The Physiology of Common Life was published by William Blackwood in two volumes in 1859–1860, and it is Lewes’s most successful work of popular science — a book that explains the basic processes of human physiology (digestion, respiration, circulation, sensation, sleep, death) in language that any educated reader can follow.
Lewes’s method is to begin with the familiar and work toward the scientific: he starts with what everyone knows from daily experience (hunger, fatigue, pain, the sensation of cold) and explains the physiological mechanisms that produce these experiences. The approach is both democratic (assuming no prior scientific knowledge) and rigorous (drawing on the latest research in physiology and chemistry).
The book was widely read and widely praised — even by professional scientists who might have been expected to resent a non-specialist’s intrusion into their territory. Its influence on George Eliot’s fiction is significant: the physiological understanding of human nature that Lewes developed in this book informed Eliot’s psychological realism, her treatment of the body as the ground of consciousness, and her refusal to separate mental from physical life.
Collecting The Physiology of Common Life
First edition (William Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1859–60): Two volumes, cloth bindings.
Market values:
- First edition, two volumes: $60–$150
- Later editions: $10–$25