A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

121.
alternative systems of geometry and alternative frameworks for physics."
87
George Eliot believed in irreversible laws and insisted that one
element ~b.
moral development is manifested in our willingness to submit
to those laws which are unmodifiable. It is also our duty to seek out
those laws pertaining to social and psychological development, education
and so on, in order that wI? can further progress by co-operating with
them. In this appeal to the IInature of things" we can see a similarity
between her thought and that of the eighteenth cent~J intellectualists.
In addition she draws an analogy between moral and mathematical laws as
in the letter previously quoted. The substance, then, of her moral attitude
may greatly resemble that of the eighteenth century moral philosophers,
but the framework is different. The eighteenth century belief in order
had theological overtones, and religion and morality had not parted com-
P~o George Eliot was an agnostic and a positivist so that to her the
phrase the "nature of things" had a very different connotation from the
one it had for an eighteenth century divine. In addition, evolutionary
psychologists such as Darwin, Spencer, and Lewes had introduced the idea
of ancestral inheritance, and this marks a cut-off between their thought
and that of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. VIe have already
recorded Darwin's criticism of J. S. ~lill
for disregarding ancestral inheritance
and we have seen the degree to which George Eliot embraced the
evolutionary psychology. Moral intuitions may appear to be not unlike
innate ideas, but they have been refined and developed in our O\,ffi as well
as in our ancestors' lifetimes. LeVies, for example, while referring to tho'"
moral sense as a "Regulative Intuition, II makes it clear that intuitions
are not to be confused with innate ideas. He concludes that
while man, in his moral beginnings, has a marked kinship with the
animals, whose life, like his own, is regulated by desires and
intelligence, he stands apart in the attainment of moral conceptions
and of organised ethical tendencies, which are correot-