Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T17:26:15.943Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Language of Discovery: William Whewell and George Eliot

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Extract

In 1861 Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) delivered his famous Lectures On the Science Of Language at the Royal Institution in London. Published the following year, this popular and influential volume provided a classical exposition for a widely accepted and comforting account of the role played by language in the creation and subsequent preservation of new knowledge. This view, based largely on German comparative philology, was embraced by George Eliot and G.H. Lewes even though it bore stiking resemblances to the lexical ideas and practise of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and William Whewell (1794–1866), representative figures of an earlier generation of philosophical Idealists – Kantians, admiring commentators on Plato, and both of them powerful defenders of the Anglican Church and Tory traditionalism. There was something about Müller's “great and delightful book” (as George Eliot called it) which appealed to distinguished Victorians of every intellectual stripe. Among the auditors at the Royal Institution were “Germano-Coleridgian” clergymen (Bishop Thirlwall, Dean Stanley F.D. Maurice), poets and philosophers (Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, the Duke of Argyle), and a distinguished group of scientists, headed by Michael Faraday. All were excited and enthusiastic, despite their very different intellectual positions. Linda Dowling suggests why:

Muller's lectures on language … were deeply reassuring. They managed to suggest that even though the new philology had reconstituted language in wholly new terms as a phonetic totality independent of representation and of human control, language somehow remained unchanged in its power to guarantee human identity and value. (“Victorian Oxford” 161)

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Aarsleff, Hans. The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967.Google Scholar
Appleman, Philip, ed. Darwin. New York: W.W. Norton, 1970.Google Scholar
Baker, George. The George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Library: An Annotated Catalog of Their Books at Dr. Williams's Library. New York: Garland, 1977.Google Scholar
Baker, William. Some George Eliot Notebooks. Salzburg: U of Salzburg, Austria, 1976 and 1980.Google Scholar
Beaty, Jerome. Middlemarch from Notebook to Novel: A Study of George Eliot's Creative Method. Illinois Studies in Literature and Language, 47. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1960.Google Scholar
Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.Google Scholar
Cannon, Susan F.Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period. New York: Dawson & Science History Publications, 1978.Google Scholar
Cannon, Walter F. [Cannon, Susan F.]. “Scientists and Broad Churchmen: An Early Victorian Intellectual Network.” Journal of British Studies 4 (1964): 6586.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cannon, Walter F. [Cannon, Susan F.]. “William Whewell, F.R.S. 1794–1866. II. Contributions to Science and Learning.” Notes and Records: Royal Society of London 19 (1964): 176–91.Google Scholar
Carroll, David. “Middlemarch and the Externality of Fact.” This Particular Web. Ed. Adam, Ian. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1975.Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, Nirad. Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor The Rt. Honourable Friedrich Max Müller, P.C., London, Chato & Windus, 1974.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. (1871)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection. (1859)Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. The Expression of The Emotions in Man and Animals. (1872)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MrsDouglas, Stair. Life and Selections from the Correspondence of William Whewell. London, 1882.Google Scholar
Dowling, Linda. “Romantic Philology and Victorian Civilization.” In Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Dowling, Linda. “Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language.” PMLA 97.2 (1982): 160–78.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Ed. Haight, Gordon S.. Riverside-Houghton Mifflin, 1956.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. Introduction, F.R. Leavis, New York, Harper, 1960.Google Scholar
Ermath, Elizabeth. “Incarnations: George Eliot's Conception of Universal Law.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 29 (1974): 273–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forbes, Duncan. The Liberal Anglican Idea of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1952.Google Scholar
Geison, Gerald A.Michael Foster and The Cambridge School of Physiology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.Google Scholar
Hare, Julius. Guesses at Truth. Second Series, London, Taylor & Walton, 1848.Google Scholar
Hulme, Hilda. “Imagery.” Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel. Ed. Hardy, Barbara. New York: Oxford UP, 1967.Google Scholar
Keefe, Robert. “Literati, Language, and Darwin.” Language and Style 19: 123–37.Google Scholar
Levine, George. “George Eliot's Hypothesis of Reality.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 35.Google Scholar
[Lewes, G.H.]. “Principles of Success in Literature.” The Fortnightly Review 1, 2. London, Chapman and Hall, 1865.Google Scholar
[Lewes, G.H.]. Problems of Life and Mind. 5 vols. London: Trubner, 1874.Google Scholar
Locke, John. Essay of Human Understanding. (1690)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mill, John Stuart. Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Vol. vii. A System of Logic, Ed. Robson, J.M.. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1973.Google Scholar
Müller, Friedrich Max. Lectures on the Science of Language Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in April, May, and June, 1861. London: Longman, Green, 1861.Google Scholar
Neufeldt, Victor A.George Eliot's Notebooks: A Transcription. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979.Google Scholar
Niebuhr, B.G.The History of Rome. 2 vols. translated by Hare, J.C. & Thirlwall, C., Cambridge, J. Taylor, 1828–32.Google Scholar
Niebuhr, B.G. “On the Sicelians in the Odyssey.” Philological Museum. Vol. 1, Cambridge, 1832.Google Scholar
Paradis, James G.T.H. Huxley: Man's Place in Nature. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 19.Google Scholar
Paradis, James G. “William Whewell's New Scientific Lexicology.” Typescript of essay read at Conference on College Composition and Communication,Minneapolis, 1979.Google Scholar
Preyer, Robert. Bentham, Coleridge and the Science of History. Bochumangendreer, Germany, H. Pöppinghaus, 1958.Google Scholar
Preyer, Robert. “The Romantic Tide Reaches Trinity: 1820–1840.” Victorian Science and Victorian Values. Ed. Paradis, James and Postlewait, Thomas. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Report.” Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. 1973. [Guide to Whewell Papers at Wrenn Library, Trinity College, Cambridge.]Google Scholar
Richards, I. A.Principles of Literary Criticism. London, Keagan Paul, 1924.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richards, I. A.Coleridge on Imagination. London, Kegan Paul, 1934.Google Scholar
Robson, R.William Whewell F.R.S. (1794–1866) I. Academic Life.” Notes and Records: Royal Society of London, 19 (12 1964), 168–76.Google Scholar
Schweber, Silvan S.The Origin of the Origin Revisited.” Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 10 (Fall 1977), 229316.Google Scholar
Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Science. New York: Cambridge UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Todhunter, Isaac. William Whewell D.D., Master of Trinity College. 2 vols. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1970.Google Scholar
Tooke, John Horne. Diversions of Purley. 2 vols. London, Thomas Tegg, 1829.Google Scholar
Whewell, William. “Aphorisms Respecting the Language of Science.” Philosophy, vol. 2, pp. 479569.Google Scholar
Whewell, William. “Comte and Positivism.” Macmillan's Magazine, vol. xiii, 03 (1866): 353–62.Google Scholar
Whewell, William. An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics.Google Scholar
Whewell, William. “Grote's Plato,” Fraser's Magazine, vol. lxxiii (04 1866), 411–23.Google Scholar
Whewell, William. History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Times, 3 vols. London, J.W. Parker, 1837.Google Scholar
Whewell, William. On the Philosophy of Discovery. Chapters Historical and Critical Including the Completion of the Third Edition of the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. London, 1860. Reprinted, New York: Burt Franklin, 1971.Google Scholar
Whewell, William. Treatise on Dynamics. Cambridge, 1834.Google Scholar
Whewell, William. William Whewell: Selected Writings on the History of Science. Ed. Elkana, Yehuda. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.Google Scholar
Whewell, William. The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded Upon Their History, 2 vols. New York, Johnson Reprint Corp., 1967 (facsimile of second edition, London 1847).Google Scholar
Wilson, David B. “Concepts of Physical Nature: John Herschel to Karl Pearson.” Nature and the Victorian Imagination. Eds. Knoepflmacher, U.C. and Tennyson, G.B.. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.Google Scholar
Winstanley, D.A.Early Victorian Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1940.Google Scholar