A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

106.
took over the role of reason as an arbiter of the feelings and that this
lessened the risk of a moral free-far-all. His answer to the charge that
moral principles have a universal and law-like character in comparison
with feelings which are particular and variable vms to agree that if
there is to be a stability in the distinction between right and ?;rong,
then there must be a consistency in human nature. He found this consisteney
in the fact that man was "on balance more of a social being than
not" and that his actions, therefore, 'were more likely to maintain society
than to destroy it. 33 The importance of man's social role was, as
we have seen, very much a part of nineteenth century discussions of the
moral sense. 'rhe two main contributions to the development 'of moral
philosophy in our time of those who submitted the claim that man is
possessed of a moral sense were that they stressed the notion that
\!
"morality assumes the value of society and is incomprehensible apart
from this propositiont' and their insistence that "feeling has a place in
morality." 34 The following quotation from George Eliot's ess?y on Young
reminds us how important moral feeling was to her. She claims that "in
proportion as morality is emotional, it will exhibit itself in direct
sympathetic feeling and action, and not as the recognition of a rule.
Love does not say, 'I ought to love'--it loves. Pity does not say, 'It
is right to be pitiful'--it pities. Justice does not say, 'I am bound
to be just' --it feels justly." 35
By this brief incursion into eighteenth century moral philosophy I
have wanted to show the continuity of moral theories between one century
and the next. The theory of the moral sense is vulnerable to certain
kinds of criticism and the way in which Hume, in particular, dealt vlith
these criticisms adumbrates some of the difficulties faced b;,{ _George
Eliot and her contemporaries. They, likevlise, had to deal with the
problem of relativism if the moral sense was seen to be primarily a