A study of characterisation in the novels of George Eliot

93.
method. 'The principle of temporality' prevailed.1I 6
Anxieties created by the loss of belief in eternity were severe. A
belief in development, (whether evolutionary, or progressive and dialectical,)
offered a sense of security, imposed a "sense of order, continuity,
and permanence" 7 upon the temporal flux. In this mood George
Eliot wrote of the "Doctrine of Development, with its geometrical (,
progression towards fuller and fuller being." 8 We can detect a similar
yearning for permanence and stability behind the "unilineF scheue of
cultural development" 9 adopted by the nineteenth century social evolutionists,
for example, Lewes t
selfish savage transformed into the
sympathetic citizen. 10 In the same way the precursors of Darwin had a
struggle to relinquish the "unilinear conception of organic relationship"
11
whereby we would have to include molluscs in our family tree, these social
evolutionists showed a tendency to tttake varied nonliterate cultures of
modern primitives and arrange them in a sort of phylogenetic sequence
leading to advanced Western culture. tI 12 Comte was even more exclusive;
his sequence ended with France.
This poses a problem however. The ambivalence I have detected in
Dar'win' s ~ Descent .:?! ~ stems from the difficulty of explaining how
our sympathetic and benevolent qualities have developed from our primitive
ancestors. Two different passages from this work bear out this point.
With mankind, selfishness, experience, and imitatio~, EEobably
add ••• to the power of sympathy; for we are led by the hope of
receiving good in return to perform acts of sympathetic kinm1ess
to others; and sympathy is much strengthened by habit. In however
complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of
high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one
another,.it will have been increased by natural selection; for those
communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic
members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest
number of offspring. CIl\Y italics) 13
The word "would" is conjectural. Some twenty pages later Darwin's uncertainty
is even greater.