliability of visual perception, Maudsley writes: “Consciousness tells [a person] indeed that he is a self-sufficing individual with infinite potentialities of freewill; it tells him also that the sun goes around the earth.”²⁵

Conscious automatism was not only the focus of philosophical and scientific discussion, but also entered into popular culture. Fraser’s Magazine published a satirical poem in 1875 that begins “Conscious Automata, we nothing can.”²⁶ The hero of Morley Roberts’ minor novel The Colossus: A Story of Today (1899) is described, in a splendidly nonsensical mishmash of discordant views, as feeling “like a conscious automaton, like one mote in a moving tide that was yet himself, like the solitary soul seated, a remote uplifted Teufelsdröckh, in the pineal gland of the brain.”²⁷ Cosmo Monkhouse, a late-century poet and critic, wrote a satirical three-act play, The Automaton, in which his characters test out the conscious automata theory and find it wanting. The play – a comedy involving jealous husbands, marriages threatened by arguments over free will, and a central character named “Fad” who supports the theory – does not demonstrate a subtle understanding of the view, although the invented scientific articles included in the play draw on vocabulary from current periodical discussion. “I abhor, detest, and utterly denies that abominable tomaton theory,” says Fad’s manservant.²⁸ (Incidentally, the play seems to have had only a one-night run.) Punch Magazine, of course, also joined in the fun, with the poem “Address to an Atom. By an Uncomfortably Conscious Automaton.”²⁹ The theory was more cleverly parodied in a piece titled “British Automaton: A Strange Case of Intermittent Unconsciousness” that appeared in Punch in September 1874, that is, even before Huxley’s publication of his article in The Fortnightly. In the spoof, Mr. Punch presents to Professor Huxley the case of Mr. John Smith Robinson who yearly “passes into a totally abnormal existence” when on his annual family holiday. His “actions are purely mechanical,” the whims of his wife and daughters rendering him a volitionless automaton.³⁰ It is a misogynist piece, but one that is based on good knowledge of Huxley’s soldier example, and the joke depends on the audience being acquainted with those details as well.

Major literary writers engaged Huxley’s ideas in more thoughtful ways, deliberating on them in serious considerations of psychology and the role, workings, and representation of consciousness. Before looking more closely at conscious automatism in connection to two literary works, “The Book of the Machines” from Samuel Butler’s Erewhon and “Shadows of the Coming Race” from George Eliot’s The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, I want to point to several other Victorian literary authors who were influenced by the theory, to demonstrate again that the ideas saturated the society becoming part of a shared consciousness. Thomas Hardy was fascinated with consciousness, moving from a view similar to Huxley’s automatism in his early career to a later one in which an immanent will slowly achieves consciousness. In the 1880s, Hardy copied in his notebooks published discussions of conscious automatism. One entry notes that “another hypothesis” “represents mind as never interfering in the course of physical events, but at best representing a mere inner aspect of the outward frame of things – a sort of backwater from the stream of physical forces.”³¹ Another entry transcribes a passage from Alfred Fouillée’s “L’Homme automate”: “le desir et l’aversion, le plaisir et la peine, sont les simples indices psychologiques de mouvemens corporels qui ont seuls l’efficacite.”³² In an 1881 entry in his Life, Hardy contemplates writing a historical drama that shows: “Action mostly automatic, reflex movement, etc. Not the result of what is called motive, though always ostensibly so, even to the actors’ own consciousness.”³³ Hardy’s “mostly” perhaps suggests only partial agreement with Huxley’s conscious automatism, but in those years Hardy frequently describes his characters acting as automata, not only when they enter into unusual mental states, such as Angel Clare’s somnambulism, but even in their quotidian activities.

George Bernard Shaw was similarly absorbed by these debates, as he developed his neo-Lamarckian theory of creative evolution that asserts the operation of creativity, intelligence, and free will in the evolutionary process. In Shaw’s Back to Methuselah (1922), Pygmalion creates “a pair of human creatures who are all reflexes and nothing else” and denies as a “man of science,” in opposition to the “mystic” Martellus, that one can draw “a line between an automaton and a living organism.”³⁴ In “The New Theology” (1907), Shaw connected conscious automata theory to what he took to be the “blind mechanism” of natural selection:

Wanting to preserve a role for consciousness in evolution, Shaw, like many others, was aghast at the suggestion that what have been considered the highest aesthetic achievements would be possible without sentience playing a role. On Huxley’s account, as opposed to Shaw’s in the passage quoted, the creators would be conscious of what they were doing. That consciousness, however, would play no actual role in the production. But Shaw’s interpretation points to an implication of the view, also picked up by others: if consciousness is no more than an epiphenomenon, why not eliminate it altogether?

Robert Louis Stevenson was also influenced by the new psychology, as evident in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Stevenson endorses the conscious automaton theory in his discussion of the “automaton-dog”:

Stevenson’s image of consciousness as an onlooker shut away in the mill garret (mechanical body with brain) is yet another metaphorical spin on the idea that consciousness is the inefficacious byplay of mechanical physical processes. His literary rendering, like the philosophical ones, expresses the view in concrete terms, but adds to it a description of the felt experience of the subject. Even writers for whom the topic of consciousness was not of intense interest responded to Huxley’s theory. Matthew Arnold copied into his notebook a passage from the Fortnightly publication of Huxley’s article on the connection between brain and conscious mental states.³⁷ As late as 1890, Andrew Lang devotes most of a number of his monthly Longman’s feature “At the Sign of the Ship” to rather unskillfully contesting Huxley’s theory.³⁸ The list goes on.

The situation is not too different from what we are experiencing today, when there is a great interest in consciousness across disciplines. Consciousness has come in contemporary philosophy to be known as “the hard problem,” but it is worth noting that Huxley had already articulated that idea in 1879, referring to consciousness as “the metaphysical problem of problems.”³⁹ Consciousness feels to us to be the most significant aspect of human life, yet it is something that, despite our increased knowledge of the workings of the brain, we cannot explain. Almost every Victorian commentator makes a version of “the gap” argument, admitting that we must recognize that we are unable to bridge the seeming chasm between brain and mind and acknowledging the difficulty of translating the mind talk of introspection into the language of science. The scientific naturalist Tyndall, another beautiful stylist among the scientific popularizers, concedes that while “accepting fearlessly the facts of materialism… I bow my head in the dust before the mystery of mind.”⁴⁰ So, it makes sense that this fundamental problem that challenges both our conceptual and linguistic resources would trouble fiction, which has long been understood to be one of our primary modes of exploring the mind.

Conscious and Unconscious Automata in Samuel Butler and George Eliot

The texts that I will examine by George Eliot and Butler take as their subject matter the mechanistic model and its implications for our understanding of the mind.⁴¹ Butler’s “Book of the Machines” from his utopian novel Erewhon, appeared in 1872, two years before Huxley’s paper. The book was not, then, influenced directly by Huxley’s conscious automata paper, but points to the cultural contexts of Huxley’s hypothesis. Although Huxley had not yet presented his conscious automaton analogy, he had made controversial statements in journal articles about the reduction of the mental to the physical. Huxley concluded his Fortnightly Review article “The Physical Basis of Life” (1869) by asserting that “thought may be regarded as a property of matter.”⁴² In an address, “On Descartes’ Discourse,” delivered to the Cambridge Young Man’s Christian Association and published in Macmillan’s Magazine in May 1870, Huxley provocatively claimed: “I hold that … the human body … is a machine, all the operations of which will sooner or later be explained on physical principles. I believe that we shall, sooner or later, arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness.”⁴³ The journalist Richard Holt Hutton, who challenged Huxley’s views repeatedly in The Spectator, responded to his address in an article titled “Professor Huxley as a Machine,” which makes clear that even before the automata paper Huxley was widely understood to be advocating a mechanistic view of human mentality. Hutton depicts a “Huxley-clock” (a conception that Huxley had himself offered in his talk, saying that he would happily accept the cost of being a machine for the benefit of getting things right⁴⁴) in which Huxley’s powers of speculation are replaced by “the infallible response of a calculating machine, striking the oracular answer to our scientific and moral questions with as much certainty as that with which the observatory clock at Greenwich strikes the mean time.”⁴⁵ Hutton’s grumpy but charming retort draws on Babbage’s calculating engine, William Jevons’ “Logical Piano,” and even the mechanism of global standard time. Such an “automatic arrangement for indicating the truth, and for ensuring right action” (550), Hutton protests, results in an impoverished view; the language of science cannot capture qualities such as love or spirit. Hutton charges that Huxley’s notion of “freedom” (determinist) “would be worth just as much as the sense of involuntary power might be to a conscious locomotive, endowed with the capacity to know that as long as the stoker attended the fire, and the boiler remained in good order, it would generate so much momentum every hour” (550). One wonders whether Hutton’s imaginative narrative was the inspiration for Butler’s elaborately developed descriptions of conscious machines and Huxley’s steam-whistle locomotive metaphor.

Butler – brilliant, clever, but prickly and quasi-paranoid – in fact suggested later, when he had come to detest Huxley as part of his crusade against Darwinian accounts of evolution, that Huxley might have been influenced in formulating his theory “by the machine chapters in ‘Erewhon,’ which were still recent.”⁴⁶ Butler writes in Luck, or Cunning that Huxley led off the project of ejecting “consciousness and sentience from any causative action in the working of the universe” with his essay “‘On the hypothesis that animals are automata’ (which it may be observed is the exact converse of the hypothesis that automata are animated).”⁴⁷ Butler turns his bitter, chip-on-the-shoulder irony onto Huxley, while aptly describing the negligible effects of the theory on lived experience: “Men and animals must be allowed to feel and even to reflect; this much must be conceded, but granted that they do, still (so, at least, it was contended) it has no effect upon the result” (156). Butler’s point that Huxley’s scenario is the opposite of the one he represents in Erewhon is worth pausing over: Butler imagines a wider role for consciousness in thinking machines, while Huxley instead ever decreases its sphere.

In the “Book of the Machines,” Butler’s first Erewhonian philosopher, a professor of “hypothetics,” contends that if humans are themselves machines with consciousness, then by analogy inorganic mechanism could develop consciousness. And even now, he asks, “who can say that a vapour-engine has not a kind of consciousness?”⁴⁸ Blending Carlyle’s and Huxley’s terms, the professor predicts that “a dynamical theory of the passions shall be deducible” from “molecular action” (201). As machines develop they gain “self-regulating, self-acting power” (209) (pace Lewes later in this chapter) and even become self-reproducing. Machines outperform humans already in calculation and precision. Hence, the professor predicts that people’s dependency on machines will sooner or later result in the development of a “mechanical consciousness” (199) in superior machines that will enslave humans.

Butler takes the evolutionary view of the development of consciousness and pushes it to extremes. His machine consciousness, however, will be efficacious. The first Erewhonian philosopher (a second philosopher will briefly contest his views in the final chapter) admits objections to free will, but assumes that consciousness, if not free, is part of the causal nexus. In Butler’s early version of the narrative, “Darwin among the Machines” evolved machine feeling is denied: “No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures. Sin, shame, and sorrow will have no place among them.”⁴⁹ The Erewhonian philosopher, on the other hand, predicts that machines will come to make their wants known and that already even a potato possesses its own form of desires and emotions.

It is hard to know whether Butler’s chapters are meant to be a satire on Darwinian theory, as has often been suggested, but which Butler explicitly denied. He had not yet rejected natural selection as he was later to do so extravagantly, when he began to fiercely defend a neo-Lamarckian account of the mechanism of evolution, on which the mind plays a directing role. In discussing his intentions in composing “The Book of the Machines” in Unconscious Memory (1880), he claims that he was at the time considering whether “being alive was not simply the being an exceedingly complicated machine.”⁵⁰ Butler conflates questions of life and mind in his consideration of complex machinery. If, he continues,

Even if Butler was in fact testing out the mechanism hypothesis in Erewhon, in this passage he cannot let go of the notion that there must be some other vitalistic sense of “being alive” against which the mechanical picture falls short. He writes: “I do not suppose I at that time saw that this view comes to much the same as denying that there are such qualities as life and consciousness at all” (22). The machine argument, he came to believe, degrades the concepts of life and consciousness. But rather than moving to reassert a distinction between the organic and the mechanical, Butler chooses instead in his subsequent work to break down that opposition, adopting the view that everything, the inorganic and the organic, must possess consciousness and volition to some degree or other.

It is not a surprise that a novelist would resist the diminishing of consciousness. George Eliot, the great Victorian novelist of the “inward self,” to borrow one of her favorite phrases, did exactly that in a letter that she wrote in December 1874.⁵¹ The letter appears to respond to Huxley’s recent automaton paper, and picks up the very terms that Huxley had employed defending his views. Scientific progress, Huxley says, works “to reduce all scientific problems, except those which are purely mathematical, to questions of molecular physics.”⁵² Eliot writes:

Resisting science’s totalizing aspirations, Eliot asserts that the subjective human view – emotion, art, morality, anything that involves values – can never be reduced to scientific fact.

The above letter was written at the time Eliot was beginning to write Daniel Deronda (1876), her novel most concerned with the problem of knowing other minds and most innovative in its representations of consciousness. Lewes was at the same time writing the third volume of Problems of Life and Mind, The Physical Basis of Mind (1876), a book that devotes seven chapters to refuting Huxley’s conscious automaton theory (Huxley’s paper was delivered “to the great scandal of the general public,” says Lewes).⁵⁴ Lewes’ title even plays a riff on Huxley’s title “The Physical Basis of Life.” (Lewes treads lightly, however, suggesting that the ideas he contests must be misinterpretations of Huxley’s views; perhaps Lewes was still smarting from Huxley’s devastating review of his book on Comte.) The dual aspect theory of mind that Lewes endorses maintains the causal efficacy of consciousness, and Lewes refuses to reduce the mental to the physical: “Consciousness as a subjective fact cannot be a material or objective fact.”⁵⁵ Lewes, in fact, contends that all action is in some measure voluntary. Extending the concept of reflex action into a general theory of automatism is a mistake, he argues, because reflex action, even if unconscious, is “sentient”; that is, it depends on sensory responses, and sentience is found only in living organisms not in machines. Huxley’s theory, Lewes maintains, is representative of the current overemphasis on mechanical explanations: “In pursuance of this mechanical point of view to the exclusion of the biological, Thought and even Consciousness have been eliminated from among the organic agencies” (383). For Lewes, “Consciousness is an Agent” (406). The actions of Huxley’s soldier are not evidence that his behavior is entirely automatic; rather they indicate “disordered mental action” (401), a catch-all term emphasizing the connection between body and mind. An automaton can never be made to display the fluctuations of sense-guided actions” (400), Lewes contends, as the injured soldier clearly does. Mechanism, in contrast to organism, “is regulated, not self-regulating” (385). Lewes concludes: “An automaton that will learn by experience, and adapt itself to conditions not calculated for in its construction, has yet to be made; till it is made, we must deny that organisms are machines” (385).

But in “Shadows of the Coming Race,” in The Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879), George Eliot also wades directly into the debate and imagines, through the voice of her narrator, the development of exactly such self-regulating and adaptive machines.⁵⁶ Recasting Butler’s scenario, her evolved race of machines supplants humans not because machines have developed consciousness, but because they do not possess that “futile cargo of consciousness” (141). Melding Huxley’s and Butler’s hypotheses, Eliot represents evolved machines that act, produce, and create without the unnecessary and inefficacious collateral product of consciousness. She makes no mention of Butler, who later accused her in a notebook entry of cribbing the chapter from his book.⁵⁷ “I ought to be highly flattered,” he gripes.⁵⁸ He may have a point, because although Eliot develops the Huxleyan view of consciousness, her narrative parallels Butler’s in several ways. Like the Erewhonian professor, Theophrastus suggests that machines may “evolve conditions of self-supply, self-repair, and reproduction.”⁵⁹ Like Butler, Eliot introduces a debate between contending views, and Theophrastus’ friend Trost, whose name in German means consolation, contends, as does Butler’s second philosopher, that machines “obey the mandates of our consciousness” (139). Machines should be conceived of as extra-corporeal limbs, maintains that philosopher. Trost similarly argues: “They are simply extensions of the human organism” (138). Theophrastus draws attention to the word play of Trost’s name, noting that although Trost tries to console him by suggesting that monotonous, harmful manual labor will soon be accomplished by machines, Trost “neutralises the consolation by extending it” (137) to a vision of society in which technical innovations will result in the automation of all labor. Perhaps Trost’s maintaining of the belief that feeling motivates action is to be regarded as similarly consolatory.

Erewhon includes discussion of machines that are able to register responses to stimuli, machines that no longer “receive their impressions through the agency of man’s senses.”⁶⁰ Eliot frames her description of the imagined coming race with discussion of the impact of new “[w]onderously delicate machines,”⁶¹ indicating that those intelligent technologies inspire Theophrastus’ forecasting of evolved machines. She pictures recently developed inscription devices, “cunning wires and wheels and needles” that “register your or my quickness,” and sensitive machines that record sound and even thought: “a microphone which detects the cadence of the fly’s foot on the ceiling and may be expected presently to discriminate the noises of our various follies as they soliloquise or converse in our brains” (138). Such devices suggest that thoughts have the sort of material realization that would allow them to be measured or imaged by machines, and that recording machines behave like organisms, sensing the things they measure or image. Trost seems to be a stand-in for Lewes, advancing views Lewes advocates in his writing. For Trost, such apparatuses do not show that machines possess sentience or intelligence. Their graphic inscriptions are useful for science but reductive; they are “only deaf and dumb bringers of reports which we decipher and make use of” (138).

Psychologist Granville Stanley Hall published a “letter” on “The Graphic Method” (1879) shortly after the appearance of Theophrastus Such that reads “Shadows of the Coming Race” as participating in current debates on machine theories of consciousness, mechanized intelligence, and the explanatory range of automatic recording devices. Hall, who later established the first psychological laboratory in the United States, was studying in Berlin before working with Wilhelm Wundt at his Leipzig psychological laboratory. The new laboratory-based experimental psychology attempted to measure dynamic qualities (amounts and speed), such as the intensity of conscious sensations. The graphic method involved the use of automatic recording apparatuses that mechanically inscribe representations of physical and mental processes, and was touted as surpassing messier, nonprecise human language in its production of objective inscriptions.⁶² Hall acknowledges the achievements associated with those methods, but questions their reach: “I cannot believe that psychological phenomena will be ever to any great extent reproduced from any combination of the curves they trace.”⁶³ He illustrates his points by alluding to Eliot’s narrative, tellingly assuming there is no need to mention the author’s name:

Hall’s image for a reductive material understanding of the mental, “the whirl of molecules engaged in composing an epic” comes not from Theophrastus’ vision, but rather from Trost, who forecasts that “delicate machines” will “give readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in the production of epic poems.”⁶⁴ Eliot imports the term “spiral vortex” from thermodynamics in an evocative metaphorical image that suggests a specific physical explanation of brain activity discernible in patterns in a recursive system. Trost, however, understands the representation of brain events as only one part of the story, and agrees with Hall on the limitations of the mechanistic view of consciousness.

Eliot had herself years before critiqued the goal of a universal scientific language: a “language which has no uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of many-hued significance …., which effects the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic signs.”⁶⁵ Such a “language may be a perfect medium of expression to science, but will never express life, which is a great deal more than science,” she writes.⁶⁶ I take Eliot still to reject such a reductionist view at the time she writes “Shadows.” Nevertheless, the ideas presented in the narrative are so thoughtfully treated that it is hard not to believe that she was at least considering their validity. “Shadows of the Coming Race” pictures a future in which this “immensely more powerful unconscious race” will have surpassed humans, held back by the subjective experience of emotions, by irrationality and inaccuracy, and by the sometimes delusory nature of conscious thought: most importantly by the illusion that they possess free will and the conviction that consciousness has causal efficacy.⁶⁷ Eliot writes: “Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined itself moving its mover, will have vanished” (141). Consciousness, useless and costly, will have disappeared in a machine race whose adaptive advantage is the elimination of sensibility. If consciousness was understood by some of Eliot’s contemporaries to be the highest development of evolution, Theophrastus suggests that we might regard it instead as an evolutionary mistake (reminding one of Hardy’s depiction of consciousness as “nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal”),⁶⁸ bound to disappear like the eyesight of cave-dwelling creatures. In an evocative turn of phrase, Eliot overturns Carpenter’s previously discussed horse and rider image in which the conscious will of the rider controls the reflex action of the horse. Theophrastus instead depicts consciousness as “like a fowl tied head downmost to the saddle of a swift horseman.”⁶⁹

Eliot’s forecasting of the disappearance of consciousness was not only the creature of her imagination. In response to the charge that consciousness could not be useless on an evolutionary account, some suggested that consciousness had now outlived its use. Commentators pointed out that many actions that once were conscious are now performed unconsciously. The idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley in an 1895 article on conscious automatism, which, he said, “seems to grow every day more in fashion,”⁷⁰ develops and rejects a hypothetical argument along those lines: “Thus habits of action and of perception … become automatic more and more and with that unconscious. From which we conclude that, when on the whole adaptation has grown perfect, consciousness will become superseded wholly.”⁷¹

“Shadows of the Coming Race” repeatedly emphasizes the benefits of doing without consciousness. The machine race will be “free from the fussy accompaniment of that consciousness to which our prejudice gives a supreme governing rank, when in truth it is an idle parasite.”⁷² The superior machines will not only perform better than humans “but with the immense advantage of banishing from the earth’s atmosphere screaming consciousnesses which, in our comparatively clumsy race, make an intolerable noise and fuss to each other about every petty ant-like performance … with a ridiculous sense of being effective” (139). It is hard not to notice that here in the voice of her second first-person narrator Eliot’s language takes on a tone and emotional stridency similar to that of her early first-person work, “The Lifted Veil” (1859), in which her narrator Latimer develops the disturbing ability to experience the consciousnesses of others. Consciousness in both texts, experienced and described, is screaming, petty, trivial, parasitic, and insect-like.

Pushing the implications of automatism to an extreme, Theophrastus fills the planet with responsive mechanical beings that exercise cognitive capacities unconsciously, but are not endowed with the senses that Lewes reserves for organisms. Instead, these are

The coming race will be, in other words, unconscious automata, who mechanically continue to produce the things that consciousness values in a world empty of mind.

In an Oscar Wilde-like reversal, the narrator denies at the end of the piece that he accepts the reality of the vision he has offered, claiming that it is only one of “my melancholy fancies,” emerging from ideas “flying about in the air like other germs.”⁷⁴ His explanation alludes to controversies surrounding germ theory, which had only recently begun to be accepted by the medical community, after vociferous resistance. The reference may work to suggest, as some were then arguing in more than a metaphorical sense, that contagious ideas can infect the mind. Yet it could also imply, despite the narrator’s turnabout, that the automatist account might also in time be accepted. Further, there is something so compelling in George Eliot’s descriptions of the pain of consciousness that we might see in this text, beyond her contributions to the disputes on automatism, an Eliot who does appreciate the benefits of escaping conscious experience. Eliot, as we know, felt intensely. She suffered from severe depression as well as severe headaches, emotional and physical pain. While she was working on Theophrastus Such, Lewes was increasingly ill and was to die before the book’s publication. Eliot may have entertained the idea at times that sentience was more of a burden than a wonder. In an unpublished (and undated, but probably 1874) poem, Eliot writes about the illusions of consciousness, as she explores the idea that there is no reality to the “I”: “Your subject, self, or self-assertive ‘I’/ Turns nought but object, melts to molecules,” she writes, endorsing the Huxleyan view she elsewhere rejects.⁷⁵ Abandoning the confidence expressed in her letter, she concedes that the “atom-whirl” (l. 7) of “consciousness” (l. 18) is in fact no more than “a bubble world” of “sense, pleasure, pain” (l. 19) and a “[p]hantasmal flux of moments” (l. 21).

Conscious Automatism and Aesthetics

Wherever Eliot ultimately stood on the question of the causal efficacy of consciousness, she dramatizes it in a way that forcefully points toward the consequences that an epiphenomenal view has for fiction. Eliot famously wrote that “the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures.”⁷⁶ What happens to that claim if aesthetic works have no causal power, and if “imaginings” and “feelings” are impotent by-products of mechanical processes?

As noted, the public debates on conscious automatism often focused on such questions of creativity and aesthetics. Opponents insisted that books matter, that they persuade, that they transfer ideas between minds and cause things to happen. Those who resisted conscious automatism believed that Huxley’s theory put us on a slippery slope to the total expulsion of subjectivity. Butler had charged that current science wanted to completely “eliminate mind,” and in an article on the new psychology, Ward famously wrote that: “It is not so long since the world was shocked… about a psychology without a soul, but the ‘modern’ psychology is a psychology without even consciousness.”⁷⁷ Regarding consciousness as an epiphenomenon can be seen as a step on the way to a thorough behaviorism. By 1913 John Watson proposed in his behaviorist manifesto that psychologists study behavior, not consciousness.

This polemic stands behind the literary writing of the late Victorian period. Is consciousness nothing? Is volition illusory? Or, is consciousness almost everything? One might expect Huxley’s theory to result in fiction’s turn to externalist representations of mind, and to the kind of literary determinism associated with Zola, with its focus on physiology, heredity, and environment. Late Victorian literature did have a brief flirtation with those modes. But, as I see it, what Huxley’s theory did was to turn consciousness over to literature, encouraging its increased focus on the internal workings of an individual mind – George Eliot’s “flux of moments” – as it progressed into a full-blown stream of consciousness.⁷⁸ As Virginia Woolf wrote: “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.”⁷⁹ Huxley, in fact, made claims that sound surprisingly close to Woolf’s. In an 1887 address to the Royal Academy on “The Interests of Science and Literature,” he described the desire “to say to the moment, ‘Stop,’ and to arrest in forms intelligible by the feeling or by the intellect the different phases of that astonishing and continually marvellous flux of phenomena which passes before the eyes.”⁸⁰ Compare Lily’s well-known realization in To the Lighthouse:

Huxley’s views ultimately contributed to a turn away from a thoroughgoing scientific approach to mind. His aim was to leave consciousness outside of the explanatory reach of science. “I cannot conceive,” he wrote, “how the phenomena of consciousness, as such and apart from the physical process by which they are called into existence, are to be brought within the bounds of physical science.”⁸² James reads Huxley’s theory as an attempt to escape from feeling: “In a word, feeling constitutes the ‘unscientific’ half of existence, and any one who enjoys calling himself a ‘scientist’ will be too happy to purchase” a single set of terms for science “at the slight cost of admitting a dualism which, in the same breath that it allows to mind an independent status of being, banishes it to the limbo of causal inertness, from whence no intrusion or interruption on its part need ever be feared.”⁸³ Like Butler, James suggests that Huxley’s preservation of a small place for subjectivity was only a first step in expelling it entirely. As he was later to write in the chapter on “The Automaton-Theory” in his Psychology (1890), Huxley’s theory sought to “turn consciousness out of the door as a superfluity.”⁸⁴ Ed Block, writing in the late twentieth century, made an even stronger claim, charging that “Huxley hunts consciousness into a corner and claims to have defeated and obliterated the self.”⁸⁵

Huxley did not banish consciousness. Instead, his dualist account allowed consciousness to retain the special place it always had in any humanist or religious world view. Huxley gave consciousness to aesthetics, to literature. In an 1856 paper on natural history, Huxley had written, “living nature is not a mechanism but a poem,” and aspects of that view were retained in his later thought.⁸⁶ As Huxley writes in “On Science and Art in Relation to Education” (1882): “All the subjects of our thoughts … may be classified under one of two heads – as either within the province of the intellect, something that can be put into propositions and affirmed or denied; or as within the province of feeling … called the aesthetic side of our nature and which can neither be proved nor disproved, but only felt.”⁸⁷ Rather than eliminating consciousness, Huxley attempted, while admitting the truth of recent science, to carve out a space where feeling and aesthetics could be free from the encroachments of science. He wrote in “Science and Morals” (1886) in response to Lilly’s virulent attack on his theory: “Now physical science may and probably will, some day, enable our posterity to set forth the exact physical concomitants and conditions of the strange rapture of beauty. But if ever that day arrives, the rapture will remain, just as it is now, outside and beyond the physical world; and, even in the mental world, something superadded to mere sensation.”⁸⁸ Huxley’s view was not really so far from Eliot’s. In the same article, he wrote that beyond matter and force, it seemed to him “pretty plain that there is a third thing in the universe, to wit, consciousness” (794). When Charles Dickens included among the false book backs he commissioned for his Gadshill study one with the title “The Collected Poems of T. H. Huxley,” he no doubt meant to imply that scientific naturalism was disenchanting the world, rendering it a Gradgrindian fact mill, stealing from it its poetry, as Carlyle had asserted many years earlier in his denunciation of his “Mechanical age.”⁸⁹

I think Dickens and James both got it wrong. Darwin did not accept the conscious automaton theory; in a letter of 1882, he wrote regarding Huxley’s essay: “That on automatism is wonderfully interesting; more is the pity, say I, for if I were as well armed as Huxley I would challenge him to a duel on this subject.”⁹⁰ Nevertheless, Darwin came closer to understanding what Huxley was up to than many others. The final letter that Darwin’s son included in his collection of his father’s correspondence is one that Darwin sent to Huxley. Darwin was very ill, suffering from heart disease, and Huxley sought to arrange better care for him. Shortly before his death, in a letter that is as forceful and moving a representation of human consciousness as that in any novel, Darwin wrote to Huxley: “Once again accept my cordial thanks, my dear old friend. I wish to God that there were more automata in the world like you.”⁹¹

The figures who populate James Thomson’s “The City of Dreadful Night” (1874) shuffle mechanically through the city’s streets, mired in a condition that the poem famously compares to the continued functioning of a defaced timepiece:

Here and elsewhere in the poem, the parallels between Thomson’s vision of mechanical life and the theory of conscious automatism that Thomas Huxley would most fully articulate later the same year are striking, but those parallels have largely been overlooked in the criticism of “The City of Dreadful Night.”² Instead, knowing Thomson’s religious skepticism, and considering the periodical in which the poem was first serialized – the secularist National Reformer – critics have tended to read the purposeless wandering of the figures in “The City of Dreadful Night” as simply one means among many by which Thomson articulates his dreary atheistic vision. When critics have acknowledged Thomson’s interventions in scientific debate at all, they have tended to focus narrowly on his thinking about evolution, but Thomson was a far more serious reader of and commenter upon the scientific controversies of the 1860s and 1870s than such arguments suggest. This chapter aims to return “The City of Dreadful Night” to the midst of the science of those decades, focusing especially on the debates then raging about the extent and the implications of psychological automatism. In context, as the following pages will show, “The City of Dreadful Night” emerges as a poem that engages thoroughly and intelligently with ideas like Huxley’s conscious automatism and the theories of matter and energy that undergirded Huxley’s psychological thinking.

But the depiction of automatic life that Thomson offers in “The City of Dreadful Night” goes further than Huxley himself was willing to do. While Huxley argued that his theory retained space for purposive actions, merely shifting such purpose from consciousness to the body, Thomson puts forth a bleaker vision: more than merely devoid of purpose, Thomson’s figures are without the capacity to execute a purpose. Yet although Thomson is insistent on these figures’ lack of will, he does not deprive them of consciousness. Instead, Thomson puts forth a dualist theory of mind, but the minds to which the poem grants us access reveal these figures to be tormented by consciousness; while Huxley allowed for the feeling of volition, positioning that feeling as an effect rather than the cause of physical changes, Thomson’s figures are denied such illusions, forced to watch impotently while the real work of life goes on outside their control. Like Huxley, Thomson explains this impotence in the poem by invoking the “universal laws” (XIV.61) of physics, those laws that, as John Tyndall would put it that summer in his “Belfast Address,” “[bind] nature fast in fate.”³ Thomson, in short, insists upon the pessimistic conclusion to which religious readers feared Huxley’s theory of conscious automatism must inevitably lead: an impotent self inhabiting a godless world.

Yet material theories like Huxley’s were not the last word on psychological automatism in the 1870s. Restoring the poem to the midst of that decade’s debates about automatism – and especially setting it alongside the work of the man who sought most vociferously to counter theories like Huxley’s, William Carpenter – casts the poem in a surprising light, revealing hints of a much more complicated picture of the body’s (and mind’s) capacity to go on automatically. In this chapter’s final pages, I unearth echoes of Carpenter’s work in Thomson’s poem; while these parallels are surely not indicative of any wavering on Thomson’s part, they nevertheless destabilize his pessimistic take on automatism in telling ways. At a minimum, such moments allow this chapter to call attention to the variety of constructions of automatism in Victorian psychological writing. In this way, this chapter will offer a necessary supplement to the physiological turn in much recent criticism of Victorian poetry, uncovering the traces of immaterial constructions of the mind in even that poetry seemingly most committed to establishing the material basis of mental life.

James Thomson, Automatism, and Scientific Naturalism

Although he had discussed automatism in earlier work – work that predated “The City of Dreadful Night” – Huxley’s fullest (and most notorious) articulation of his theory of conscious automatism came at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Belfast in August 1874, in a lecture that he subsequently published in three periodicals as “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and Its History” (1874).⁴ Building on the increasing amount of our bodily and mental activity that psychophysiologists had ceded to the reflex function, Huxley insists in that essay upon the material basis of consciousness, writing that “[i]t is experimentally demonstrable … that a mode of motion of the nervous system is the immediate antecedent of a state of consciousness.”⁵ That is to say that, for Huxley, our bodies are the source of thought and action; consciousness comes after the molecular “mode of motion” in our bodies. Consciousness, then, as Huxley puts it in perhaps the essay’s most controversial image, is as powerless to control the working of the body “as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery.”⁶

To justify such a thoroughgoing denial of the efficacy of volition, Huxley turns to the latest theorizing in the physical sciences:

While Huxley asserts here that, in a sense, we remain free to “do as we like,” that claim is undercut by his implicit invocation of the first law of thermodynamics, the conservation of energy, in his description of the chain of cause and effect. Since the universe constitutes a closed energy system, in which energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it would be impossible for an entity like that immaterial will on which more conservative theorists insisted to interfere in the “unbroken continuity” of material events. Writing in the next issue of the Fortnightly Review, W. K. Clifford makes this point explicit, citing “the law of the conservation of energy” to argue that no energy is added between the moment a stimulus affects our senses and our subsequent response.⁸

Huxley himself anticipated the criticism his theory would elicit: the religious, he notes, will insist that the consequences of his theory “are fatalism, materialism, and atheism.”⁹ These were charges that Huxley denied, but to Christian ears Huxley’s assault on volition must have dire consequences, seeming to eliminate the possibility of moral action. As more than one historian of science has noted, the will had also become by the 1870s a last bulwark for conservative theorists; it seemed to stand in their work as nearly synonymous with the immaterial and immortal soul.¹⁰ Strictly speaking, Huxley’s theory preserved the dualism on which conservative theorists insisted, as I discuss later in this chapter, but it did so in ways that directly challenged such a conflation of consciousness and soul, rendering the mind largely superfluous and making it wholly a product of molecular action in the nerves and brain.

Thomson was keenly interested in automatic action and its implications for free will, an interest that was surely fueled by his own experience of automatic states – the half-light of his bouts of insomnia, or the habitual drunkenness that plagued his later years. Certainly Thomson reaches for the language of automatism to describe his own suffering in these and related states. In his prose phantasy “A Lady of Sorrow” (1867), for example – which, as Thomson’s friend and editor Bertram Dobell notes, charts Thomson’s own grief at the death of the teenage girl Thomson tended to treat as the angelic love of his life, Matilda Weller¹¹ – Thomson figures the condition into which the “mighty enchantress” Sorrow threw him after that loss in mechanical terms: “As I passed daily through the streets, my eyes must have pictured the buildings and the people, my ears must have vibrated to the roar of the vehicles; but my inward vision was fixed the while on her, my inward ear was attentive to her voice alone.”¹² Elsewhere he even more explicitly draws upon the language of automatism to describe this state, insisting both on a rigid division between body and mind and on the body’s ability to function on its own: he writes how, when first visited by the lady of the title, “my spirit was stunned and lay as dead in the body mechanically alive.”¹³

Yet to limit Thomson’s interest in automatic states to concern with his own maladies is to risk missing the breadth of his engagement with the phenomena. One of Thomson’s more remarkable considerations of the range of such states is the long article he published in 1876 – nearly twenty years after the book’s publication – on Garth Wilkinson’s Improvisations from the Spirit (1857), a collection of automatic poetry.¹⁴ Thomson rejects Wilkinson’s mystical explanation of the origins of his poetry:

Thomson, that is, positions such states as ecstasy and trance on a continuum with the more mundane conditions of our existence, generalizing automatism in ways similar to Huxley’s theory; even the most typical forms of consciousness, he thereby implies, are to be understood as fundamentally automatic. His insistence on a naturalist explanation for the phenomenon to which Wilkinson credits his poems is typical of his approach to such matters; what is surprising here is Thomson’s dismissal of science’s efforts to explain these states, a dismissal that threatens to obscure how widely read he was in the work of scientific naturalists like Huxley.

Certainly Thomson wrote frequently in the pages of The National Reformer about Huxley, John Tyndall, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, expressing full-throated support for their efforts to disprove such supernaturalism as Wilkinson’s. Thomson’s interest in evolution is well known, but most significant for my own argument are Thomson’s frequent discussions in his journalism of Tyndall’s notorious “Belfast Address,” which was given at the same BAAS conference as Huxley’s automatism lecture.¹⁶ Thomson dedicates his August 30, 1874, “Jottings” column in The National Reformer to a detailed discussion of Tyndall’s argument, and the aspects on which he chooses to focus are revealing. He quotes Tyndall’s description of the conservation of energy as “one of the great generalisation[s] reached in our day,” repeating Tyndall’s tracing of the origins of that theory to the “constancy and indestructibility of matter,” a connection that is key to “The City of Dreadful Night,” as I explain later in this chapter.¹⁷ Equally important in the passage that Thomson quotes is Tyndall’s discussion of the implications of the conservation of energy, that it

Although he does not describe Huxley’s application of these ideas to the immaterial will, Thomson does turn to mental science, writing that “[w]ith the mass of materials furnished by the physicist and physiologist in his hands, Mr. Spencer twenty years ago sought to graft upon this basis a system of psychology.”¹⁹

While conservative readers balked at what they saw as the inevitable consequences of theories of conscious automatism like Huxley’s, Thomson, himself by the 1870s a confirmed pessimist and atheist, embraced those consequences. Thomson – a posthumous collection of whose essays was aptly titled Satires and Profanities (1884) – seemed never to tire of baiting the religious; Isobel Armstrong justly describes him as “deliberately blasphemous” in his writing.²⁰ And so, when he returned to Tyndall’s “Belfast Address” in his November 15, 1874, “Jottings” column, Thomson complained that Tyndall was not willing to confront the religious aggressively enough, lamenting what he described as Tyndall’s “repudiation” of atheism after Belfast.²¹ But disappointed as he was by Tyndall’s refusal to embrace what seemed like the necessary implications of his thinking, Thomson claims in that column to sympathize with what he figures as Tyndall’s clinging to the old faith, writing, “Who does not know intelligent and conscientious men whose creed has little by little yielded up all its life of brain and heart, and who yet cling to the mummy with desperate self-delusion rather than be left alone in the world?”²² In “The City of Dreadful Night,” however, Thomson avoided Tyndall’s – and Huxley’s – error, refusing to cling to the similarly desiccated corpse of volition in his vision of mechanical life.

Mechanical Life in “The City of Dreadful Night”

Considering Thomson’s insistence on going further than even Tyndall was publicly willing to do, it is hardly a surprise that “The City of Dreadful Night” offers the most troubling possible version of something very much like Huxley’s conscious automatism. While Huxley himself sought to fend off charges of materialism, fatalism, and atheism, that is, Thomson embraces such charges, painting the figures who trudge through the poem as mere clockwork, utterly devoid of will. Thomson establishes this trance-like impotence in the poem’s first section:

The rhyme of “wander” and “ponder” in lines 54 and 55 cements the connection between action and thought – both are aimless and abstracted, with the slack final syllables of the feminine rhyme perhaps underscoring their lack of purposeful vigor – just as that rhyme seems to situate the mental and the physical on a single plane. Like the figure of the defaced watch with which I began – a figure offered by a character who himself mechanically and endlessly retraces his steps, ever revisiting the sites at which Faith, Love, and Hope died – these “spectral wanderers” (XIV.27) trudge on without aim or purpose, as numerous critics have noted.²³ Volition is such an oddity in this city that the speaker follows the source of the defaced timepiece image merely “[b]ecause he seemed to walk with an intent” (II.1). If the denizens of the city occasionally interrupt the abstracted murmurs that constitute the majority of their speech by giving in “[t]o frenzy which must rave” (I.68), the force of that line’s “must,” it seems to me, is to position even such outbursts as unwilled, moments in which language itself overflows its bounds. Those who rave, in other words, appear like the vessels through which language energetically expresses itself, like mere bodies through which larger forces flow, a point to which I will return later in this chapter. It is fitting, then, that the reviewer in the Athenæum accuses Thomson of a similarly automatic and undisciplined ejaculation, drawing upon the language of energy to make the point: “The poet feels within himself an energy which demands expression, but the very energy which, properly directed, results in excellent work will often produce an impatient restlessness which prevents him from sitting down calmly to reflect upon anything whatever. He seizes – if not at haphazard, at least without duly considering it – upon the first striking subject that presents itself.”²⁴

But if Thomson’s figures – like Thomson himself – move, even speak, without will, the poem makes clear that some part of them remains more lucid than their dazed actions might suggest, a detail expressed through the distinction Thomson consistently draws between surface and depth, as in Section XI:

What is essential in this stanza’s insistence on the simultaneous insanity and rationality of the city’s wanderers, at least so far as the poem’s engagement with theories of automatism is concerned, is the way it erects a seemingly insuperable barrier between rational mind and uncontrollable – “insane” – body. The wanderers are in possession of their faculties, but that perfect reason remains barricaded in the brain, incapable of exerting its will.²⁵ This is a conundrum toward which Thomson also gestures in his notebook, where he seems to multiply such divisions:

Thomson here reverses his usual figure, aligning consciousness with the outer self that lives and works – once again placing thought and action on the same mechanical level – and shifting the adjective “cold” to the part of himself from which his consciousness is cut off. But this passage’s insistence on a “disabling separation” between the inner and outer selves nevertheless resonates with the division Thomson describes in “The City of Dreadful Night,” the sense of consciousness trapped in the flesh, trailed along by the body yet powerless to impose its will. It is worth recalling here Suzy Anger’s point that Huxley’s theory of conscious automatism “is a dualist conception of mind, but one that limits consciousness to registering the private, the ‘what it feels like to me’”;²⁷ for Thomson, however, this state of impotent awareness shades into nightmare. Hence in “The City of Dreadful Night” Thomson traces the “insanity” of the city’s wretches to [t]he “dreadful strain / Of thought and consciousness which never ceases” (I.74–5), what the poem elsewhere describes as “[a]n everlasting conscious inanition” (XIII.40). Indeed, the pain of an impotent consciousness is such that the greatest blessing the poem can offer, its “[o]ne anodyne for torture and despair” (I.80), is “[t]he certitude of Death” (I.81), “[t]hat draught whose slumber nothing can bereave” (I.84).

If Thomson’s recourse to the language of insanity risks pathologizing automatism, limiting it to the sort of abnormal conditions – insomnia, alcoholism – that plagued Thomson himself, any hope that impotence might be a discrete condition, a local ailment from which only the nighttime population of this city suffers, is quickly dashed. For in spelling out the logic of the impotence at the poem’s heart, Thomson – like Huxley – turns to the theories of energy and matter that, later that year, Tyndall would hail as the great generalizations of the day.²⁸ The mechanical action on which I have been focusing in the poem, after all, is not uniquely human but is replicated in the action of the unconscious and non-sentient world, even comes to stand as merely a single form of that universal action, as in the linguistic outbursts I described earlier in this chapter. As one of the two speakers overheard on the river-walk in Section VIII insists, “The world rolls round for ever like a mill; / It grinds out death and life and good and ill; / It has no purpose, heart or mind or will” (VIII.36–8); the cyclicality of this image, as numerous critics have noted, parallels the circular paths traced by the city’s residents.²⁹ My point is that the human wandering this poem depicts finally comes into focus as but one part of the same flow of matter and energy, alike subject to what the preacher in Section XIV calls “the universal laws, / Which never had for man a special clause / Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate” (XIV.61–3). The lines from Section VIII that I quoted earlier in this paragraph refuse to trace the universe’s grinding cyclicality to heart or mind or will, but that absence ultimately makes no difference to the course of material events. Walled off from the unbroken chain of material cause and effect, as Huxley would put it, the minds that we possess are unable to alter what the preacher of Section XIV later labels “Necessity Supreme” (XIV.75), a title that seems to amount to much the same thing as Tyndall’s claim in the “Belfast Address” that the first law of thermodynamics “binds nature fast in fate.”³⁰ In the poem, the preacher’s subsequent assertion that even our births are bound by the physical laws of the universe works to similar effect, describing how the play of “forces” – a telling choice of words – shapes our lives: “If one is born a certain day on earth, / All times and forces tended to that birth, / Not all the world could change or hinder it” (XIV.70–2).³¹

As Thomson would note in his discussion of the “Belfast Address” later in 1874, as I described earlier in this chapter, Tyndall traced the origins of the theory of the conservation of energy to the recognition of the indestructability of matter; it was this indestructibility, in Tyndall’s telling, that suggested to scientists the equal impossibility of destroying or creating energy.³² Thomson anticipates this connection between atoms and energy in “The City of Dreadful Night,” seeming to position the circulation of atomic matter – its unending movement from one form to another – as the ultimate engine driving the wandering of the poem’s figures.³³ Indeed, the poem grants these atoms an agency it denies its human wanderers, as in the preacher’s evolutionary claim that “[a]ll substance lives and struggles evermore / Through countless shapes continually at war, / By countless interactions interknit” (XIV.67–9). Earlier in Section XIV Thomson is more precise about the status of the substance he names here, as in the way the preacher guarantees the peaceful oblivion of death by explaining the ultimate fate of our bodies: “Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh, / Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh / In earth, air, water, plants, and other men” (XIV.52–4). The consequence of such claims, I am suggesting, is ultimately to reduce all motion to this atomic level, for the poem insists in these passages on even human life as but another manifestation of matter’s movement. Conscious or not, we are fundamentally indistinguishable from earth, air, water, plants.³⁴ This point is only reinforced by Thomson’s oft-noted tendency to describe the city as a necropolis, again rendering the wandering this poem describes as merely a different view of the circulation of dead matter.

“A Skilful Rider”: Dualism, Will, and Automatic Action

But while Thomson seems intent in “The City of Dreadful Night” on following automatism to what he implies are its inevitable consequences – the materialism, fatalism, and atheism with which Huxley knew he would be charged – it remained clear to other Victorian observers that none of these were necessary consequences of automatism itself. Indeed, the work of another key theorist of psychological automatism, William Carpenter, also resonates in compelling ways with Thomson’s poem, as different as the beliefs of the two men were.³⁵ In his Principles of Mental Physiology (1874) – as well as a series of essays he published in the 1870s – Carpenter emerged as perhaps the strongest voice for an orthodox dualist psychology against Huxley’s theory of conscious automatism. Carpenter himself – along with Thomas Laycock – had been central in extending the reflex function to the cerebrum, theorizing what he labeled “unconscious cerebration.” But while Carpenter was willing to acknowledge the mind’s ability to function automatically, he continued to argue for the possibility of conscious volition, insisting upon an immaterial will’s ability to control the automatic mechanisms of the body.³⁶

In his “On the Doctrine of Human Automatism” (1876), for example, Carpenter notes that many of the automatic actions to which Huxley points in his essay as evidence for human automatism are acquired actions, at least initially dependent for their development on the exercise of the will: in human beings, he suggests, “the higher forms of activity can only be excited in the first instance through the consciousness, though they too may become automatic by frequent repetition”³⁷ The surest proof of the freedom of our wills, for Carpenter, is the evidence of our own consciousness: “[I]f I assert, on the basis of every-day experience, that my conscious Ego can direct my automaton to execute this movement, it is surely no answer to say that because my automaton was competent to do it for itself, therefore my conscious Ego really had nothing to do with it.”³⁸

To this point, it is tempting to conclude that Carpenter’s discussion of automatism has little in common with the nightmare vision presented in Thomson’s poem. After all, part of the torment of consciousness in “The City of Dreadful Night” is the evidence it provides us of the impotence of our wills, of the impossibility of our exerting any power over ourselves or the world around us. But the vehicle – “Perchance it is a Fate-appointed hearse” (IX.16) – that appears in Section IX of the poem seems to point directly to Carpenter:

Repeatedly in his psychological work, Carpenter turns to the similar figure of horse and rider to illustrate the will’s capacity to play upon the body’s automatic functions. In Principles of Mental Physiology, for example, he writes that “the relation between the Automatic activity of the body, and the Volitional direction by which it is utilized and directed, may be compared to the independent locomotive power of a horse under the guidance and control of a skilful rider.”³⁹

Whether or not the drudges of Section IX in “The City of Dreadful Night” are skillful is unclear; they are certainly incapacitated, either fully unconscious or three parts of the way there. Yet in this detail, too, Thomson echoes Carpenter, for Carpenter expands the analogy to describe our own abstracted actions: Carpenter writes, “[T]he horse will quietly find his way home, whilst his rider, wrapped in a profound reverie, entirely ceases to guide him; just as our own legs carry us along a course which habit has made familiar, while our Mind is engaged only upon its own operations, and our Will is altogether in abeyance.”⁴⁰ Indeed, Carpenter adds later in Principles of Mental Physiology that our body’s ability to find its way without the guidance of the will is evidence of the patient energy previously exerted by the will in forming habits:

But what is perhaps most significant in Carpenter’s frequent returns to this figure is the way he finally uses it in “On the Doctrine of Human Automatism” to counter the scientific naturalists’ insistence that the conservation of energy rendered impossible a self-directing will. After all, the rider does not create the energy of the horse, but merely directs it: “[J]ust as a rider utilizes and directs the motor energy of his horse, so, I maintain, does the mind of man utilize and direct (within certain limits) the physical energy of his body, turning this to account not only in muscular movement, but also in those cerebral changes which serve as the bases of further mental operations.”⁴²

Such connections become all the more significant in light of the image with which “The City of Dreadful Night” closes, Thomson’s description of Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia, a figure, it is worth noting, whom Thomson describes as being “[s]ustained by her indomitable will” (XXI.52). Even the weak gain something from looking upon her:

The ambiguity of this image, the way it threatens to run counter to all in the poem that has come before, is underscored by the many readers who, despite the poem’s conclusion with the word “despair,” have found something hopeful or comforting in it.⁴³ After all, however inert the exercise of her will (although we are told that “she works on still” [XXI.50]), the figure of Melencolia seems to hint at possibilities that Thomson has elsewhere been at pains to deny. Thomson is quick to try to close down any hope Melencolia might arouse, insisting that she shows “[t]hat all is vanity and nothingness” (XXI.70); but in light of the poem’s echoes of Carpenter’s images of a volition that is only temporarily in abeyance, the will that Thomson grants Melencolia threatens to destabilize the poem’s insistence on our impotence.

Nor is Thomson’s depiction of the unconscious riders the only way in which “The City of Dreadful Night” seems to echo Carpenter’s more conservative theory of psychological automatism. Carpenter’s position seems equally to be captured in a figure for which Thomson often reached to defend his pessimistic outlook. As critics have frequently recounted, after Thomson sent a copy of the poem to George Eliot, she responded in a May 1874 letter by expressing her hope that “an intellect informed by so much passionate energy as yours will soon give us more heroic strains with a wider embrace of human fellowship in them.”⁴⁴ Thomson replied by acknowledging the limits of his own poetic vision: “I am aware that the truth of midnight does not exclude the truth of noonday, though one’s nature may lead him to dwell in the former rather than the latter.”⁴⁵ Significantly, this was a description of perspectival truth that Thomson had used before in print. Positioning himself as merely the editor of “A Lady of Sorrow,” Thomson there asks whether the composition that follows is “true in relation to the world and general life”:

The image of the double-sided coin on which Thomson here finally settles parallels a metaphor that appears repeatedly in the psychological literature, a metaphor to which Carpenter often turned to refute reductionist psychophysiological constructions of mind like Huxley’s. Carpenter uses it in Principles of Mental Physiology, for example, to describe the controversies between materialists and “spiritualists” about the nature of mind: these controversies, Carpenter insists, are “almost as absurd as that mortal contest, which (as fable tells us) was once carried on by two knights respecting the material of a shield seen by them from opposite sides, the one maintaining it to be made of gold, the other of silver, and each proving to be in the right as regarded the half seen by himself.”⁴⁷

Thomson, of course, does not evoke the figure of the two-sided coin explicitly in “The City of Dreadful Night,” but more than one critic has noted the limitations of the poem’s perspective. Its very title situates its vision as merely one half of the story, hinting at a daytime vision that would surely look very different. As I have discussed, Thomson’s insistence on “universal laws” is aimed at forestalling such a reading, is aimed at generalizing his vision, but it should nevertheless come as no surprise that at least one contemporary reviewer of Thomson’s poetry reached for a closely related image to the double-sided shield to blunt the edges of Thomson’s pessimism. Amy Levy writes of Thomson:

Others, if they did not employ the same metaphor, made much the same point, refusing Thomson the universality he claimed for his necessitarian vision. The title of the review of Thomson’s first two volumes of poetry in The London Quarterly Review – “Optimist and Pessimist Poetry” – equally positions Thomson’s perspective as merely one possible approach, and not the right one: that reviewer insists, “Of course we start from the basis that pessimism is heresy.”⁴⁹ The review in the Athenæum, meanwhile, goes so far as to describe the poem as “a bitter satire upon atheism,” suggesting that Thomson “has simply written ‘dreadful’ poetry because just now it is the fashion to be dreadful.”⁵⁰

However bleak Thomson’s vision in “The City of Dreadful Night,” that is, praise of the poem often hinged on readers’ ability to cordon off or rationalize away its pessimism. One of my points in this chapter has concerned the part that theories of psychological automatism could play in such rationalizations. While Thomson’s insistence on undergirding his dreary vision with the latest psychological thinking about the rigid division between our bodies and our minds allowed him to deny us an efficacious will, that psychological context simultaneously provided Victorian readers with possibilities for reading against the poem’s grain. That even as unrelenting a pessimist as Thomson could be so consistently defanged by readers and reviewers surely has the potential to tell us a great deal about the way both poetry and psychological writing were understood – and misunderstood – in the period, as I have argued elsewhere.⁵¹ But while considerable critical attention has been paid in recent years to tracing the way Victorian poetry engaged with and contributed to the development of new physiological theories of mind, even if Thomson’s part in those engagements has been largely overlooked, such work has often tended to have too little to say about the important role that conservative theories like Carpenter’s continued to play in such conversations.⁵² My focus here has been on the contested status of psychological automatism, of course: if in Huxley’s notorious argument such phenomena seemed to confirm conservative fears about materialist assaults on the possibility of agency and on the existence of anything beyond the body, I have sought to show that it bears keeping in mind that Huxley’s was far from the only theory of automatism on offer. Just as more conservative readers were able to reconcile Thomson’s pessimism with their own beliefs, even as potentially troubling a phenomenon as our body’s capacity to act without – even despite – our wills could be made to fit alongside an abiding faith in that which transcended matter and forestalled despair.

In the Private Papers of 1903, Henry Ryecroft, a spokesperson for his creator, George Gissing, lamented the bygone age of literary genius, when Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot had been able to work unconstrained by market pressures. The “big, blusterous, genial brute” Anthony Trollope belonged to this generation as well but constituted an exception, Ryecroft thought, because his voluminous writings suggested that he could have withstood the stresses of the advanced technological era in publishing.¹ He was the professional writer before his time: somewhere between a “mere cosmic force,” as another of Gissing’s spokespersons, Jasper Milvain, described genius, and its opposite, a “skilful tradesman.”² As readers of Victorian fiction know, the pathos of New Grub Street reflects a commonplace of the late nineteenth century: the gap between activity that was mental and, therefore, quintessentially human, and motor movements that were automatic and approximated the inhuman rate of production set by mechanical models. None but a hack writer, a kind of human automaton, could approach such a standard, the novel suggests. Trollope’s accomplishments (forty-seven novels, in addition to many short stories and other works of prose) supported this view, it seemed, for just months after the writer’s death in 1882, An Autobiography (1883) presented a kind of caricature of efficiency: a “man with a watch before his eyes, penning exactly so many words every quarter of an hour,” as Ryecroft describes him.³ Trollope’s name suffered a writer’s condign punishment for these disclosures. The author “did himself no good with the public or the critics by the quaint frankness of his avowals in his Autobiography,” remarked George Saintsbury in 1895. His work is “every-day, commonplace, and even not infrequently vulgar (three things that great art never is).”⁴

An Autobiography’s disclosures continued to trouble Trollope’s reputation in the twentieth century when, during the ascendancy of literary modernisms, critics questioned his creativity, focusing on two traits that undermined the prevailing idea of the artist as an originator of prestige products. The first I have already introduced: Based on the author’s own descriptions of his writing habits, Trollope was viewed as inordinately prolific and indefatigable, functioning primarily not through a creative consciousness but through motor automatisms. This behavioral trait was confirmed by a second one: the quality of the work itself, namely its padding. The novels were notorious for a particular kind of verbosity marked by repeated exposition and slowly paced plots. Of course, this feature had hardly been idiosyncratic in the age of serialization and multivolume works marketed for the circulating libraries, and one might declare that Victorian prolixity had simply fallen out of fashion by the early twentieth century and leave it at that. But my point is that as a result of disclosures in An Autobiography, productivity was linked to padding; that is, a behavioral feature was seen as a contributing cause of a literary one. The latter, as a result, assumed a psychological dimension.

With this in mind, and in light of the features that discouraged the view of Trollope as creative in an honorific sense, I show in the pages ahead how professional readers into the mid-twentieth century implicitly evaluated the writer against two invidious distinctions that informed the seemingly separate domain of behavioral psychology. The first of the two was introspection versus habit; the second was of remote versus relatively inhibited association. The first term of each pair was linked to creativity – and was implicitly mentalistic – while the second was seen as somatic, an automatism approaching the mechanical.

Indefatigable Trollope

Even before An Autobiography appeared, Trollope’s rate of production had aroused suspicions in his readers. Trollope “writes too much to be always at his best,” declared Margaret Oliphant, in an overview of his work in 1867 for Blackwood’s Magazine.⁵ In a similar retrospective for the Edinburgh Review a decade later, Alexander Innes Shand speculated, “[T]here must obviously be a good deal of the mechanical about his assiduous literary toils, since he has been in the habit of delivering a regular supply of his work with the most methodical precision.”⁶ Trollope was frequently compared with other novelists whose work had nothing in common with his other than its quantity and regular appearance. In his unsigned essay, Shand comments that Sir Walter Scott wrote The Antiquary “with the ease of a clerk or a copying machine.”⁷ As these comments indicate, writing too much could also mean writing too regularly, and energetic writers often turned out products with what seemed the continuous precision of mechanical devices.

Some of the most withering criticism in this vein came from the pen of the young Henry James in the July 1883 issue of Century Magazine. Dwelling there on the author’s astonishing output, he concludes that Trollope “published too much; the writing of novels had ended by becoming, with him, a perceptibly mechanical process.”⁸ Unlike the novels of Dickens and Thackeray, his showed no “periods of gestation.” Instead, “[h]e sat down to his theme in a serious, business-like way, with his elbows on the table and his eye occasionally wandering to the clock.”⁹ James had personal knowledge of Trollope’s habits: They once traveled together on a “pitching Cunarder” where Trollope “was able to shut his eyes and ears to the outside” and work daily.¹⁰ This detachment is not depicted as pure mental abstraction, but as a constant calibration of writing to official time, so that words and clocks become synchronized instruments. To James, Trollope is always writing; his novels do not begin in ideas; ideas emerge with – and seem submerged in – production. James could not have read An Autobiography at this point, as it only appeared two months later. All the same, his reaction to Trollope’s productivity is excessive in its revulsion: He brags of not having read all of the novelist’s work. “There came a moment in his vigorous career … a good many years ago … when I renounced the effort to ‘keep up’ with him.”¹¹ He makes this personal confession of flagging energy a declaration of his own humanness: One cannot follow Trollope without reaching mental exhaustion. Trollope’s continuous activity renders attentive reading, which should be an ethical responsibility, null and void: “It ceased to seem obligatory to have read his last story; it ceased soon to be very possible to know which was his last.”¹²

James implies in addition here that writing characterized primarily as motor activity calls for a very different sort of reader than the cerebral kind he exemplifies. As Nicholas Dames has argued in his study of the century’s changing reading practices, the “modern dynamics of continual speed-rate increases” usually associated with the railway and the telegraph also induced a cultural demand for “compositional practice[s] geared toward skimming readers.” In terms of the physiology of optics, the eye became a motor, the reader a reading machine.¹³ Accordingly Trollope, in An Autobiography, imagines the reader as the receptacle complementing his production. Although he frequently worries about producing too much (the specter of a “terrible author” who overwhelmed Paternoster Row with work haunts him), he does not fear being unremembered, for he conjures a reader who runs through his novels just as quickly and in much the same way as he writes them.¹⁴ “As I have myself forgotten what the heroine [of the Vicar of Bullhampton] does and says – except that she tumbles into a ditch – I cannot expect that anyone else should remember her.”¹⁵ The Palliser series will probably not be read “consecutively,” he supposes;¹⁶ and even if it is, readers will not recall the characters from the previous books: “When I remember how many novels I have written, I know that I have no right to expect that above a few of them shall endure even to the second year beyond publication.”¹⁷ The man who never thought much about work until he was doing it did not expect his readers to behave differently, and Trollope’s own reading corresponds in crucial ways to his writing practices. It is as thoughtless and breakneck: “Could I have remembered, as some men do, what I read, I should have been able to call myself an educated man. But that power I have never possessed.”¹⁸ The author’s oblivion, Trollope implies, is the natural outcome of the pace of reading that his writing anticipates. Motor activity emulating a mechanical standard overwhelms and vitiates mental faculties like memory. Henry James could not, and in pride would not, keep up.

In the comments of both James and Trollope, the inverse relation between an (over)active physical capacity – writing – and a frail cerebral capacity – remembering – reveals the extent to which the popular understanding of artistic creativity depended on an antimaterialistic view of thinking, one that eschewed physiology and relied instead on classical tropes of genius as an exclusively mental endowment. On some level, Trollope accepted these assumptions. “I have been told that such appliances [attention to word counts, rates of composition, deadlines, terms of sale] are beneath the notice of a man of genius,” Trollope writes defiantly in An Autobiography. “I have never fancied myself to be [one].”¹⁹ Still, the most productive decade of his extraordinarily active career coincided with early research on genius that defined the concept in terms very favorable to him. In Hereditary Genius (1869), the first psychometric study of what had generally been considered a mental and often mystical condition, he made the cut based on sustained achievement leading to eminence. In the volume, which collected articles written four years earlier in Macmillan’s Magazine, Francis Galton presents a cohort that had “decidedly eminent relations” – blood relatives – who had distinguished themselves “pretty frequently.”²⁰ As an “eminent writer,” Trollope thus appears as a legacy, an “S” (son through the male line) of Frances Trollope, the main entry.²¹ He is the prolific son of his prolific mother. “Those qualities of intellect … which urge and qualify a man to perform acts that lead to reputation”²² – Milvain’s “cosmic force” – were not by themselves sufficient indicators of genius. Natural intellectual abilities had to be harnessed to the capacity or the will to surmount all obstacles, to transcend economic and social conditions that would hinder most others. Genius required, Galton wrote in an influential phrase, a “concrete triple event, of ability combined with zeal and with capacity for hard labour.”²³ So while, according to Trollope (and James), his rate of production guaranteed the obsolescence of his work, to Galton his status as an “eminent” writer and genius rested precisely on these exceptional factors.

Although he evaded defining genius as either mental or physiological, Galton did shift the discussion of it from metaphysics to biology and early development (differences that remain entangled). Moreover (and more pertinent to my argument), Galton conflated the idea of genius with the concept of creativity; the latter had yet to emerge in psychometrics as a distinct behavioral trait.²⁴ Genius could only be proved by “eminence,” that is, a sustained record of generation that – one presumed – was creative. In this light, the absence of any accounts of inspiration in An Autobiography is telling; the narrative explains the author’s eminence without describing periods or moments of creativity. In this work, then, Trollope tacitly accepted the Galtonian concept of genius without entertaining any belief or interest in creativity/inspiration.

In periodic metafictional turns occurring in the novels, however, the author depicted creativity (so to speak, anachronistically) as the epistemological event of genius by using its traditional poetic trope, the invocation to the muse. For example, well into Orley Farm (1862), the narrator pauses for assistance in describing the physical charms of one of the novel’s marriageable heroines, Madeline Staveley: “[T]hat the muses may assist me in my endeavour, teaching my rough hands to draw with some accuracy the delicate lines of female beauty, I now make to them my humble but earnest prayer.”²⁵ An invocation to the muse like this one alluded to the ancient notion of genius as a retractable gift, rather than as the result of sustained activity.²⁶ On a psychological level, it introduced the “period of gestation” that James thought so crucial to creativity; or it signaled the surfacing of unconscious forces already at work. Whether the invocation marked the beginning of consciousness or the end of instinct, it suggested that inspiration was not quite within the writer’s control. As the passage from Orley Farm shows, Trollope did understand the hold that the idea of the individual creative act exerted over the idea of the writer of genius. Predictably, though, his tone is waggish. On this topic, the writers for Macmillans are blunt: “That a novel writer should be unable to write as much or as well on some days as others, and above all that he should be dependent on some word or force called ‘inspiration’ – for this theory of his art Trollope had nothing but scorn.”²⁷

Gissing’s “Ryecroft” thought that An Autobiography had changed the perception of the literary writer and the writing process, for “readers have [since] grown accustomed to revelations of ‘literary’ method, and nothing in that kind can shock them.”²⁸ Offended at first by An Autobiography, Saintsbury reassessed Trollope in the 1920s and, echoing Ryecroft, admitted that once he had become more exposed to the “prolific and professional novelist[s]” of the present era, he could set him alongside other older and equally steady producers like Dickens, Balzac, and George Sand.²⁹ In other words, Saintsbury was able eventually to interpret genius as eminence and thereby affirm the Galtonian view of Trollope. There had always existed assiduous writers, as Saintsbury came to realize. Still, they had not usually published a record of their routines in lieu of a description of their sources of inspiration. For this reason, his use of the category of the professional to rehabilitate the writer had little effect on the scions of James, who associated indefatigability with mental vacancy. An Autobiography thus remained somewhat of a scandal not only because it showed no sign of the furor poeticus described in Plato’s Ion – “the most influential account of the poetic process which has come down to us from antiquity,” observes Penelope Murray³⁰ – but because it omitted describing the writer’s mental process. In 1901 Leslie Stephen’s bland remark captures the general reaction to the writer’s business-like approach: “[I]f inspiration be a daring word, some time must at least be allowed for ideas to ripen and harmonise, and … it may be well to await some overmastering mood, that will not come regularly when an old groom calls you at 5:30 a.m.”³¹

Yet Stephen suspected that the author “was not quite so black as he painted himself” and in his essay poses a crucial question: “What stores … had Trollope to draw upon? He must … like all of us, have had an ‘inner life.’”³² Shortly afterwards he answers his own query by citing An Autobiography’s picture of its author creating his characters while wandering “‘about among the rocks and woods … crying at their grief and laughing at their absurdities.’”³³ “I have been impregnated with my own creations till it has been my only excitement to sit with the pen in my hand, and drive my team before me at as quick a pace as I could make them travel,” Trollope declares in the same passage.³⁴ Stephen was one of several reviewers to paraphrase or quote these statements and mention both the author’s “castle-building” and an “inner life passed in [the] company” of his characters over the span of years.³⁵ Because they separate the inception of the novels from their inscription, the quotations have proved useful to critics, for they have confirmed creativity as a mental activity distinct from the act of writing highlighted in An Autobiography. Yet apart from the passage on “castle-building” and living with his characters, Trollope did not supply ample evidence for a radical division between the inspired formation of character and the continuous composition of his plots. Rather, he hinted at a more simultaneous and systemic process. “I have never found myself thinking much about the work that I had to do till I was doing it,” he discloses in An Autobiography. “I have indeed for many years almost abandoned the effort to think, trusting myself, with the narrowest thread of a plot, to work the matter out when the pen is in my hand.”³⁶ The image of an unthinking author moving pen across paper appeared mechanical – and, to some Victorians, repellently modern.³⁷ In his Preface to the first edition of Poems (1853), Matthew Arnold cites with approval the response of the dramatist Menander who, when asked about the progress of his latest comedy, replied that “he had finished it, not having yet written a single line, because he had constructed the action of it in his mind.” In contrast, a “modern” critic would have directed the ancient to focus on “the brilliant things which arose under his pen as he went along.” Arnold was lamenting the current neglect of architectonicé; but, significantly, he connected its absence to the “modern” way of writing while, and inseparable from, conceiving. Obviously, Arnold was reacting here to the current professionalization of writing: “modern” seems synonymous with journalism or hack work. Thus the creative behavior of Trollope continued to bewilder subsequent generations of readers. Like so many of their Victorian predecessors, and now under the aura of high modernism, they begrudged him honorific literary status because he had represented his illumination as predictable, continuous, and inextricable from the act of writing. To Walter Kendrick (whose book of 1981 about Trollope bears the apt title, The Novel-Machine), An Autobiography reads “like the confessions of an unabashed hack, who ground out fiction by the shelf-full and bragged obnoxiously about how much money he made from it.”³⁸ In the first half of the twentieth century, Trollope’s brand was an embarrassment, remarked James Kincaid in 1977.³⁹ Those who granted Trollope some cerebral involvement still kept his thinking and writing separate, reverting to the premodern model evoked by Arnold. According to David Skilton in 1972, the “two stages of composition for Trollope … are the setting up of a set of characters in a mental world, where they become to him as friends, and the almost mechanical writing-down of the story which springs from his consideration of the characters.”⁴⁰ Once he establishes a “mental model … Trollope sets off writing at high speed, using his characters as the basis of action, and relying very little on a preconceived plot.”⁴¹ To Kendrick as well, Trollope begins with his imagination and a strong feeling about his creations before he writes; it seems that in writing there is no thought, only transcribing.⁴² “Trollope’s theory locates all the novelist’s art and all his joy in a time before any writing is done.”⁴³ Highlighting the contemplative phrase of the writer’s process, he continues: “Before he begins to write, Trollope is very artistic. While writing, however, he is less artistic than any shoemaker.”⁴⁴ Indeed, “when he sits down to write, the novelist becomes his own amanuensis.”⁴⁵ Likewise, J. Hillis Miller notes the “strange thoughtlessness” of Trollope’s method and stresses its pervasive uncertainty.⁴⁶ With yet another sentence in mind from the Autobiography’s Chapter X – “I have rushed at the work as a rider rushes at a fence which he does not see” – he concludes that writing a novel was for Trollope a “desperate act,” a “skilled manipulation of the pen that has become so habitual that the pen no longer has to be consciously directed by the mind.”⁴⁷

Miller’s use of “habitual” in reference to a writer’s creativity would have gratified James and all those who had been suspicious of the rate of Trollope’s composition and the quantitative and physical terms in which the author discussed it in An Autobiography. Generally linked to “custom” in the views of Romantic writers like Coleridge and Wordsworth, habit reputedly distorted and dulled the senses and the imagination.⁴⁸ Theory in the nascent domain of psychology seemed to confirm this view. To Alexander Bain, in The Emotions and the Will (1859), habit was the physiological infrastructure of learning, the end result of a process classed as “secondarily automatic.”⁴⁹ The “remarkable narrowing of the sphere of influence of a sensational or active stimulus” enables us to execute many daily tasks without thinking about them. For this reason, Bain declares, “the comparison between the routine and the reflex operations seems most just and accurate.”⁵⁰ Bain’s work as a whole represented an arm of contemporary psychological science that was dethroning the mind as both the initiator and controller of thought and exploring instead the ways in which mind and body worked in concert. These theories informed representations of mental life in both fiction and poetry, as studies by Anne Stiles and Gregory Tate have shown. They illuminate Trollope’s creative behavior too, eliciting the systemic operation behind Miller’s comments: Trollope could compose quickly because writing had become an acquired experience, a secondary automatism.

Yet this line of thinking also suggests that habit had become entwined with cognitive development. In this light, Trollope’s routine illustrates the mind’s diminishing role in repeated executions and as Bain argues, “the indispensable and perennial character of the [sic] corporeity, in giving origin to moving power.”⁵¹ Still, in 1883, the year An Autobiography reached readers, to conceive of habit not as the polar opposite of creativity, but as integral to creative processes ungoverned by purely mentalistic (i.e., conscious) paradigms of behavior contravened the Romantic cult of genius, a vestige of older religious notions of inspiration.⁵² And as I have just shown, twentieth-century critics continued to cling to abstract notions of creativity – as a completely mental, even metaphysical, event. Just as some Victorians believed that Trollope’s plots involved no thinking, many later readers like Kendrick and Skilton assumed that the invention of characters involved no writing.

The unsubtle separation of mental and physiological activity, of thoughtfulness from habit maintained by Skilton and Kendrick – and even by Miller in his description of thoughtlessness as “strange” – did not reflect more complex views about motor automatisms advanced decades before. Whereas Bain only suggests a link between habit and mental development, in a two-part article published in 1900, Théodule Ribot explores the “profounder elements” underlying conscious invention: “elements of impulsion and inhibition, that is to say, motor elements, since it is in movements that we are seeking the origin of creative imagination.”⁵³ But in their cerebralization of the unconscious, the literary community largely ignored not just the work of psychologists like Ribot, but the roots of Freudian theory in physiology. They would have found support in an essay Trollope published three years after finishing the manuscript of his life story, one that presents a view of creativity reflecting popular Romantic – that is, mentalistic – conventions. Called “A Walk in a Wood” (1879), and first entitled “How We Write our Books,” it describes the writing process as leisurely and unencumbered, and it hinges the creative moment on the possibility of an escape into nature: “The most difficult thing that a man has to do is to think…. My purpose here is to describe how this operation, always so difficult, often so repugnant to us, becomes easier out among the woods … than in the seclusion of any closet.”⁵⁴ For such a process to function unhindered, “There must be a confirmed assurance in your mind that you have got out of the conventional into the natural” – away from ploughed ground and built landscape.⁵⁵ The ideal forests for meditation, he recommends, are those with the most umbrageous trees, in the Black Forest of Switzerland.

The context of this exception is worth amplifying in order for us to understand why it occurred. The prominent role of the woods and of thinking in the article can be partly explained by Trollope’s assumption that the piece would be a part of a series in the periodical Good Words called “Half-Hours in the Fresh Air,” and partly by an awkward patch in his relationship with the magazine’s editor, Norman MacLeod, some years before. In 1863 Rachel Ray, which was to run from July to December, was pulled by MacLeod after an attack on Trollope as a “sensation writer” from the dogmatic evangelical periodical, the Record. Having envisioned his publication as a mild alternative to extremist organs like the Record, Macleod denied that the latter’s criticism of Trollope had affected his decision to stop Rachel Ray.⁵⁶ “Please take a kind meaning out of [the spirit of my rejection] and don’t give a Recordite meaning to it,” Macleod implored.⁵⁷ Evidently Trollope took the rejection graciously, but after the fiasco with Rachel Ray he no doubt understood that a piece on the writer’s process could not record his practices in the way of the autobiography that he was currently revising, or in any way that would undermine dominant ideas of genius and creativity. “A Walk in a Wood” would have to highlight the mind in a vaguely spiritual way and promote the salubrious effects of meditation outdoors. As a result, the piece brings Romantic and mentalistic clichés to the market for Christian literature. “I have always found it impossible to utilize railroads for delicate thinking,” Trollope recalls for the readers of Good Words.⁵⁸ (In An Autobiography, he recalls writing the allotted pages per day of Doctor Thorne in a railway carriage from France to Marseilles and in a ship’s cabin from Marseilles to Alexandria. He wrote Lady Anna at sea.⁵⁹ An Autobiography may not be absolutely authoritative, but Trollope’s extraordinary ability to work aboard a pitching ship does have the testimony of Henry James.) In contrast to his coming life story, Trollope here portrays creative genius as a meditative operation that occurs prior to writing and that requires solitude in verdant surroundings.

With “A Walk in a Wood,” Trollope conceded to the commanding Romantic profile of genius and inspiration, one that has not entirely disappeared. If “introversion and intensity is [sic] the essence [of the creative personality],” remarked the psychometric researcher R. B. Cattell in his report of 1971, “it is easy to see why a committedly extravert, impulsive and casual society has had to begin frantically chasing – and vulgarizing – creativity over the last decade…. Einstein remote in the patent office library, Darwin taking his solitary walks in the woods at Down – these are the epitome of the way of life of the creative person.”⁶⁰ In “A Walk in a Wood,” Trollope added to this anecdotal stock much earlier than Cattell imagined.

By prescribing a systematic, albeit retrograde, way to achieve creativity, however, the essay also anticipated a corpus of self-help literature that signaled a shift in terms: For by the middle of the last century, genius was reconceived in psychometric circles as “continuous with lesser talents and not qualitatively differentiated” from them.⁶¹ In this light, “creativity” began to override “genius” as a meaningful concept in behavioral psychology. In Genius Unmasked (2013), for example, Roberta Ness treats creativity as a method for developing one’s acumen for business and potential for leadership; she offers ways for “almost anyone” to “improve innovation.”⁶² James’s image of Trollope as a philistine focused exclusively on action and productivity could now be redrawn as a portrait of Trollope the steadily creative entrepreneur. Even when he looked backward, then, as in “A Walk,” Trollope could not help but look forward.

Verbose Trollope

Ignoring the bland and unrevealing descriptions of inspiration supplied by Trollope in “A Walk,” most twentieth-century readers treated An Autobiography as the portal to his opaque “inner life,” searching its early chapters covering childhood for the unhappy origins of the adult’s extraordinary drive. In doing so, they relied on the Freudian discourse that has continued to pervade biographical studies (and has been deployed, most notably, in W. J. Bate’s Samuel Johnson [1977]). But depth psychology has not been particularly illuminating about Trollope’s writing process. Freud’s famous essay, “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming” (1908) treats fiction-writing as a male author’s heroic fantasies; it does not tell us what occurs systemically during the act of writing. Furthermore, because any speculation about motive in the Freudian vein has presumed an unconscious that, in Hans Eysenck’s caricature, is “hot and wet, seething with lust and anger” rather than one “more cold and dry … more reality bound,” Trollope’s fanatically regular routine, when viewed through the first lens, has raised the specter of an angry, compensating subject when in fact the author’s creative behavior suggests the workings of a “rational” mental process (Eysenck’s word).⁶³ Admittedly, following this “cold” unconscious – on the surface, so to speak, of his writing – might leave intact the image of Trollope as the son mindlessly following his mother’s frenetic composition – a kind of automaton. Yet this approach, derived from behaviorism, the psychological model contemporaneous with depth psychology, has the potential to modify the reputation of a Trollope whose methods seemed so unintrospective, so uncreative.

In this regard, behavioral research focused on unconscious cognitive processes has pursued two systemic operations that should be of interest to those seeking a new analytics of creativity, one that avoids ostracizing and stigmatizing Trollope, respectively, through Romantic and mechanistic clichés. First, the kind of blind speed in thinking for which the writer was notorious – a speed often regarded by those requiring some evidence of mental involvement as purely physiological and, therefore, automatic – has been explored and reclassified as the functioning of intuition. In his influential study of 1968, Malcolm Westcott elaborated on Bain’s work and emphasized that intuition reaches “conclusions on the basis of little information which are ordinarily reached on the basis of significantly more information.”⁶⁴ Although intuition is unchartable (by deductive or empirical means) and “rarely has any observable or communicable consequences,” it bypasses logic to arrive at the same end as logic.⁶⁵ Summarizing decades of research on the faculty, Eysenck defined it in 1995 as “the process of rapid classification of a stimulus event, and the equally rapid attribution of the characteristics of its class to that event.”⁶⁶ Intuition, in other words, is characterized by speed; it is faster than conscious thinking. The descriptions here are readily applicable to the seeming lack of preconception that bothered Trollope’s critics. Westcott’s theory in particular sheds light on the much-lamented “modern” technique (according to Arnold) of omitting conscious planning by casting intuition as a form of conditioning that lies on a continuum with habit – between the thresholds of cognition and behavior.⁶⁷ Intuition can evade consciousness because, according to Westcott, it results from a “transfer of training.” An acquired faculty, it coalesces from operations that when repeated over time have become “unconscious and automatic.”⁶⁸ Thus, Trollope’s experience in composing multiplot novels created an intuitive shortcut around their mindful construction.

The psychological concept of intuition holds a potential justification not only for the case of Trollope the indefatigable writer but, surprisingly, for the trope of literary inspiration that he mocked. For even as it substantiates the physiological interpretation of productivity that his contemporaries found mechanistic, it embeds the hackneyed metaphor of Romantic inspiration – often represented as a flash of insight – in a theory of overtraining. The Muse, to adopt the language of behavioral science, is an embodiment of a stimulus event in which a conditional probability is strong enough to rise to consciousness as a symbol.⁶⁹ When invoked by the iconoclastic Trollope in Orley Farm – because supposedly, the task facing him at this crucial moment, a description of female beauty, requires a power greater than his own – she signals the threshold of cognition, a portentous pause in an otherwise rapid process. Through the Muse, he invests with literary authority a verbal feat expanding on an operation that he has already executed numerous times. In this way, the behavioral concept of intuition offers a reconciliation between the vulgar Romanticism of the inspired genius and the equally vulgar philistinism of the sedulous professional writer.

Mid-twentieth-century literary critics like Skilton and Kendrick most likely would have balked at (in their view) such a compromised idea. Indeed, by another behavioral gauge of creativity, Trollope did not fare as well. This measure was focused on style rather than composition and was devised decades after the writer’s death, when biography and heredity were not so much discounted as folded into a “nomothetic” standard: one that supposedly surmounted social, racial, and ethnic particularities to describe a universal of human behavior that could be isolated through measurable exercises.⁷⁰ Of special interest here among the technologies devised to determine creativity were various kinds of word association tests (WATs) that privileged a certain cognitive style as a marker of talent, its chief feature being uncommon or even hermetic syntactical combinations. In their thought patterns (when reduced to strings of words), creative persons exhibited “overinclusiveness,” a term coined by Sarnoff and Martha Mednick in the 1940s. Defined as “an inclination not to limit one’s associations to relevant ideas, memories, images, etc.,” overinclusiveness (also called “looseness” or “flat association”) contrasted with “steep” association, or the tendency to string together ideas that were “limited and rigidly interlinked.”⁷¹ Eysenck thought the theory of overinclusiveness worth attention. Creative minds demonstrate a “tendency to have shallow [or flat] rather than a steep associative gradient, i.e., to admit more unusual associations, ideas, memories, and images than is customary.”⁷² His adherence to a nomothetic standard of intelligence stirred much controversy (provoking accusations of racism); but in her recent summary of research on genius, Ness also finds this measure credible enough to represent it in detail. “Fido” and “bark” from “dog” exemplify, she explains, a pattern of steep association while “collar,” “hair,” and “trainer,” from the same prompt, “dog,” indicate the remote bent of flat association.⁷³ Among creative personalities, such a cognitive style has been designated “psychoticism” – or the “P” factor, a label that preserves the ancient and popular connection between the creative and the pathological personality.⁷⁴

Cognitive researchers have recognized, of course, that the associational patterns of such psychosotics (derived from “psychoticism”) are less extreme than the “incomprehensible word salad of the chronic schizophrenic” and for this reason have assumed that creativity with a high P factor must have an inhibitor to disregard the remote associations typical of psychotic thinking.⁷⁵ Searching for this inhibitor through experiments on persons deemed creative by other criteria (e.g., by school performance), they have recorded subjects blocking information presented to them earlier when it is reintroduced in a setting that has rendered it irrelevant. The subjects’ “failure” to recognize what should be familiar associations has indicated to scientists the importance of cognitive inhibition in normal thought processes. Without it, crowded and outlying associations would result in the associative disturbances typical of psychotic thinking.⁷⁶ In short, too much cognitive inhibition suppresses all remote association and tends to produce uncreative or “steep” verbal performances. On the other hand, overinclusive associations, with an inhibitor, signal creativity – psychoticism in the absence of psychosis.

Whereas intuition embeds the kind of physiological repetition for which Trollope was notorious but in doing so melds mechanical and creative behavior, according to psychologists like Westcott, psychosotic word association emphasizes verbal novelty and thereby adds a literary patina to the rational unconscious. Indeed, the remote associations deemed “creative” by test-scorers in the middle of the last century bore a telling similarity to the high modernist poetry then in vogue, as I have discussed elsewhere. The verbal ingenuity of James Joyce and Ezra Pound, the analogistic narratives of Marcel Proust, and the revaluation of the metaphysical poets by T. S. Eliot all indicate an alignment of taste between cognitive and literary skills. Such a standard inevitably sidelines Trollope, for it reflects modernist and Romantic literary models antipathetic to his style and authorial profile.

To amplify this point, and to demonstrate just why Trollope’s work stylistically contravened new psychological definitions of verbal creativity (and therefore confirmed the impression of the writer at work as a kind of automaton), I mount an experiment of my own, one in close reading, by reprinting below a sample of Trollope’s writing to “test” it for the presence or absence of remote associations. Of course, the sequence of words and phrases in a narrative, even in a manageable sample of one, cannot replicate the format of a WAT. Still, through a traditional “surface” (rather than deep) reading focused on syntagmatic relations, I can search for any signs of looseness or of its inhibition in Trollope’s style. My subject consists of two samples, many pages apart, from Trollope’s The Small House at Allington (1864). The first comes from Chapter XIX and refers to Christopher Dale, the Squire of Allingham. Within this field – comprising the narrator’s commentary (in the first passage) and free indirect discourse (in the second passage) – I have marked the words, phrases, and clauses that form three sets circling around three ideas: that the Squire is constant (italics), reserved (underlining), and always thwarted (bold):

The second, from Chapter XLIX, concerns the Squire in another situation:

Readers familiar with this novel know that constancy is one of its themes and a virtue shared by many of the sympathetic characters – John Eames and Lily Dale, as well as the Squire. For this reason, it is appropriately emphasized in the first passage. But I am not reading part against thematic whole, although this is the usual tactic of a traditional close reading. Rather, I confine myself to this very small field in order to pinpoint the features of the style resulting, some assumed, from the compositional behavior that proved so detrimental to Trollope’s reputation, at least in the short run. For to one of Trollope’s contemporary detractors, no doubt these collocations would display the integument of the novel’s padding, which was the consequence of the author’s word-counting and commitment to routine.

Although padding was a necessity for the mid-century novelist writing triple-deckers or issuing installments, Trollope’s seemed excessive to many, as I have related, and linked insidiously to his productivity. Displaying the verbal constituents of this padding, the passages cited suggest, furthermore, a recursive direction in Trollope’s associative chains. The repetition of words (“constant”) or of very similar clauses (“it was not in the nature of the man to be angry,” “he was not angry,” “he was seldom angry”), often very close to each other, displays Trollope’s tendency as he composes to rehearse an idea through phrases that differ slightly but convey the same meaning. Through these rehearsals, we glimpse a writer whose range of thought over a brief span of time was conceptually “steep,” that is, kept from remote linkages. Rather than associative looseness, Trollope’s style reveals a conservative tendency to linger on the same thoughts amid a steady flow of words. The narratives are loquacious, but they are also ideationally confined. The cognitive pattern that emerges in these two small samples indicates a strong inhibiting force and a style incompatible with that suggested by measures of high P.

I have suggested that the aesthetic link between the behavioral testing of creativity and contemporary literary standards has been obscured in part because Trollope’s critics have focused instead on creative content traceable to biographical details. Although I have also shown that a stylistic analysis in behavioral terms does not guarantee a flattering judgment of Trollope’s writing, the exercise does underscore that the picture of Trollope as an uncreative novelist was at bottom a historical one, in both literary and psychological terms. Because the creativity of a particular style is dependent on cultural standards that are hardly universal or timeless, any test of a verbal performance is, one of its practitioners admits, “only a projection of the test constructor’s personal view about what creativity is.”⁷⁹ Nonetheless, the theories of psychological intuition and associative looseness offer frameworks for viewing Trollope at work – and for contextualizing the assessments of Trollope’s work through the mid-twentieth century. Studies of psychological intuition have repositioned habit as a component of, rather than an impediment to, creativity. They have rehabilitated indefatigability by dissociating it from the mechanistic behavior that James derided during an era in which psychological materialism seemed unable to account for creative activity. Intuition gives a name to the faculty that Trollope acquired through steady labor, the faculty that enabled him to become an eminently productive writer, thinking and writing simultaneously. Measurements of high P, although seeming to exclude Trollope from a creative cohort, employ a dynamic between looseness and inhibition that opens his compositional process to analysis and highlights the role of repetition in anchoring his associative flow. In this light, An Autobiography represents and even anticipates a psychological shift in the approach to creativity, one that (according to Arnold and James, respectively) modernizes and vulgarizes inspiration by connecting it to practice and conditioning. But Trollope probably would have been untroubled by these complaints.

“Love of the deity effect of organization. Oh you materialist.”¹ So Darwin famously wrote in an early notebook. And although there are alternative interpretations of this entry, its self-mocking accusation of materialism fairly enough characterizes the critical assumption that underlies Darwin’s scientific method: All phenomena, even faith, are to be explained by reference to material processes, to causes now in operation; the “motive power” for all the growth, change, development, for all the apparent design in nature, emerges from matter alone with no assistance from God or from consciousness conceived of as unrelated to the material.

This method, the very basis of the uniformitarianism that Darwin learned from Charles Lyell, has been the fundamental assumption of mainstream science since the nineteenth century. It was obviously central to the development of geology, which Darwin studied at Cambridge and was learning from Lyell, and extended across biology, reaching even to psychology, to, for example, Alexander Bain’s determination to explain psychological phenomena physiologically. It is also an ostensibly innocent source of that powerful if embattled tendency in nineteenth-century science to translate all human actions, all human feelings, all human thought, into the language of mechanism. While it was not Darwin who explicitly made this translation, his language and his theory – “oh you materialist” – certainly was a major factor in the growth of the tendency. Darwin himself would not have agreed with this application of his ideas.

A very large question invariably comes with the insistence on material mechanism: Where, in this world full of life with its endless and wonderful variations, is the agency that shapes us and the world? Where do “purpose,” “desire,” “will” come in? Is every form of life, every action, every thought, every feeling simply a function of “material” phenomena? How does William Paley’s watch tick on without a watchmaker? Even strong secularists and believers in evolution felt the pressure of questions such as those. But it was not only a scientific question at stake; it was, with even more cultural significance, a moral one. In the light of Darwin’s materialist assumption, the world, even as it filled with matter, seemed for many to empty out. Did Darwin himself believe in the materialism that he professed (secretly) and mocked at the same time? Did it inevitably lead to where T. H. Huxley was shortly to take it?

Is Huxley’s famous essay, “On the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History” a logical and inevitable consequence of Darwin’s theory? Huxley’s big game, of course, is not the frog with whose spinal column he experiments. Not only Huxley’s frog, but all of us – we might all be machines. Huxley gets around what he speaks of as “the logical consequences of this conviction of mine,” not by denying that humans are machines, but by dismissing clerical assumptions that the logical consequences of that position are “fatalism, materialism, and atheism.”² “Logical consequences,” he says, “are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men,” and the only question is “whether a doctrine is true or false.”³ In this way he ducks what is, indeed, a not unreasonable clerical understanding of the argument that humans are automata also, their will having nothing to do with the actions they take. The disclaimer strikes me as disingenuous. Huxley does not fully endorse Descartes’ view “that brute animals are mere machines or automata,” allowing that animals do have consciousness, for, as he puts it, it is not “permissible to me to suppose that such complex phenomena as those of consciousness, first comes into existence suddenly, and without being preceded by simpler modifications.” His point is rather an almost more devastating one, that is, that what we have taken to be the cause of our actions – our conscious will – turns out to be not a cause but a “symbol” of them. Whatever logical inference priests and others might choose to make of the fact, “all states of consciousness in us, as in them [animals] are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain substance … we are conscious automata.”⁴

For Huxley only the material, by way of the laws that govern it, can affect the material. Our arms move not because we intend to move them, but because of automatic, unconsciously aroused energies, of which our professed intention is only the symbol. This makes Huxley’s argument even more troubling morally and religiously than Descartes’ because Huxley banishes from his argument any outside agent. Although he cleverly evades the charge of “materialism,” the world he describes operates entirely through material forces with no motive intelligent force, no purposeful agent. But what happens when Darwin turns the deity himself into an “effect of organization”?

If Descartes’ God is out of the argument, from where in heaven’s name does the machine get its energy and its direction; what makes it run? Can mere accumulation of variations through time really get us to that peacock’s gorgeous feathering? Or to the pepper moth’s protective adaptation to the dust and smog of the Industrial Revolution? Darwin’s explanation, “natural selection,” looks like an answer, but examined carefully by many skeptical readers, it turns out not to do the job. Everyone noticed right away that “natural selection” was a metaphor, and one which, when investigated closely, seems only inches away from implying Huxley’s frogs jumping around with their spinal columns cut. The metaphor smuggles in an agent with the word “selection” – for Darwin knew that an agent is necessary. But as Samuel Butler insisted, that agent was a fraud: Darwin’s explanation for how the marvelous and apparently designed variations develop turns out, on Butler’s account, to be a mere redundancy – nature is responsible for the movements of nature. Even to this date, despite a vast majority of scientists who work with the idea of natural selection, that critique remains alive, as in J. Scott Turner’s recent book, Purpose and Desire.⁵ But it was also a problem for Darwin, who was not quite so absolute a “materialist” as his cynical notebook comment implies. Rather, he was, as Jessica Riskin has argued, “torn between the mechanist dictate to banish agency from nature and the organicist impulse to naturalize agency, to make agency synonymous with life.”⁶ And it is his “profound and extraordinarily productive ambivalence” that, I believe, kept him from taking Huxley’s step toward the notion of automata, on which I want to focus here.

Riskin explains that Darwin was influenced by two traditions, one that saw nature as passive before the workings of an agent, God, outside it, and the other, the Romantic organicist “impulse to naturalize agency.”⁷ So, on the one hand, and as the current dominant view has it, he expelled external agency from nature, and on the other, he responded to nature by recurring regularly to its own internal agency. Always defensive and annoyed that Lyell and others often saw his theory as akin to Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s, he nevertheless increasingly included the idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics in his own arguments, and more important for my argument here, regularly animated nature even as he was expelling God from its workings.

As August Weismann developed Darwin’s views, he proposed a “Darwinian” theory that effectively banished intention and agency from evolutionary development: The famous Weismann “barrier,” as it is called. In the name of Darwin, will and purpose do seem to disappear from the evolutionary process. And this reading of nature was accompanied, almost as a corollary, with a sweeping minimizing of the possibility of animal intelligence, and the exclusion of much that Darwin said and much that Darwin worried over, from what is now generally meant by Darwinism. For many, the Weismann barrier was morally repulsive, and George Bernard Shaw, an aggressively assertive vegetarian for whom the reality of animal sensibility was a given, found it morally and intellectually insupportable. (To be fair, Huxley too, in his essay on automata, attributes the capacity of feeling to animals.) Shaw was gentler on Darwin than his predecessor, Samuel Butler, because he recognized the humanity of Darwin and the ambivalence in him that Riskin identifies, but he was relentlessly severe on what he saw as the scientific establishment in its movement to what Stephen Jay Gould would later call “ultra-Darwinism.”⁸ Shaw was appalled by vivisection, a scientific practice that was partly justified by the idea that animals are, in effect, only matter, mere automata without even the consciousness that Huxley ascribed to them: They have no feelings, no intentions. Behind this way of thinking there is actually far more Weismann than there is Huxley. When a dog howls in pain, it is not really experiencing pain. There is a perhaps unphilosophical but certainly a temperamental connection between such vivisection-favoring attitudes toward animals (whose humanoid behaviors, when taken literally by lay animal lovers, have been regularly discounted as mere anthropomorphism) and the idea that we are, as in Huxley’s phrase, “conscious automata.”

The materialist method became a metaphysical idea. Riskin points out that Weismannian science, seeming itself to be so materialist, in fact picks up the view of natural theologians. For those theologians, all agency lay with God and the natural world itself was all like Paley’s rock – without intention, mind, and agency. And thus, just as with Paley, there is no contradiction between Weismann’s deep religiosity and his science. Darwin, plagued as it were with a feeling for all organic life, could not reconcile his ideas with traditional religious faith.

All agency in Paley’s nature comes from outside it – oh, Paley, you materialist! For Weismann too there is nothing that can cross the barrier between those immaterial phenomena of intelligence and desire and the physical processes of inheritance. Natural selection, which by definition was not an agent, he believed to be a theory sufficient to account for all evolutionary change (this was not the case even for Darwin). So agency once again disappears from the world, but is reinstated in the mode of automatism. Having no explanation for the apparent agency of forces in the natural world, Weismann falls back on a “‘Universal Cause’ – sometimes the ‘Final Cause’ – operating behind the mechanism of the universe”: “a brute-mechanist … theory in which development took place by means of an essentially passive, preset machinery.”⁹ The great irony that Riskin persuasively asserts is that a rigorous Weismannian materialism almost always entails something like natural theology, in which all agency comes from an intelligent nonmaterial force, like God, so that today’s ultra-Darwinism is, at least logically, perfectly compatible with natural theology.

Under the regime of materialist methodology, nature functions mindlessly, like an automaton: It is in effect, a machine. Intention and desire, manifest in human activity, have no place in inheritance, an idea that eliminated (until very recent developments, most particularly in epigenetics, have called it into question) the Lamarckian idea that acquired characteristics might be inherited. Mind is nonmaterial and is only epiphenomenal, incapable of directing or even affecting the physical. As we would put it now, it is in the genes, the DNA, not in the exemplary giraffe’s desire to reach the higher branches of the tree for dinner. Oddly, one of the effects of the Weismann barrier, as it accounts for all evolutionary development by way of genetic transmission, is to ignore the possibility that science might need a fuller account of agency. Ultra-Darwinism is implicitly metaphysically materialist, and anticipates Daniel Dennett’s transformation of “natural selection” into an algorithm.¹⁰ Natural selection is in effect simply a recipe for development and change, with no motive force. If there is a driving force of the machine, it lies outside the domain of science. If there is any telos, any order or meaning, it comes from outside the world that science investigates. There is no internal force, energy, direction, purpose.

This way of thinking certainly has been made, by mainstream evolutionary biology itself, to seem intellectually compatible with Darwin’s theories, to be “Darwinian,” but it is affectively dissonant, not consistent with the way Darwin himself describes the world. While the dominant reading of Darwin has tended to be that he did not believe in progress, or direction in evolution – and thus the prevailing sense that his world is entirely driven by chance – the theory, as he develops it, has often been taken as compatible with ideas of progress. Robert Richards has made a powerful and meticulously documented case that Darwin was not, as Butler snarkily and tragically described him, mechanistic. Rather, Darwin’s “conception of nature derived, via various channels, in significant measure from the German Romantic movement.”¹¹ And this movement, like Romanticism almost everywhere, “discovered mind to be deeply implicated in the organic structure of nature.”¹²

That this is likely the case is suggested by the ambivalence baked into the metaphor, “natural selection,” a phrase that persists through all six editions of the Origin. It persists despite the fact that Darwin finally conceded that Herbert Spencer’s “Survival of the Fittest” is probably a better, a more precise term for what he is after, and that phrase shows up in the fifth and sixth editions of the Origin and has of course been regularly attributed to Darwin himself. Earlier, in the third edition, Darwin directly confronted the critique of his agential metaphor, and with a perhaps forced casual air, he there demetaphorizes it. When reduced to nonmetaphorical prose, its failure to account for agency becomes clear. The passage is worth looking at in its entirety:

The tone puts off critique by suggesting that ongoing critiques are mere nitpicking since everyone understands that metaphors of this type are commonplace in the sciences for reasons of simple convenience. Strikingly, the long passage does not directly engage the problem that is actually the difficulty with the metaphor – that is, agency itself. It only indicates that the evasion of the problem is very common in the language of science.

If all he really means by natural selection is “the aggregate action and product of many natural laws,” how can one make a fuss about that? But of course, that’s just the point. The objection is not “superficial”: The shade of intention and intelligence built into the word, “selection,” is actually very important to Darwin’s overall argument, not merely a pretty shortcut. Its elimination here reduces “selection” to nothing more than, again, “the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us.” Once Darwin de-anthropomorphizes “natural selection,” so that it becomes nature, or the laws of nature, instead of the maternal figure looking after every organism, he opens himself to Samuel Butler’s brilliant critique: All Darwin really says, as Butler sees it, is that natural phenomena are caused by nature – a mere empty redundancy.

All of which returns us to the Victorian preoccupation with the question of “automata,” as Huxley had proposed it. The fascination about automata is precisely the question of what makes them go. As Rick Rylance puts it, the controversy over the prospect of human automatism, “familiar from the 1840s, came to a head in the 1870s when post-Darwinian debate amplified anxieties over the direction of psychological theory.”¹⁴ John Tyndall, thinking within a framework very much like Huxley’s, takes up the crucial question – the relation between mind and matter. And like Huxley he cannot explain it: “For every fact of consciousness,” he claims, “whether in the domain of sense, thought, or emotion, a definite molecular condition, of motion or structure, is set up in the brain.”¹⁵

The materialist position entails a view that there is nothing in this world that is, literally, metaphysical. Traditionally, the question of agency was not a problem in that one could posit a God, a metaphysical entity, as an initiating force. But this often entailed, as in natural theology, a vision of the world as nothing but a brute entity that came to life, like Paley’s watch, because of God’s will. As the Victorian materialists did their scientific work, without any consideration of the possibility of divine agency, they were left with Paley’s rock. The agency they could allow had to be entirely physical. Tyndall’s world, Huxley’s world, thus became something like Paley’s world though without God – which in effect left not only animals, but the whole world, something of an automaton.

The illusion of intentional external intervention in the workings of matter had already been dispelled by Lyell’s gradualist explanations of geological change. No need for divine intervention at all to explain phenomena which, at first sight, seem too grand to be the result of normal natural law. In Roy Porter’s words, Lyell saw himself as “the spiritual saviour of geology, freeing the science from the old dispensation of Moses.”¹⁶ While this language seems explicitly antireligious, it was consistent with the tradition of natural theology. The very respectable Lyell persisted in his religious orthodoxy; his compromise position was not so much a dismissal of religion as a compartmentalizing of it. Science and religion needed to keep to their separate spheres, a view updated by Gould’s modern version of it, his idea that science and religion have nothing to do with each other, but operate, as he put it, in separate “nonoverlapping magisteria.”¹⁷ Science affirms its independence by excluding from its deliberations anything that is not matter. Even if God lay behind it all, the ultimate cause, as such division of labor allows, it must be an absentee God who mediates intention through the laws of nature.

It was not only Huxley and Tyndall, refusing the work of the absentee God, who were puzzled by the question of the relation between the material and consciousness. In the end, Darwin too was stymied. Both as in the production of literal automata and in the study of the mind, transforming into the study of the brain, all of this puzzlement reflected an effort to understand phenomena traditionally thought of as extra-material, metaphysical, as functions of material processes. Though reluctant to enter combat, not least on matters of religion, Darwin, at the end of the brilliant and difficult last paragraph of The Variation of Plants and Animals under Domestication, essentially banishes God from the work of evolutionary development. The climax of the two volumes is the imaginative demonstration that natural things that look designed are not designed.

With a concluding long metaphor that compares the development of organic variations to an architect’s building of “a noble and commodious edifice,” Darwin tries to banish intelligent design from nature. Without previously cut stone, the architect attempting to build his “edifice” chooses fragments of stone from the base of a precipice according to how they serve his purposes, just as, Darwin claims, natural selection “chooses” variations to adapt best to their environment: “These stone pieces bear the same relation which the fluctuating variations of organic beings bear to the varied and admirable structures ultimately acquired by their modified descendants.” That is, they are “accidental,” distinctly not intentional. “Can it be reasonably maintained,” Darwin asks, “that the Creator intentionally ordered … that certain fragments of rock should assume certain shapes so that the builder might erect his edifice?” The answer to this spells out the argument of two volumes of close study of variations: “No shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations, alike in nature and the result of the same general laws, which have been the groundwork through natural selection of the formation of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were intentionally and specially guided.”¹⁸

But this metaphor runs into problems. In the analogy, while the pieces the architect uses are “accidental,” the edifice is intentionally designed and structured by the architect – but then, to what is the architect being compared? Where is the intentional agent in the other half of the metaphor? Darwin makes a forceful case for the “accidental” nature of the variations, but leaves the question of design still hanging. Although, as I have indicated, Darwin avoided direct engagement with such problems, he left the battling to his “bulldog,” Huxley, and to scientific popularizers of science like Tyndall, who were always itching for a fight in their efforts to displace religious authority with the authority of the increasingly professionalized vocation of “science.” But the gentleman Darwin thus left many troubling questions to be resolved, and particularly does so here, where, having demonstrated, as we have seen, that there is no intention in nature, he concludes by alluding to God after all: “On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus, we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and predestination.”¹⁹ Note that he carefully does not say that he believes there is such a “Creator,” only that his own view here is, on the surface, at least incompatible with an omniscient God. Instead then of clamping down fiercely on the side of a more or less automatic nature, he makes a point of demonstrating his ambivalence (a rhetorical sop?) – “a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and destination.”²⁰

It was not only religion that resisted the mechanistic interpretation. As we have seen, Butler – followed by Shaw – , spoke from an entirely secular view that happily accepted the idea of evolution, but found Darwin’s theory absolutely inadequate in its determination to eliminate mind and intention from evolutionary processes. While that theory, Butler thought, takes “luck” as the determinant of development and speciation, he insisted instead that the process was guided by “cunning,” by what he called “inherited memory.” With devilish wit, Butler accused Darwin of “pitchforking … mind … out of the Universe.”²¹ Darwin’s theory, he believed, was “mechanical” as opposed to the “vitalistic” form of another tradition of evolutionary thinking, which he admired in Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin. Darwin’s theory may describe nature a bit more elaborately than his predecessors did, but it does not tell us anything about the agency that pushes evolution. The material world, as Butler and many others interpreted Darwin, is populated by automata whose movements were meaninglessly produced by chance, with no intention, no direction, no purpose. The apparent design that Butler takes Darwin to have written off as the product of mere chance is, rather, the product of a form of intelligence, an intelligence manifested in what Darwin had called “instinct,” but which Butler insisted was “memory.” Whatever they called it, all participants in the argument agreed that it is inherited. Butler sided, then, with Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, and with Lamarck, as did Herbert Spencer, in believing that acquired characteristics are inherited and carry forward with them human desires. (It should be noted, however, that Lamarck himself is partly overinterpreted by Butler, for Lamarck does not heavily emphasize the work of intention in evolutionary development, allowing that it only enter in its later stages with humans themselves.²²)

But this secular critique of Darwin, like the religious one, and, indeed, like the view of evolution that still dominates modern evolutionary science, is inadequate to the complexity (and perhaps at times confusion) of Darwin’s thinking. While it is certainly reasonable, in this respect, to think of Darwin’s theory as reductive (it reduces certain distinctive human traits to mere instinctive motion), it is equally possible to think of it as expansive, one in which matter truly matters as it did to Butler, even incorporates agency in itself, without positing long-range intention and teleological design. Riskin’s argument, which I have earlier quoted, gets at the heart of Darwin’s ultimate escape from a vision of the crude, raw nature that ultra-Darwinism implies: Darwin was, again, “torn between the mechanist dictate to banish agency from nature and the organicist impulse to naturalize agency.” It is that “profound and extraordinarily productive ambivalence” that ultimately makes Darwin’s theorizing so rich and so difficult to reconcile with the Huxleyan idea of the “automata” that it seems to have inspired.

I want then to suggest several different ways, neither Butlerian nor Paleyan, in which Darwin’s writing might be taken to short-circuit, or radically complicate, the connection between his theory and automatism. Unlike Huxley’s, Darwin’s work is threaded through with that “profound and extraordinarily productive ambivalence” that Riskin identifies. Darwin may have argued design out of the biosphere, but he had, at the same time, a feeling for life that cannot (at least, in my estimation, should not) be reduced to mechanism. I have already briefly discussed the nature of his much chronicled and ambivalent relation to his idea, his metaphor “natural selection.” This metaphor, as we have seen, simultaneously disguised the sheer materiality of the evolutionary process and implied an agency capable of “design.”

A second aspect of Darwin’s thinking incompatible with the pure materialism of which he accused himself is regularly detectable in his anthropomorphism. Ironically, part of the reaction to Darwin’s views was just his tendency to locate humanoid qualities in animals, thus, from traditional perspectives, degrading the human. But of course, Darwin’s anthropomorphism was intrinsic, absolutely essential, to his efforts to prove that all species develop from, evolve from earlier species, eventually to be recognized as emerging from one, or few: We are all, that is, related. He had to demonstrate continuity from the “lower” organisms to the human, and tends therefore to infuse the organisms that occupy nature with a sense of intentionality that he will at the same time deny to nature itself.

A third aspect of Darwin’s writing and thinking that resisted the tendency toward Huxleyan automatism manifests itself in Darwin’s ambivalence toward mindless change as opposed to intentional agency. Huxley’s outspoken, blithe, self-confident refusal to allow moral and theological conclusions to influence the “facts” takes the shape of a philosophical argument, a mode that Darwin only rarely uses. Both Darwin and Huxley explain evident design in nature as the effect of the laws of nature, of time and contingent change. But while in Huxley dualism is alive and well, in Darwin there is almost always a hint of doubt, a struggle. As ever, itching for the fight, Huxley aggressively pushes into battle the basic epistemological assumptions by which he was attempting to establish for himself and biological science professional status and cultural supremacy. In the Huxleyan narrative, intention and purpose will always yield to the unceasing pressure of the “cosmic process,” as he called it in Evolution and Ethics.²³ In any Huxleyan contest between agential life and mindless cosmic laws, the mindless cosmos wins.

Darwin treads in a more gingerly manner. When he talks about instinct, which embraces several “distinct mental actions,” he is reluctant to provide a complete definition. He makes an analogy with habit, and even concedes that some habits are directly transmissible: “I think it can be shown that this does sometimes happen.”²⁴ Even as the idea of instinct seems to be another element in the attempt to dehumanize, or materialize the process, Darwin points out that “a little dose of judgment or reason, often comes into play.” This, of course, is not quite Butler’s effort to transform “instinct” into inherited memory. But the inherited instinct, which Huxley uses to make the case for the powerlessness of intelligence to affect physical action, is not all there is in Darwin’s descriptions. In Darwin, instinct, at least sometimes, is supplemented by what is by definition not instinct, a power to react to the new: “A little dose of Judgment or reason.” A little dose that in effect exempts Darwin from that Huxleyan tradition. While there is no denying that Darwin’s constant goal, even against the most commonsense sort of conclusions, was to build what was really a circumstantial argument into an inevitable one for the power of natural selection over time to achieve all that design had hitherto been assumed to have achieved, he allowed that habit, emerging from repeated willed efforts, can bring about some of the changes he describes.²⁵

The very heart of Darwin’s theory is the effort to show the continuity of taxonomy, behaviors, expressions, feelings, from the lowest organisms to “the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving”:²⁶ us higher animals. Those apparently nonmaterial qualities, like intelligence and emotions, which traditionally we have taken as marks of the distinctiveness of humans, he finds present in varied forms in almost all living creatures, even in those, like worms, that seemed mere matter in motion. This view of things might take matter in two very different directions – the reductive one, in which on its own it has none but the crudest value, and the other, an expansive one, in which matter takes upon itself the values hitherto reserved for nonmaterial phenomena, like thought and feeling. Consonant with Darwin’s apparently anthropomorphic tendencies in reading animal behavior, that almost all forms of life incline toward the intelligence and capacity for feeling that we honor among humans, we are now discovering that such a Darwinian view of things makes it increasingly difficult to treat most organic things like mere matter, objects for our use and exploitation, for our dinners. It gives to Shaw’s vegetarianism a yet more substantial grounding. A sense of the sacredness of all matter, incompatible with the reductionist view implicit in automatism, can be taken to lie only half hidden in Darwin’s very secular readings of nature.

Science has increasingly focused its attention on the intelligence and capacity for feeling of a widening range of creatures. Octopuses and elephants have been getting a lot of attention. The minds of birds are being explored with wonder. Studies have been made arguing or demonstrating the capacity for altruism in apes, toolmaking ability in crows, and we have even pushed beyond that. Jane Bennett, reacting not only to environmental disasters but to the earth-friendliness of ecology, proposes a theory of “vibrant matter” that begins, in a Spinozan way, to blur the line between living organic and mere brute matter.²⁷ Darwin, of course, does not go nearly that far, but his microscopically close study of natural phenomena opens the way to such a view.

Bennett uses Darwin’s “worms” as a key example, and justifiably. She does not, of course, argue that worms intentionally work “to enable human culture,” which Darwin shows they significantly manage to do. But, according to Darwin, “worms have played a more important part in the history of the world than most persons would at first assume.”²⁸ As Bennett puts it, this can be taken as the “unplanned result of worms acting in conjunction and competition with other (biological, bacterial, chemical, human) agents.”²⁹ Nevertheless, Darwin’s close observation of worms leads him to believe that their actions are not – as would, by definition, be expected of instinctual behavior – the result “of unvarying inherited impulse.”³⁰ Part of the remarkable charm of Darwin’s last (and surprisingly most popular book) is that intimate views of worms’ ways show them to be acting with intention, responding to the requirements of different conditions. Worms, as it were, become “characters” inside narratives, and not entirely predictable, even on the matter of whether they draw leaves into their burrows by their pointed ends – which they normally and quite sensibly do. Darwin’s worms, it seems, intelligently “improvise.” Luck, or cunning, as Butler asked – the worms, it seems, are after all rather cunning. The ostensibly insensible world of worms, about the closest thing to mere matter among organisms, is full of agency and intelligence, after all. Worms are not automata. One might argue, following Bennett, that neither are Huxley’s frogs.

A fourth kind of resistance to pure materialism in Darwin emerges more clearly and forcefully in an area with which I will be concerned for the rest of my discussion here: His theory of sexual selection, which has only fairly recently been given the kind of attention that its important role in evolution has deserved. That theory quite specifically gives members of the species some power in shaping their own evolution. It almost immediately became a troubling theory, and one that evoked resistance even from Darwin’s intellectual allies.

But all of these – his dominant metaphor, “natural selection,” his anthropomorphism, his recognizing more than instinct even in the lowest organisms, and his theory of sexual selection ironically tend to give back to nature what Darwin has so often been interpreted as denying it. While he never allowed agency from outside the material world that was his subject, he did, however contradictory it might seem, allow for forms of agency, and agency coming from the very place of consciousness and intention and desire that Huxley insists have no effect on what we actually do. There are tendencies in Darwin’s writing that reinfuse matter with value and short-circuit the idea that his views emptied the world of intelligence and meaning.

Sexual Selection and Lamarckian Evolution

Sexual selection, from its first introduction in the Origin, has been a troublesome theory. It seemed in some ways to contradict Darwin’s dominant argument – the centrality of natural selection to the processes of evolution. It might be read – as I will read it here – as an alternative to the view that Darwin’s materialist theory entails the exclusion of any agency but “nature,” and thus logically also implies the Huxleyan option: Perhaps we are all machines, automata. Certainly, the main stream of post-Darwinian evolutionary theory resisted the very idea that sexual selection plays a serious role in speciation, and found, and continues to find ways to assimilate its apparent effectiveness to natural selection.

Without more elaborate explanation, a phenomenon that has no useful, no practical purpose is very unlikely in nature, where there is always a cost in expenditure of energy that, for survival, must be balanced with a reward. The argument that Alfred Russel Wallace made, as did many others resistant to the idea that sexual selection has so important a role in evolutionary history, is that the extravagant display of many male animals is an honest signal, received by the selector, and leading her to choose the mate most likely to produce the most and the best offspring. So the extravagant and dangerous plumage and behavior of courting male birds contribute to survival through their superior powers of productivity and adaptability. On this accounting, and the accounting of most contemporary evolutionary biology, sexual selection is functional in just the way natural selection is – simply a more elaborate way toward adaptation. Will, choice, whim are out of court. Conformable as this is to modern science’s rigorous reading of the way nature works, it does not do justice to what Darwin was saying.

For Darwin, certain evolutionary developments could not be explained by the working of natural selection alone – most particularly the differences between the sexes in secondary sex characteristics. His horror at the sight of a peacock resulted from its inexplicable, gorgeous plumage, which clearly made it more vulnerable to depredation, and thus incompatible with the rigors of natural selection. The development of variations that improve the ability to combat made sense in the world of natural selection, but what could possibly account for variations that make the males more, not less vulnerable. Only sexual desire might explain it. And given the various and elaborate courting procedures that we see among birds – the female bird’s rejection of many, selection of one – Darwin reasonably infers that the gaudy ornamentation develops under the pressure of female desire.

For Wallace and today’s ultra-Darwinians, while it might have looked like sexual selection to Darwin, it is really just another version of natural selection, governed by the usual cost–return mechanisms of nature. That is why the female of the species, however great a risk the male might take, tends to remain drab. The female need not show off; there is no urgency, given that, as Darwin puts it, the males are more or less indiscriminately “eager.” There will always be males ready to help in reproduction, and the female instinctively chooses the one that will most obviously be successful in the process, but in doing so she avoids the risks she imposes on the male by remaining drab, hidden. So, the problem that Darwin’s theory faced, as Wallace and then most of the scientific establishment rejected it, was that sexual selection and natural selection not only were different; at times they contradicted each other.

No wonder that sexual selection was almost immediately attacked on all sides, by those friendly to Darwin’s ideas, like Wallace, or hostile to them, like St. George Mivart. Sexual selection, unlike natural selection, is not a metaphor. It identifies an intelligent agent. And, horror of horrors, that agent turns out, most of the time, to be a female. So, the theory threatened to contradict Darwin’s own emphasis on “natural selection” as the dominant, if not exclusive, evolutionary force. It also challenged cultural norms by giving that power of “choice” to the female of the species, with the unlikely argument that the female had a fine aesthetic sense. And worse, the female choice of suitors seemed to Wallace and others “arbitrary,” a quality entirely incompatible with full commitment to natural selection, where usefulness always determines adaptive success. Darwin’s insistence, against his own instincts about the intellectual weakness of women and the explanatory power of natural selection and also against the majority of scientists and critics, crosses what was to be called the “Weismann barrier” by implying that what we do now, what we desire, how we act on that desire, can be inherited and can affect the directions of evolutionary change. Contra Huxley’s materialism, it suggests that conscious will actually can affect physical qualities.

And there is the other crucial question: How was it possible that so unadaptive a quality as “beauty,” or fancy display, could survive the depredations of natural selection. It was not until well into the twentieth century that Ronald A. Fisher, by demonstrating mathematically how arbitrary choice might, through the mating process, survive those inevitable depredations, made the idea of sexual selection’s role in evolution scientifically respectable,

Note that from the first, when he introduced the subject in the Origin, Darwin was careful to distinguish sexual from natural selection. He makes the distinction but does not suggest or infer from that difference that the two “selections” were incompatible. In sexual selection, he wrote, the result of the struggle between the males for possession of the females “is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring. Sexual selection is, therefore, less rigorous than natural selection.”³¹ What is also not explicit in his discussion, emphasizing “struggle” between the males, is that the males too are driven by desire and take great risks in yielding to it. And even after winning the battle, the male has work to do; he has to win the female through courtship. The real complications are implicit but not announced when Darwin asserts that the females “often take individual preferences and dislikes.”³²

That phrase, “individual preferences and dislikes,” is the heart of the problem, since it introduces, quietly enough, something of the arbitrary, and awards to the will considerable power toward the physical changes involved in speciation. The presence of these rather nonmaterial forces (remember, Huxley and Tyndall exclude the possibility that nonmaterial forces could ever affect material ones) drives a yet deeper wedge between sexual and natural selection. Fisher, saving sexual selection from critiques like those of Wallace, argues that the “preference and dislikes” were, initially, geared to the health, vigor, and survival qualities of the suitor, but then, inevitably, got separated from that very adaptive function.³³ Nevertheless, sexual selection, particularly as it is discussed by Elizabeth Grosz, but yet more importantly for my purposes, Richard Prum, entails intention and desire and will. It suggests what mainstream evolutionary biology long resisted, that there are ways to get around the power of natural selection – up to a point, that is, as Mr. Brooke in Middlemarch might have put it. Fisher, much later, showed how that was possible.

We are on the edge here of a Lamarckian understanding of evolutionary possibilities, for mate choice in sexual selection entails a member of the species choosing the way she (it is usually a “she” doing the choosing), wants her partner to look and behave and consequently determining to a large extent how offspring will look and behave. By choosing generation after generation the partners whose plumage or performance most appeals to them, females increasingly heighten their demands on potential mates. Slight changes gradually accumulate, and these changes are passed on to their young.

This view of evolutionary possibility was difficult enough both for Darwin and his readers to accept because it implies a process not fully controlled by natural selection, but even worse, it implies that females and female desire and taste determined these striking, apparently anomalous developments. Oddly, it was in part because Darwin held female intellectual and aesthetic power so low that he managed to hang on to his theory against the widespread rejection he encountered. “No doubt,” he writes, after describing female contributions to the development of their species, “this implies powers of discrimination and taste on the part of the female which will at first appear extremely improbable; but by the facts to be adduced, hereafter, I hope to be able to show that the females actually have these powers.”³⁴ Perhaps not happily, Darwin sticks to his point as the only way to explain the peacock.

“In defense of this reading of female evolutionary agency,” Darwin writes,

Evolution by way of mate choice in sexual selection introduces just those elements of intention and desire in agency that the Weismann barrier and ultra-Darwinism reject. The bird becomes an agent.

In an extended and brilliant passage imagining the way the Argus pheasant developed its extraordinary plumage, Darwin argues that the bird “affords good evidence that the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm and for no other purpose.”³⁶ Yet the gaudiness of the “refined beauty” makes the bird a sitting duck, very vulnerable prey. Darwin in effect devotes the whole of The Descent of Man to working out how this seemingly purposeless extravagance, in the face of the dangers to which it exposed the bird, might possibly have evolved. Against the power of sexual selection that Darwin spent most of the Descent attempting to demonstrate, Darwin was intruding the mere whim of sexual desire, desire that had no end but the satisfaction of itself.

I do not propose, as a layman exploring cultural ground, to intrude into the scientific debates about evolution and the processes of selection. Rather, I am interested in considering whether Darwin’s own work, so often characterized as rigidly “materialist,” so rigidly determined by his commitment to the power of natural selection, can legitimately be taken as denying the agency of intelligence, will, even whim, in the unfoldings of evolution. “Individual preferences and dislikes” are essential to Darwin’s way of looking at nature, and thus his view belies the Huxleyan option that we are all automata. Darwin’s theory, contrary to how it has been interpreted and reinterpreted in this history of evolutionary biology, makes of the evolutionary process something other than the “hogwash” that Shaw inferred from it.

Prum describes the work of Amotz Zahavi, who argued that “sexual selection is effective because it improves the ability of the selecting sex to detect quality in the selected sex.”³⁷ Zahavi saves the idea that the elaborate male displays are “honest signals.” As Prum puts it, Zahavi believes that “the individual who is attracted to a mate with such costly traits is responding not to its subjective beauty, which is incidental to its costs, but to what it tells her about the male’s ability to rise above its costs.”³⁸ The extravagant and dangerous plumage and behavior of courting male birds are “honest signals” of superior powers of productivity and adaptability. It may be that a Darwin come back to the twenty-first century would after all embrace Zahavi’s theory, but the Darwin of 1871 insisted on the “no purpose” and allowed for the free play of individual preference. The choosing female is anything but an automaton.

Darwin, for his part, accounted for what he too regarded as the silliness of choosing mates who are particularly vulnerable to predators by attributing it to “fashion.” Evelleen Richards notes how “the fashion metaphor was crucial to his thoroughgoing identification of animal breeder with sexual selection.”³⁹ In a long, illuminating chapter, Richards demonstrates the importance of the idea of fashion to Darwin’s thinking, and the way his very disrespect for female intelligence allowed him to attribute to females the power to choose and to shape species destiny.

Domestic breeders too designed the races their breeding strategies produced on the lines of fashion. The pug nose on a dog carefully bred has no value for survival except that the breeder is attracted by the dog’s form. Darwin makes this analogy – both female bird in the wild and domestic breeder at home are governed by the whims of fashion, not by the strenuous cost accounting of natural selection. But this analogy, even if it implies some distaste for “fashion,” is further indication of how mate choice in sexual selection, probably against Darwin’s own preferences, implies an almost Lamarckian tendency in his thinking.

We recall that against the advice of thinkers like Wallace, Darwin begins his Origin with consideration of domestic selection. Conceding that domestic selection and “selection” in nature are quite different, Darwin manages brilliantly to lay out the means by which the choice of small gradations by breeders allows for the development of notoriously odd variations, like the pouter pigeon, inconceivable in a state of nature. And Darwin goes on to argue that the same processes take place in the wild, where nature is the selector. But the breeder, unlike nature, is also in quest not of the fittest but of the most fashionable; and within the limits of domestication it is possible to breed variations, races, that would not survive in the wild. In sexual selection in nature, the female bird, the peahen, the female of the Argus pheasant, can push the male to the limits of variation that will allow survival. All for the sake of fashion. The irrationality that Darwin assumes in the female turns out to be an effective, if arbitrary, agent, deriving not from the forces of natural selection or instinct, but from desire, indeed, aesthetic preference. Natural selection loses out for a moment, at least, to the whims of the ladies.⁴⁰ And the ladies, it seems, have wills of their own, wills that amazingly shape the development of new species but without the adaptability that marks all evolutionary development by natural selection. While sexual selection, as Darwin explained it from the start, is a weaker force than natural selection, in Darwin’s elaboration of its workings, it becomes striking evidence that the pursuit of “fitness,” “adaptability,” via natural selection is not the only force in nature leading to evolution. Darwin even tries to demonstrate – a point that Prum elaborates by way of contemporary scientific evidence – that it does not always follow that the strongest either manages to win the female over or, having managed, helps breed the most and the strongest offspring. As Darwin notes, in many cases, “males have acquired their present structure, not from being better fitted in the struggle for existence, but from having gained an advantage over other males, and from having transmitted the advantage to their male offspring alone.”⁴¹ Wonderfully, the very sensible Darwin, arguing that many secondary sex characteristics depend on “the will, choice, and rivalry of the individuals of either sex,” concludes firmly, and against majority opinion, “we cannot doubt that, though led by instinct, they know what they are about, and consciously exert their mental and bodily powers.”⁴²

The striking thing about Darwin as he struggled to account for phenomena that couldn’t immediately be explained by natural selection, is that even in spite of his own inclinations and prejudices – his lifelong struggle to prove the reality and pervasiveness of natural selection – he did what Huxley in his automaton essay enjoined when confronted: “the only question which any wise man can ask himself, and which any honest man will ask himself, is whether a doctrine is true or false.”⁴³ Darwin “adduced” the facts and followed what he took to be indisputable evidence that seemed to belie his own beliefs.

While Darwin’s attitudes toward these phenomena are mixed and sometimes even self-contradictory, in the light of his views on sexual selection it is hard to argue what Butler so strongly believed, that he expelled mind from nature, from the world. His is no land of “hogwash,” and we should remind ourselves that Shaw did not so much blame Darwin, but the science that took Darwin’s theories to the world of ultra-Darwinism from which, indeed, intelligence is consistently expelled. Darwin is not responsible for the various ways his theories have been used, except insofar as he was himself not entirely consistent. But the full world of Darwinian evolution is rich with wonders and with life, and while he certainly tried to separate himself from Lamarck at every opportunity, let me dare to suggest that as one reads his arguments for sexual selection, his stunning explanation of how the ball and socket designs on the Argus pheasant’s wings might have developed, it is hard not to believe that he had just a touch of Lamarck in him, the Lamarck who affirmed evolutionary development “according to which living forms developed gradually and contingently, driven by their own inner agencies.”⁴⁴