A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

76.
nervous and glandular struoture~] f'we necessarily inh,,,rit its tendencies ..
,~
We inherit the temperament, the longevity, the strength,the susceptibility
of one or both parents •••• " Likewise, lIeven special aptitudes, such as
those for music, mathematics, wit, and so on, will be inherited; nay, even
. 't '. " 10
acqmrea. enaencl.es ••••
Through this Lamarckian concept of the possibility of inheriting ao"
quired characteristics, Lewes and, as we shall see later, Spencer and
Darwin reintroduce a faint notion of the theory of innate ideas. The
theory of evolution gave a greater impetus to this tentative statement of
Lewes. For, if we have evolved over countless generations, and if the laws
of association obtain so that by frequent and vivid repetition .ve establish
in the nervous system certain set responses, then whot we are today!represents
an amalgam of ancestral tendencies and respcnses laid down over
the centuries. Our response to the world is still ex}:erientially based but
it no longer needs to be our own indivi:lual, separate experience; we now
have the whole history of the race and all its attenE~J_nt
experiences to
account for the differences in response and character,. Spencer V'Jrites in
The PrinciEles of PsychC?IJ2..€;i;Z. (1855) that "these u.l1ifcX'm ancestral experiances,
potentially present in the nervous structure~
11
constitutea~ partially-inn,}te preparedness. II
What Spencer has no\'! st:ated is that -Ne l?.J:'e not
bequeathed to us
passively reoepti
ve to experiences but in the important prooess of a:~'lptation,
the adjust,;.,
ment between the inner wor:~d
of "lile org