A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

117.
empirical statements are reports of what we see when we look at the
natural world. II 72 The words used by intuitionists to describe the
faoulty by means of whioh we decide that something is good or right,
words such as "non-sensuous intuition,1t "awareness," "apprehension,"
"reoognition," as Nowell-Smith points out, all strongly suggest an
analogy with "sight and touch. II 73
The following statement in Middlernarch about Dorothea's painful
emergence from "moral stupidity" 74 illustrates that George Eliot
certainly conoeived of the moral faculty as a physioal faculty, a
function of the organism, to borrow Lewes' phrase.
it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself
to Mr Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and
wiooom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no
longer reflection but feeling--£:!l ~ wrought ~ 12. ~ direct­
~ .2f.sense, like ~ sOlidit;y of objects--that he had an
equivalent centre of self, where the lights and shadows must
always fall with a certain difference. (5 (my italics1
This identification of moral and physical vision is not an isolated
instance. illhere is a similar referenoe in Daniel Deronda in the epigraph
to chapter 21 and the following statement in ~ ~'about
Dinah's failure to recognise that Hetty's worries are practical and
emotional rather than spiritual contains the same analogy.
It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never
understand the higher, the higher nature commands a complete
view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn
this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good
deal of hard experience, often with bruises and gashes incurred
in taking thiqgs by the wrong end, and fancying our space wider
than it is. 76
A letter to Mrs Ponsonby in 1877 offers the same conclusion.. George
Eliot writes that "pity and fairness--two little words, which, carried
out, would embrace the utmost delicacies of the moral life--seem to
me not to rest on an unverifiable hypothesis but on facts quite as
irreversible as the perception that a pyramid v1ill not stand on its
apex. 1I 77