Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;This thesis examines the similarities in George Eliot and John Stuart Mill's handling of their deterministic convictions. Both George Eliot and Mill approached determinism according to a structure of needs which I have called liberal positivism. On the one hand, because George Eliot and Mill's commitment to a deterministic view of human life is very much a substitution for religious belief, their impulse is radically to question social order. On the other hand, they were working at a time when an expanding human science promoted the move towards positive inclusion. Liberal positivists dealt with the question of determinism by exploiting what may be termed the shape or dynamics of process, one punctuated by gaps. This emerges in various ways in the writings of J. S. Mill, George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, G. H. Lewes, and Auguste Comte. ;Chapter I examines the biographical relations between George Eliot and John Stuart Mill, and other liberal positivists. Chapter II firstly looks at G. H. Lewes' philosophical position as regards Mill, and proposes that, despite the differences, all liberal positivists dealt with causation and exploited the dynamics of process. I examine at length the structure of liberal positivist needs and their relationship to determinism. The dynamics of process and their effect on determinism are examined in the work of Comte, a popular writer amongst liberal positivists. A short reference to a twentieth century Marxist debate confirms the facility with which these dynamics may be used in questions of determinism and human agency. ;Chapter III examines John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic as a particularly lucid expression of liberal positivist causal understanding. Mill's methods of scientific research are shown to use the dynamics of process and gap, and his emphasis on particular causal analysis suggests the possibility of the effects of narrative itself on determinism. Chapter IV uses many of the suggestions made in Chapter III to examine George Eliot's Middlemarch and the way in which narrative handles story according to liberal positivist needs. ;I conclude, briefly, that the performative aspect of the exploitation of the dynamics of process and gap may explain the marked silence or indifference that exists between liberal positivists on the question of determinism