A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

100.
utility organised and consolidated through all past generations of the
human race, have been producing corresponding nervous modifications,
which by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in us
certain faculties of moral intuition--certain emotions responding to
right and v/rong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual
12
experiences of utility. tt
In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin devotes a whole chapter to "The
- --
Moral Sense", ooncentrating, as we might expect, on the biological rather
than on the sociological origins of this facu~~ in man. He writes, however,
as I have already shown, more diffidently in the field of anthropology
than in the more clear-cut scientific work !h.!::.0rigin ~ Species. VIe
have, for example, this proferred hypothesis. "The following proposition
seems to me in a high degree probable--namely, that any animal 'l?fhatever,
d'
endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections
being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience,
as soon as its intellectual powers had become_as well, or nearly
as well developed, as in man. 1I 13
Darwin,
in this work, sounds a triumphant note)showing that he, like
Spencer, could not totally resist an implicit teleological interpretation
of evolution, which thereby becomes not just a process of change, but a
process of change towards a value-laden goal. He.writes that "looldng to
future generations, there is no cause to fear that the social instincts
will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger,
becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. In this case the struggle between
our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will
be triumphant." 14 This is a very optimistic, well-nigh utopian conclusion;
we must not fail to notice, however, the use of the future
tense and the qualifying "perhaps." In this chapter on "The Moral Sense ll ,
Darwin brings evolutionary evidence to refute J. S. Mill and Alexander