Spirit Becomes Matter

This title explains how, under the influence of the new 'mental materialism' that held sway in mid-Victorian scientific and medical thought, the Brontës and George Eliot in their greatest novels broached a radical new form of novelistic moral psychology, one that was no longer bound by the idealising presuppositions of traditional Christian moral ideology, and which is closely related to Nietzsche's physiological theory of will to power (itself directly influenced by Herbert Spencer).