Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880

Rylance, Rick

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198122838.001.0001

Cited by 248 publications

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“…90 As I aim to show, the Victorians had a key term for advancing this social psychology, and that term was habit. The subsequent dilution of the term's meaning -its contemporary linkage with notions of addiction and questions of the individual will -marks an odd effect of the replacement and co -option of physiologically based theories of mind in the nineteenth century by psychoanalysis.…”

Section: Counter -Traditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Habit in the English Novel, 1850–1900

O'Toole¹

2013

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Section: Counter -Traditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Habit in the English Novel, 1850–1900

O'Toole¹

2013

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“…At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Henry Holland (1788-1873), Charles Darwin's cousin, perceptively recognized that what is sometimes perceived as progress in knowledge can simply be the effect of a performance in language (Rylance 2000). Holland, like a number of other theorists of science in that period, held the post-Kantian notion that knowledge was not an unmediated perception of things, but it was rather to be understood as the result of the interpretive powers of language.…”

Section: Developing Theories On Mind and Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Lady Welby: Significs and the interpretive mind

Neubauer

2013

Semiotica

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Victorian epistemological debates surrounding the role of language and the relation between thought processes and knowledge, and therefore consciousness, were the legacy of the linguistic turn that took place at the end of the eighteenth century when the philosophical, a priori method of understanding language was abandoned for a historical, a posteriori one. In the nineteenth century, language was no longer conceived as a fixed form, but as a growing and developing medium. It was this shift in understanding that gave a model of thought for Darwin's evolutionary theory and that afforded new depths of investigation. It was against this backdrop that Lady Welby elaborated her significs theory of language, sign, and meaning. She focused on the interrelation between signs, meaning, and value, not only at the level of verbal language, but throughout the universe to show a fundamental continuity between the natural and cultural world as she believed that the universe is permeated with meaning.

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“…49 There were other objections too, from those who saw the machine-like body/brain imagined by the scientific naturalists as a chilling counterpart to Carlyle's lasting nightmare vision of modern man grown mechanical in head and heart. 50 These, usually religious, opponents railed against the 'eminent atomic, molecular chiefs' of the secular and scientific world. 51 Their anticipated accusations are the subject of the closing sections of Huxley's essay where he rehearses the charges of fatalism, materialism and atheism he anticipates will be levelled against him and dismisses them as unfounded.…”

Section: Huxley and Conscious Automatamentioning

confidence: 99%

Sexual Selection, Automata and Ethics in George Eliot'sThe Mill on the Flossand Olive Schreiner'sUndineandFrom Man to Man

Burdett

2009

Journal of Victorian Culture

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Sidgwick, the exercise of a mysterious 'I', the basis of formed ethical will, is what most clearly distinguishes humans from other species, but this was a distinction that evolutionary thinking was rendering increasingly fragile. For Darwin in the Descent, ethical or socially responsible behaviour is the product of evolutionary forces, and not an instance of the special human privileges and burdens endowed by a divine creator. But this biological account raised its own problems in relation to a modern yearning for freedom and self-fulfilment that was particularly sharply felt by women seeking to transform traditional gendered expectations about their lives. It is in novels that this tension is most tellingly explored.From the 1870s on, Sidgwick's 'mysterious' human will and the moral capacities with which it is associated came under direct attack from the new physiological understanding of mind.Volitional consciousness itself came to be seen as a metaphysical fiction in theories which threatened to collapse long-held assumptions about self and consciousness, motive and action.

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Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880

Cited by 248 publications

References 0 publications

Habit in the English Novel, 1850–1900

Habit in the English Novel, 1850–1900

Lady Welby: Significs and the interpretive mind

Sexual Selection, Automata and Ethics in George Eliot'sThe Mill on the Flossand Olive Schreiner'sUndineandFrom Man to Man

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