A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

92.
in the vast universe of consciousness, among an infinity of other atoms,
~ struggling desperately to ~assert their ~ existe~ at .~ expense
:?! ~ ~ ~tp.ers. It 3 The phrase I have underlined is crucial. The
emphasis on competition and the danger that this would lead to a totally
amoral individualism were most alarming to nineteenth century moralists.
They were seeking in evolutionary theories sanctions for moral action,
not sanctions for a code based on the principle of each man for himself.
David Riesman comments that it is easy for us, looking back, to understand
how ~ OriBin of Species was 11130 completely misinterpreted when
it first apPiJared, as a brief for a struggle to death among individuals,,"
although in fact it has "much to say about co-operation as a technique of
competition. 11 4
In a previous chapter I mentioned that in The Origi~ ~ Species
itself Darvnn almost entirely avoided placing any progressionist or
teleological interpretation on the vast body of biological fact he had
accumulated. I quoted the one capitulatory remark that occurs "at the
very end of the work when in a most uncharacteristically unscientific
mood, he writes that lias natural selection vlorks solely by and for the
good of each being, all corporeal and mental endov~ents
will tend to
progress towards perfection." 5
However, a later work, ~ Descent E!!. ~ (1871), which is decideil;J.y
less empirical and less scientific than ~ Origin ~ Species, contains
various ambivalent statements about the moral progress of the race. These
show that D~vin,
no less than his contemporaries, needed to believe not
only that ethical improvement was possible but that it had already begun
and would continue. According to Hans Meyerhoff, in the nineteenth
century, "all the sciences of man--bi01 ogy , anthropology, psychology,
even economics and politics--became 'historical' sciences in the sense
that they recognised and employed a historical, genetic, or evolutionary