A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

115.
act on it, then obviously it is inconceivable that they should choose to
do otherwise. It is the Socratic and Platonic dictum that "Knowledge is
virtue" only from a different angle. George Eliot is not referring to a
transcendent knowledge of the real world, but to an experientially
based knowledge of the actual world.
She is not the only thinker to resolve her intellectual and moral
paradoxes in this way. I have compared her position to that of the Stoics
before. And they posed a similar way out of this same difficulty. The
notion of freedom and the notion of goodness are inextricablV entwined
in their thought as the following comments reveal:
there is to Stoicism a positive conception of freedom ••• most
easily described as the state of mind enjoyed by good men. They,
and they alone, are able to "act as they willI!; for freedom is
"the possibility of determining one's O1tm action;" or lithe knowledge
of what is permitted and what is not ". ... 8 A man can be
free, can act as a man, if and only if the external movements of
his body follow from a decision which reconciles his ovm will
and moral choice to what is necessarily the case. 69
This paraphrase of ~ogenes
Laertius reveals a striking resemblance between
one aspect of Stpic thought and George Eliot's moral and intellectual
position. It is noteworthy that, for the Stoics, freedom is a
state of mind enjoyed by "good men," sages in fact. Similarly it is
George Eliot's morally developed characters who come to see moral
questions unambiguously. Their freedom consists in their acnurate perception
of their ov.'l1 natures and of the facts of the world about them.
This clearer seeing confers a moral certainty. Their hardly-earned
insight into} and sympathy) with human life have largely purged them of
egoistic considerations. In this way it is possible to say that they
intuit moral truths.
This raises an interesting point about George Eliot's moral solutions.
By conceding that morally evolved persons intuitively recognise
what is morally right, she is partially offering a reconciliation