The Outward Mind

Reviewed by: The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature by Benjamin Morgan Katelin Krieg (bio) Benjamin Morgan, The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017, 368 pp. $105.00 cloth. In recent years, some scholars have expressed concern that burgeoning interest in fields like neuroaesthetics, cognitive literary studies, and digital humanities is indicative of a large-scale turn away from traditional modes of humanistic study toward scientific—or, less charitably, scientistic—methods of inquiry. Benjamin Morgan's The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature offers a timely and welcome corrective to the assumption that the incorporation of scientific methods in humanistic study is a relatively recent development by calling our attention to an overlooked branch of scientific thinking in Victorian aesthetics. Morgan neither blindly endorses scientific methods nor rejects them as inapplicable to objects of humanistic inquiry, but rather looks to Victorian scientific aesthetics to formulate a third model for the interaction between scientific and humanistic modes of thought: mutual defamiliarization of our categories of analysis. Morgan's book not only offers a reassessment of the disciplinary landscape of the Victorian age, but also offers viable new ways of thinking about disciplinary relationships in our own moment. Morgan's wide-ranging study builds on a growing body of scholarship concerning the relation of literature to the Victorian sciences of mind. For Rick Rylance, Sally Shuttleworth, and Nicholas Dames, however, the representative of the "literature" side of the equation is most often the realist novel. Morgan importantly extends our focus to the realm of aesthetic theory. He offers a methodological intervention, as well, by treating science and literature "as rhetorics that might be flexibly and widely called on," and not "domains or fields" of knowledge (p. 17). Morgan focuses on shared ways of speaking about and understanding aesthetic experience, rather than, [End Page 244] for example, tracing a set of concepts across disciplinary divides. This approach avoids either collapsing or reifying disciplinary divides, which have been the major drawbacks of the "One" and "Two Culture" models that have dominated science and literature studies. To foreground these "shared rhetorics," Morgan instead draws on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory and Jacques Rancière's notion of a "scene" in a series of case studies that foreground "concepts at work" (pp. 16–17). Each chapter of The Outward Mind centers on a key category of aesthetic thought (form, response, materiality, practice, or empathy) and explores it as a "vector" of interaction between scientific and aesthetic thought. For the Victorians that populate Morgan's book, aesthetic experience troubled the long-held distinction between material objects and immaterial mind. These thinkers stressed the material and embodied nature of aesthetic experience, which is the focus of part 1 of the book, "Toward a Science of Beauty." Part 2, "The Outward Turn," shows how this blurring allowed aesthetic objects to take on qualities formerly reserved for the human mind. Chapter 1 offers an alternative lineage of aesthetic thought, directing attention away from John Ruskin's organic, social aesthetics toward a relatively unfamiliar group of Victorian intellectuals who sought rationalist accounts of beauty through mathematics and geometry. However, these thinkers simultaneously and paradoxically stressed the sensuousness of aesthetic experience (in contrast, say, to Ruskin's theoria). George Field, the color manufacturer favored by Constable, Turner, and the Pre-Raphaelite painters; David Ramsay Hay, interior decorator and founder of the Edinburgh Aesthetic Club; and Club members John Addington Symonds Sr., Thomas Laycock, and E. S. Dallas all understood "form" as mathematical patterning. In their work, they simultaneously advocate two mutually exclusive ways of discerning these patterns: careful study and automatic apprehension as an "ambient effect of a lived environment" (p. 30). Morgan illustrates this persistent tension between mathematical rationalism and sensual perception with Field's richly illustrated quartos, including the popular Chromatics; or, an Essay on the Analogy and Harmony of Colours (1817). The books' material form worked against his rationalist account contained within, as they foregrounded beauty's sensory effects. Similarly, the Edinburgh Aesthetics Club measured human bodies in an attempt to discover the harmonious mathematical patterns constituting beauty. As a result, bodies

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