The impassive novel: "brain-building" in Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean

The histories of aestheticism and the modern sciences share surprising origins in nineteenth-century conceptions of the mind, brain, and feeling. But scholarship has yet to comprehend the twin roots of aestheticism and science in full, with the efect of obscuring some of the period's most creative and politically important legacies. Witness Walter Pater: Critic, novelist, and lead theorist of the aesthetic movement in Britain. Scholars have hailed Pater as championing literature's power to release readers from the brute forces of the material world. Pater's rejection of science-his disrespect for "the fact-based methods of scientiic reason" (Teukolsky) and "the complacent law of reason" (Donoghue 5)-seems vital to his signiicance. He appears to anticipate a formalist poetics of literature, celebrating the experience of beautiful feelings for its own sake and promising liberation from an ascendant reign of quantiication, objectivity, and instrumental reason. But we misread Pater by branding him an iconoclastic idealist. Far from polarizing aestheticism and science, Pater systematically structured the two as interdependent categories, casting them within a shared understanding of beauty and its transformative ethical ends.