This work examines the writings of Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, James Hamilton, Eliot Mill, Arnold, Pater and Newman, and makes reference to Hawthorne, Dickinson, Spencer, Carlyle, and Hardy, all in the context of the dominant intellectual movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. The thought of Hamilton, Newman, Mill and Spencer is contrasted with that of 20th century figures like the philosophers Frege, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, the neo-Darwinist Monod and Dawkins, and critics such as Eagleton and Miller. The author argues for a traditional view, deriving largely from Newman, of the unity and autonomy of individual human beings. He suggests that science and literature depend on persons being actively and resposively present to each other, that freedom is always interpersonal, and that in great literature, we can discover the workings of this deep mutuality and its enemies.