A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

120.
longer see other people as extensions of themselves 8Jnd their own "i'Tants.
But the great majority of George Eliot's characters are locked in their
egoistic vision and see the world and other people only in terms of
their own personal requirements. As she asks in Middlemarch: I~Vill
not
a tin;'{ speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of.the::"orld,
and leave only a margin by which we see the blot?" And then follows the
82
categorical statement: "I know no speck so troublesome as self."
'When we come to examine the "intellectual" moral school of the
eighteenth century, we see that its members, like the members of the
tlsentimental" school were reacting against the "selfish" theories and
the dispiriting view of human nature and human possibilities of Hobbes
and Mandeville. L. A. Selby-Bigge points out, besides, that these two
schools were "much stronger in their criticisms of each other than in
their own solutions of the problem. II 83 The "sentimentalists" had
attempted to show that virtue is both real and natural by rel~ting it
to "human nature. It The lIintellectualists, II on the other hand, for
example, Price and Balguy, made an appeal to the "nature of things."
84-
• Price in the Introduction to his ! Review of' ~ Principal Question,S
in Morals (1758) writes of himself that "his principal view has been to
trace the obligations of virtue up to the truth and the nature of things." 85
Intellectualists, regarding moral distinctions as a function of reason,
could claim them as objective, and therefore in some wayan expression
of truth, or order. For Price, moral systems are as self-evident as the
systems of Newtonian mechanics or of Euclidean geometry. He claims, for
instance, that he is willing for morality and abstract truth to stand or
fall together.
86
The reference to Newton and Euclid indicates a superb
confidence in the "nature of things.1/ Such absolute faith is not so easy
to maintain today vlhen we are faced as D. D. Raphael points out llwith