Prelude: Polarities: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Theory of life (1817-1818) as Victorian cosmology -- ch. 1. Foundations: John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte -- ch. 2. Applied science -phrenology and evolution: George Combe and Robert Chambers -- ch. 3. New faiths -the philosophy of necessity, "force", and mesmerism: Charles Bray and Harriet Martineau -- ch. 4. Synthetic philosophy: George Henry Lewes and Herbert Spencer -- Finale: "The many in the one, the one in the many": George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-1872) as Victorian cosmology.
