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MYTH_KEY

                                             December 4, 2021


    In George Elliot's "Middlemarch" (1871-2),
    "The Key to All Myths" is a fictional
    scholarly project An ambitious project by the
    aging scholar Casaubon-- his life's work,
    though doomed to be left uncompleted.

    Casaubon was married to the young heroine of
    "Middlemarch", and so he is inevitably
    presumed to be at least loosely modeled on
    Herbert Spencer, the older partner of the
    young George Elliot.


Quoting June Scott Szirotny's piece from 2001,
"Edward Casaubon and Herbert Spencer":                https://georgeeliotreview.org/items/show/546

   "Casaubon, thinking, in his "Hey to all Mythologies",
   to trace the origin of all myths to a single culture,
   but not able to read the necessary German works,
   produces only a theory that 'floated among flexible
   conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which
   seemed strong because of likeness in sound, until it
   was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible'
   (xlvii, 469-70)."

   "Likewise, Spencer, who, as George Eliot recognized
   was not a great reader (GEL, III:338), bases his
   _Synthetic Philosophy_, another ambitious synthesis
   of knowledge, largely on _a priori_ assumptions.
   Huxley quipped, 'Spencer's idea of a tragedy is a
   deduction killed by a fact'. [16] "

   "With little tolerance for knowledge not rooted in
   facts, George Eliot repeatedly complained of
   Spencer's disposition to generalize without
   sufficient regard for verifiable evidence.  In 1852,
   describing what she called 'a *proof*-hunting
   expedition' on which she accompanied him, she wrote,
   'Of course, if the flowers didn't correspond to the
   theories, we said "*tant pis pour les fleurs"' (GEL,
   II: 40). ... In 1877, she complained that 'his mind
   both "spontanément and systématiquement" rejects
   everything that cannot be wrought into the web of his
   own production' (GEL, VI:426). "

                                   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer

Wikipedia-- which on occasion does
better than the Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy-- on Herbert Spencer:       The Stanford Encyclopedia of
                                          Philosophy article seems a
   "The basis for Spencer's appeal to     self-conscious attempt at
   many of his generation was that he     rehabilitating Spencer,
   appeared to offer a ready-made         defending him from charges
   system of belief which could           of "social darwinism".
   substitute for conventional
   religious faith at a time when               If you haven't heard those
   orthodox creeds were crumbling               charges yet, it has a "what
   under the advances of modern                 are they going on about?"
   science. Spencer's philosophical             feel to it.
   system seemed to demonstrate that
   it was possible to believe in the
   ultimate perfection of humanity on
   the basis of advanced scientific
   conceptions such as the first law
   of thermodynamics and biological
   evolution."

   "In essence Spencer's philosophical
   vision was formed by a combination
   of deism and positivism."

                                                       AUGUSTE_COMTE
Continuing with Wikipedia:

   "Spencer followed Comte in aiming for the
   unification of scientific truth; it was in
   this sense that his philosophy aimed to be
   'synthetic.' Like Comte, he was committed to
   the universality of natural law, the idea
   that the laws of nature applied without
   exception, to the organic realm as much as
   to the inorganic, and to the human mind as
   much as to the rest of creation."

   "... Even in his writings on ethics, he
   held that it was possible to discover
   'laws' of morality that had the status of
   laws of nature while still having
   normative content, a conception which can
   be traced to George Combe's Constitution
   of Man. "


   "... Spencer sought the unification of
   scientific knowledge in the form of the
   reduction of all natural laws to one
   fundamental law, the law of evolution."


In the fifty years since Middlemarch, the intellectual
world had not progressed very much, hence the success of
Lévi-Strauss.

             LEVI-STRAUSS





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