George Henry Lewes
Mind · Conduct · Experience
George Henry Lewes was born in London in 1817. A writer, philosopher and critic with wide interests in science and physiology, he became an important figure in the development of nineteenth-century thinking about the relationship between mind, body and experience.
Today he is also remembered for his long partnership with the novelist George Eliot, but his own work occupied the increasingly fertile ground between philosophy, physiology and the emerging science of psychology.
The Idea
The mind cannot be understood apart from the life that expresses it.
Lewes distrusted attempts to explain mental life through abstract philosophy alone. Thought, sensation and consciousness belonged to living human beings and therefore had to be studied through experience as well as speculation.
For Lewes, mind and body were not separate worlds. Understanding one required attention to the other.
Lewes and Owain Morgan
Lewes gives Owain something fundamental to his method: a reason to observe before he explains.
Owain is interested in what people say, but he is equally interested in how they behave. Words are part of conduct, not necessarily a transparent account of it.
A hesitation may matter. So may an unexpected change of manner, an habitual response, a sudden irritation, or a discrepancy between what somebody professes and what he actually does.
None of these things proves anything by itself. That distinction is important to Owain.
He does not regard behaviour as a collection of secret signs that can simply be decoded. He observes patterns and contradictions, then asks what might account for them. A man’s conduct may reveal something he cannot express, something he would prefer not to acknowledge, or something of which he is not yet fully conscious.
Lewes also helps Owain resist a purely mechanical understanding of human beings. Physiology matters. Sensation matters. The body matters. But so does the individual’s experience of thought and feeling.
That combination is particularly important to a Professor of Mental and Moral Science working at the end of the nineteenth century. Owain stands at a moment when questions once belonging principally to philosophy are increasingly being examined through physiology, experiment and observation.
Lewes allows those worlds to meet. For Owain, the consequence is simple but profound:
Conduct must be observed before motive can be inferred.
The Unresolved Question
Observation has its own danger.
If behaviour reveals something of the mind, how confidently can one move from what is visible to what is hidden?
A hesitation may indicate deception. It may equally indicate fear, embarrassment, uncertainty or nothing of significance at all.
Owain therefore cannot treat observation as proof.
Behaviour is evidence, but evidence requires interpretation.
The more carefully he observes another person, the more conscious he must remain of the possibility that the error lies not in what he has seen, but in what he has concluded from it.
Further Reading
The Physiology of Common Life (1859–60) — Lewes’s exploration of physiology written for a general readership, reflecting his determination to connect scientific understanding with ordinary human experience.
Problems of Life and Mind (1874–79) — his major investigation of philosophy, psychology, physiology and the nature of consciousness.
A Biographical History of Philosophy (1845–46) — Lewes’s history of philosophical thought, subsequently revised and republished during his lifetime.
The Essence
Lewes helps move Owain away from the idea that the mind can be understood through introspection or abstract reasoning alone.
If thought belongs to a living person, then understanding thought requires attention to how that person lives, responds and acts.
For Owain, the mind may be hidden from direct view, but it is never entirely separate from conduct.