In pursuit of a scientific culture

One of the preoccupations of Victorian writers was the search for a philosophical replacement of romanticism. This book traces the course of that search. Peter Dale centers his analysis on positivism. In clear opposition to romanticism, positivism was militantly realistic and antiromantic. Its realism was based on observation of the structures of the natural world and on the scientific method that provided the way to understand those structures. Positivism became the dominant ideology of the later Victorian age; Dale argues that because of its influence on both practical and contemplative life, it was the true intellectual successor to romanticism. Dale approaches positivism through the important writings of George Henry Lewes, but extends his focus to include the effect of positivism on such writers as George Eliot, Leslie Stephen, Charles Darwin, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and others, in an attempt to show an ongoing engagement between science and the imagination.