A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

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and so on, all establish the inexorable oausality of her deterministio
world. Against their baokground we have the struggles, oonveyed mostly
ironioally, but sometimes with oompassion, of individual human beings
who have to oome to terms with this inescapable reality. By indioating
a oharaoter's relationship with these laws, George Eliot oan provide the
reader, most eoonomioally, with information about that oharaoter's
moral stature and how far his egoism blinds him to the reality of the
external world. Sympathy iathe all-important affeotive oomponent of
morality; right seeing--in the sense of olearly reoognising what laws
are modifiable and which are not--is the oognitive component.