ABSTRACT
In Spencer's model, mind is a crucial component of evolution: cognition and its training is a guiding force at all stages of development, leading to the progressive perfection of moral powers created by the cumulative mental activity of earlier generations. As Peter Bowler argues, 'Mind has not been banished from nature; it has been incorporated into it as the guiding force of evolution'. Spencerian approaches to mind and evolution form a kind of 'shadow discourse' to the better-known Darwinian discourse: in literary studies, the compelling scholarship that has brought to light the importance of Darwinian language and ideas to novelists and writers in the nineteenth century has at the same time obscured the importance of Spencer. In nineteenth-century literature, we can see many of the central concerns of the period recast and engaged through the lens of fiction, especially questions about the place of the individual, of agency and responsibility that Spencerian philosophy raised.
