A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

64.
development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface,
in the development of Society , of GoveZ'nment , of Manufaotures, of
Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution
of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations,
holds throughout. 'I 28 This essay continues to enlarge and illustrate
this theme until it arrives at the conclusion that .lIprogress is not
an accident, not a thing within human control, but a beneficent necessity."
29
After such a example of facile optiBism, a comment from the twentiethcentury
geneticist, Peter Medawar, is pertinent. It :'Ls lIa profound truth, II
he maintains, "realised in the nineteer::th century by only a ha.."ldf'ul of
astute biologists and by philosophers hardly at all, •• that nature does
~ know best, that genetical evolution, if we choose to look at it
liverishly instead of with fatuous good humoUr, is a story of waste,
k h · ft . d bl d II 30 D . . Th Or" f S .
rna es 1. ,comprOml.se, an un er. arW1.n ~n _.:~ ._ :.g~n ~ peC1.es
avoids almost entirely suoh IIfatuous good humour" as well as the irnplicitly
teleological bias of Spencer t s thought ..
However tl::.e concluding section
of the work does contain this capitulatory remark:
s natural selection
works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental
endowments will tend to progress towards perfection." 31 This remr::..rksits
rather oddly alongside an earlier a.."ld more representative one, thet
"natural selection tends only to make each organic being as perfect as,
or slightly more perfect than, the other inhabitants of the same country
with which it comes into competition.tI
Gordon Haight claims that George Eliot Itsaw at 0110e what Huxley admitted
years later, that the survival of the fittest is not always the
survival of the best. 11 ~3.'This oontention is borne by ,George, Eliot's
comment from a letter of 1867 that t'nat;':lral seleotion is not always
good, and depends (see Darwin) on many., caprices of· very~ foo1i.sh;;.KClimal.s~ t,)3/+