A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

116.
between two opposing ethical views. In the eighteenth century there were
two schools, "the!intellectual' and the t sentimental' ••• representing
two principal lines of thought •••• They are primarily distinguished by
their adoption of reason and feeline respectively as the faculty which
perceives moral distinctions, a faculty declared in each case to be
peculiar and not identifiable with ordinary reason or ordinary feeling. II
70
We have seen George Eliot's allegiance to the notion of a moral sense
and the importance of sympathy. Let us now consider how far it is possible
to identify certain intuitionist tendencies in her thought, before
briefly examining the moral position of the eighteenth century intellect-
001 school.
There is a famous authorial passage in ~ ~ ~ ~ Floss, for
example, where George Eliot contrasts rigid rule-dominated moral judgements
with judgements reached by the exercise of lIinsight and sympathy.1I
All men of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to
the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the
mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims,
and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to
repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring
from growing insieht and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the
popular representative of the minds that are guided in their
moral judgement solely by general rules, thinking that these
will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without
the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality-­
without any care to assure themselves whether they have the
insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or
from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide
fellow-feeling v'lith all that is human. 71 (my italics)
George Eliot' 5 use of the word "insight" in this passage raises the question
of how far she would have described the moral faculty as analogous
with the ordinary faculty of sight. As P. Nov:ell-Smith states, "the intuitionist
is not drawing our attention to the obvious fact that we
have moral experience; he is inviting us to construe this experience •••
as being analogous to seeine_ Moral judgements are reports of what we
see when we look at the non-natural Vlorld in the same S9rt of way that