A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

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mention.
He shares with George Eliot a recognition of how far remorse
I
can act as a spur to moral growth. It can either be remorse because of a'
sense of falling short of a personal ideal or it can i!1trude because of
a disparaging judgement from some trusted person.
We have thus seen that George Eliot and her contemporaries shared a
common language of moral discourse, stressin~
above all else, sympathy
as the affective component of the moral senne. This sense was believed
to be partially inherited but refined and developed by individual experience.
Let us nOVI examine briefly the philosophic background of the
term "moral sense" and of the notion of morality as a function of the
feelings rather than of the reason.
Darwin's and Lewes' use of the term "moral sense" does not constitute
an innovation on their part. In fact, considering that Lewes' acceptance
of hereditary tendencies allows him to concede an inherited moral disposition,
which operated in a way that was little different from the
earlier notion of innate moral ideas, it is rather ironic that the
term "moral sense" originally entered the philosophic language of the
eighteenth century as a defence against the "bogey of relativism" 28
which was seen as the inevitable outcome of Locke's refutation of the
theory of those same innate ideas. The empiricists held that all ideas,
including moral ideas, are obtained from the ,input of sensory impressions.
Sentimentalists, such as Hutcheson, Shaftesbury and Hume, ruled
out reason as a motivating force in hnman action. Hume, for example,
writes that "reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions."
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How then do we come by moral truths? If we have no innate moral
ideas, what certainty is there that we '1.'-5...11
develop mozoal sensibilities
at all? Shaftesbury, faced with this dilemma, searched anxiously for an
assurance that "in the course of normal expl~rience,
the ideas of God,