If the scientific pursuit of beauty should appear an eccentric, fruitless, or simply wrongheaded quest, Benjamin Morgan's The Outward Mind supplies a brilliant account of its central importance to theories of art in the nineteenth century. In setting out this history in magnificent detail, Morgan both revises and enriches our understanding of the development of Victorian aesthetic theory, including writers usually thought to be remote from (or hostile to) the claims of scientific materialism, such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. As Morgan suggests with his appealing title, the relationship between mind and matter lay at the heart of the issue. “To arrive at a science of beauty,” he points out, “was to arrive at a science of the human being as an organism susceptible to stimuli, including aesthetic stimuli” (128). Empiricists, traditionally at least, had been accused since the eighteenth century of favoring mechanistic explanations of mental events while still running the risk of dissolving the world into fleeting ideas. Idealists, on the other hand, were seen as prone to unscientific speculation and mystification of the inner life. What Morgan demonstrates so compellingly here is not just the limitation of viewing Victorian thought through these familiar poles but the value of an “outward” model of mind—one that links art and science—to surprising number of critics and theorists of the age.

Outwardness—as opposed to the more common understanding of an inward mind—happens to resonate with the views of some leading philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists today, such as Andy Clark and other proponents of an “extended” or distributed notion of mind. Morgan nods in their direction but does not labor the point, chiefly because his purpose is rigorous intellectual historiography, and in any case his arguments do not lead toward the same kind of view, strictly speaking (the extended mind position being, in one sense, a functionalist claim about objects or processes serving as vehicles for the realization of thought). Part of what is meant by the outward nature of mind is the fact of its embodiment and the ways in which ideas of material-mental embodiment (waves, currents, sensations, force) play a decisive role in the language and concepts that made up Victorian debates over art and beauty. While more scholarly research now acknowledges why the embodied mind mattered to writers from Tennyson to Eliot to Hardy—and, of course, not forgetting 1860s sensation fiction—the originality of Morgan's thesis is that materialism reached much further into the period's critical consciousness than has previously been recognized. In a further move, he suggests that many of the Victorian poets, novelists, critics, scientists, and philosophers who contributed to this increasingly mainstream view of consciousness and art held some version of the complementary view that the physical world was “enminded” (19).

Exactly what an enminded world entails is hard to discern, despite the incredible wealth of detailed illustration that Morgan provides. From one perspective, it refers to more than the scientifically grounded recognition found throughout Victorian literary culture that minds depend deeply on the physical structure of a body that supports and shapes them: it says that “matter itself bears qualities of mind” (147). But quite often Morgan's point returns, somewhat more modestly, to the physical connections (such as atoms) that made it possible to bridge between mind and object in aesthetic theories. A key chapter discussing Pater's fictional portraits (not just Marius the Epicurean) achieves this by sustaining a rewarding and unexpected comparison between impressionism and the earlier phenomenon of the sensation novel: Pater “modulates into a different key the somatic effects that had animated sensation fiction at the level of plot twenty years prior” (157). Later, the emphasis falls on Vernon Lee and the development of embodied empathy (in one sense a kind of unconscious bodily mirroring of an external object's form). These most certainly are instances of attunement underpinning different models of formalism, if less convincingly also cases of enminded matter.

As Morgan notes early on, reflex and unconscious action were decisive features of this intellectual landscape. According to unconscious cerebration and adjacent theories, traffic between minds and objects could pass beneath conscious understanding. In pages of densely crowded argument, The Outward Mind weaves an intricate story that connects scientific and literary theorists of the Victorian unconscious and nervous system, including W. B. Carpenter, E. S. Dallas, Grant Allen, James Sully, and Lee herself, as well as psychologists like Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, G. H. Lewes, and Henry Maudsley. Their theories “took as their basic unit a semiconscious interaction between an embodied mind and an environmental stimulus” (107), such that beauty could be grounded in biological (and evolutionary) pleasure. Artworks could be defined as formal structures prompting—barely within our awareness—instinctive physiological gratification. A reader familiar with George Eliot's essay “Notes on Form in Art” may not be greatly surprised to discover this, but it is less widely appreciated that the undergraduate notebooks of Oscar Wilde, for example, contain “surprisingly earnest” (257) references to Wilde's reading of British and German mental philosophy and mid-century scientific materialists like William Whewell, Thomas Huxley, and John Tyndall. Perhaps the strongest chapter, Morgan's on William Morris takes up the argument about tactility and form in reference to the materiality of books and print designs. Again, emphasis falls on what sensory bodies (and sometimes unminded ones) do—“idling, concentrating, and noticing” (177)—but in unison rather than alone, as Morgan subtly recovers the opportunities for ideological disagreement among thinkers of this kind. Morris's case shows the outward mind rebelling against the purely individualistic mind posited by the likes of Herbert Spencer, and hence of the world in more than just a psychological sense.

Morgan has spritely relish for empirical approaches to art and the oddities of some Victorian aesthetic experimenters. The dazzling range of the research on display, as he moves agilely between canonical literary figures and critical history and sometimes forgotten nineteenth-century scientists, is remarkable. And it shows that if scientific approaches to art often tend toward ahistorical generalization and formalism, the precise ways in which Victorian thought produced and debated such knowledge were not just influential but drove mainstream aesthetic theory. In sum, the achievement of The Outward Mind might not actually be its take on outwardness—the “exteriorization of mind, consciousness, and the self into networks of matter, sensations, and objects” (6)—but rather the scale and seriousness of its interdisciplinary reassessment of aesthetic tradition in nineteenth-century Britain (and well into the twentieth century). Authoritative and crisply readable, The Outward Mind is a major contribution to Victorian studies.