Strange triangle of conversations last night with humans and Chat-GPT.
Emily Thomas, who I know only from her Bergson interview of Emily Herring at Durham Uni, shared a scanned extract from “an old philosophy book” on X/Twitter.
My interest was piqued by the fact that a lot of recent scientific history of left-right (human) brain hemispheric behaviour started with practical experimentation on caged birds, and Iain McGilchrist not only uses those sources in his 21st century work, but he uses them as his example captured in the animation of his hypothesis. So was curious which “old philosopher” had made that reference?
Emily had forgotten where she’d taken it from, and had shared it simply as an amusing index entry. So I asked Chat-GPT:
Can you find an older philosophy book whose index includes:
“Birds, effect of removing cerebral hemispheres of, 108;”
To which the answer was “George Henry Lewes, The Physical Basis of Mind (2nd series of Problems of Life and Mind, originally 1877; the U.S. Houghton, Mifflin edition you often see is dated 1891)”
Bingo. So I sourced the only Kindle edition (only £0.49p) and proceeded to read, (very good) more on which later. Curiously, that edition didn’t include the alphabetical index?
With Chat-GPT’s help we sourced a Project Gutenberg plain-text copy – no index – presumably the same source of the Kindle edition. Also confirms it’s the 1891 Houghton and Mifflin second edition.
Also sourced a couple of on-line scanned-PDF copies:
Internet Archive / California Digital Library scan of
The Physical Basis of Mind: Being the Second Series of Problems of Life and Mind
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891 – no index.
Wikimedia Copy and Hathi Trust Copy …
… all the same original scanned image – no index.
Chat-GPT couldn’t actually find a copy with the index, which begs the question how it made the original find?
Anyway – driven by curiosity … cut a long story short …
There are lots of modern “classic book” hard-copy publications out there, but I must suspect they all have the same fault from the same scanned and text transcription sources. “Used” copies of original 1877 and 1891 publications are in the £500 bracket!
So add to British Library reading list for my next visit.
(And don’t forget to scan the index!)
And – George Henry Lewes was the life partner of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). They were a London “Salon” in their 19th century time before the Bloomsbury Set in the 20th. Comte & Feuerbach → Lewes & Eliot → Leslie Stephen → Virginia Woolf / Bloomsbury. A chain of humane rationalists, each pushing the boundaries of what “science” could mean in human terms. (I must wonder where William Godwin, Shelley and the British and German (Goethe et al – see Andrea Wulf) “Romantics” fit the evolution of thought.)
And – actually reading the indexless Lewes, without using the word “Entropy“, 1877 Lewes talks a lot about life/body and brain/mind overcoming the “friction” losses of the physical world. Roughly – per Chat-GPT – Carnot (ideal engine) → Clausius (entropy) → Kelvin (dissipation) → Lewes (life & mind) → Spencer (cosmic evolution) → Huxley (ethics of entropy) → Poincaré / Boltzmann (statistical salvation). All that AND Goethe AND the hemispheric hypothesis!
Mind blown! It’s all there. Onwards and upward.
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