GEORGE HENRY LEWES. 743 



all charitable institutions and associations to give information of all 

 assistance rendered by them to individuals living in the district. 



Through this Intelligence Bureau reliable personal knowledge of 

 every applicant for hospital-relief could be obtained. We fully ap- 

 preciate the great difficulty of organizing and uniting voluntary 

 charities in this country, where there are so many different religious 

 sects ; but by establishing such a system as the above much could 

 be done toward distributing help where it is really needed, and tow- 

 ard preventing indisci-irninate charity, and in detecting impostors. To 

 avoid the injurious moral effects of hospitals on the characters of the 

 inmates, and to prevent such bad sanitary conditions in hospitals as 

 are sure to result in retarding cures, and often in the generation of 

 fatal hospital-diseases, it is necessary to have hospitals constructed 

 and managed in accordance with the teachings of sanitary science. 



T 



GEORGE HENRY LEWES. 



HIS versatile thinker, known to science by his " Seaside Studies" 

 -*- and his "Physiology of Common Life" works of much origi- 

 nality as well as by his "History of Philosophy" and his "Prob- 

 lems of Life and Mind," in which he puts forth independent views on 

 scientific methodology, was born in London, April 18, 1817. At an 

 early age he was sent to the Continent of Europe to receive an educa- 

 tion, but returned while still a lad, and was then placed under the 

 tuition of Dr. Burney, at Greenwich. 



The influence of his residence abroad, during the impressionable 

 period of boyhood, is seen in a greater degree of vivacity than is 

 usual among his countrymen. On leaving school young Lewes be- 

 came a clerk in a mercantile house, but, as his tastes inclined him 

 rather to a literary and scientific than a business career, he left the 

 counting-house and took up the study of anatomy and physiology. 

 His interest in these sciences appears to have sprung purely from a 

 thirst for knowledge, as he did not purpose to become a physician. 

 As early as 1836 he had in contemplation a treatise on the philosophy 

 of mind, in which the doctrines of the Scotch metaphysicians Reid, 

 Stewart, and Brown were to be physiologically interpreted, and, 

 during the following year, he gave a course of lectures upon this sub- 

 ject. The investigations made at this time were destined to be sus- 

 pended for a while, but later to be resumed and pushed forward into 

 the most difficult provinces of philosophical inquiry. The years 1838 

 and 1839 he spent in Germany, devoting himself with characteristic 

 assiduity to the study of literature and philosophy. Besides ac- 

 quiring a mastery of the German language, he gained an intimate 



