Robinson’s discussion of Freud reminds us that scientific theories and hypotheses are not products of some ahistorical objectivity; they are ideas firmly bound to the culture and history in which they arise. Turning to thinkers who preceded Freud, she points out the shaky “parascientific reasoning” that led Malthus to his conclusions regarding human population growth and Darwin to describe The Descent of Man. It should not escape our notice that privilege and colonialism were well served by these theories that made the inevitability of suffering in the competition for limited resources into a scientific principle. As the author wryly puts it, their “contemporaries saw clearly enough what the implications must be for social policy, that the impulse to intervene in the suffering of the poor, an impulse that was under formidable control among them in any case, could, if acted upon, yield only greater suffering.”

For all the weighty subject matter, Robinson’s wry wit is evident throughout, whether she is detecting a “whiff of phrenology” in yet another neuroscientist’s trotting out of poor Phineas Gage, the railroad worker whose upbeat personality underwent a change for the worse while he survived for thirteen years with a spike through his brain, or asking us to imagine “a row of schoolroom modernists hanging beside the schoolroom poets, Marx, Nietzsche, and Wellhausen beside Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier” and then to notice the “marked similarity among them of pince-nez and cravat.” Modern thought, it turns out, “has been modern for a very long time.”

Works of fiction like hers are proof, quotable proof, to put it simply, of the reality of individual human subjectivity. They make ‘the felt life of the mind’ real in the world.

Her book points out what would be obvious to anyone unacquainted with the modern view that “we don’t know our own minds,” but that “certain well-qualified others do know them.”

I have not done justice to Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind. I haven’t mentioned her genial laceration of gene- (and cultural meme-) based explanations of human behavior, nor her very rational demonstration that a theory of mind that can only deal with the complexity of its subject by denying its reality is, by scientific standards, a pretty inadequate theory. I have hardly mentioned the modern debate between science and religion, in which, as her whole book demonstrates, neither science nor religion is adequately or even accurately represented.

Marilynne Robinson has written two previous works of formidable nonfiction (Mother Country and The Death of Adam). She will forgive me, I hope, for believing that, of the two great prose projects, fiction is the greater miracle. For me, her astonishing novels — Housekeeping and Gilead and Home — offer the most compelling argument for her premise in Absence of Mind. Works of fiction like hers are proof, quotable proof, to put it simply, of the reality of individual human subjectivity. They make “the felt life of the mind” real in the world. They offer a clear demonstration that, far from being marginalized or suppressed, “the testimony of individual consciousness” is, in fact, the surest path to a greater understanding of who we are, how we might have come to be, and where we go from here.