附註:Includes bibliographical references (pages 237-244) and index.
The impact of evolutionary thought -- The evolutionary universe in fiction -- The lure of mechanistic science -- Science and the supernatural -- Science as a religious quest -- From mechanism to mysticism.
摘要:In Mechanism and Mysticism, Louis J. Zanine provides the first full-length study of Theodore Dreiser's interest in modern scientific research and of the impact of scientific ideas on the thought and work of a writer who would gain fame as a deterministic naturalist, but who would end his life as a mystic pantheist. Dreiser was raised in a household dominated by the fanatical Catholic faith of his father and the superstitious beliefs of his mother. In 1894, having rejected the orthodox Christianity of his upbringing, he underwent a significant intellectual and spiritual revolution, precipitated by his discovery of the evolutionary writings of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. The concept of an evolutionary universe provided Dreiser with the philosophical framework for the pessimistic naturalism of his early novels (Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier). In the next decades, his discovery of scientific mechanism would reveal a universe that was a well-ordered machine, and it is in the context of Dreiser's reading of the mechanistic philosophy of Jacques Loeb and others that Zanine examines An American Tragedy and The Hand of the Potter. The philosophy of mechanism, combined with his understanding of evolutionary thought, provided Dreiser with a scientific world view that gave him a coherent system of beliefs about human beings' place in the universe, their origins, and the bases of their behavior. Yet Zanine demonstrates that Dreiser never fully adopted the stark materialism or atheism of the mechanists. He continued to have a deeply superstitious side, and a number of experiences with fortune tellers, seances, ouija boards, and spirit apparitions convinced him of the existence of some controlling supernatural force in the universe. During the same years that he was espousing the principles of mechanistic philosophy in correspondence and conversation with Jacques Loeb, Zanine shows, Dreiser was also drawn into speculations about the supernatural through his fri
