Chapter XIX (4)

"Her powerful intellect had accepted the teaching of Auguste Comte, and she looked forward to the reorganization of belief on the lines which he had laid down. Her study of his two great works was diligent and constant. The last time I saw her--a few days before her death--I found that she had just been reading over again, with closest attention, that wonderful treatise, _The General View of Positivism_, a book which always seems full of fresh wisdom, however often one comes back to it. She had her reservations, no doubt. There were details in Comte's work which did not satisfy her. But all who knew her were aware--and I speak from an acquaintance of eighteen years--that she had not only cast away every shred of theology and metaphysics, but that she had found refuge from mere negativism in the system of Comte. She did not write her positivism in broad characters on her books. Like Shakspere, she was first an artist and then a philosopher; and I imagine she thought it to be her business as an artist rather to paint humanity as it is than as she would have it to be. But she could not conceal her intellectual conviction, and few competent persons read her books without detecting her standpoint. If any doubt could have existed, it was set at rest by that noble poem on 'Subjective Immortality,' the clearest, and at the same time the most beautiful, expression that has yet been given to one of the most distinctive doctrines of positivism; a composition of which we can already say with certainty that it will enter into the positivist liturgies of all countries and through all time. Towards positivism as an organization, a discipline,--in short, as a church,--her attitude must be plainly stated. She had much sympathy with it, as she showed by regularly subscribing to positivist objects, as, for instance, to the fund of the central organization in Paris presided over by M. Laffitte. But she sought membership neither in that nor any other church. Like most of the stronger and thoroughly emancipated minds in this period of transition and revolutionary disturbance, she looked not beyond her own conscience for guidance and authority, but judged for herself, appealing to no external tribunal from the solitary judgment-seat within. I do not for a moment suppose that she looked on the organization of a church as unattainable; but she did not regard it as attained."

Another of her friends [Footnote: W.M.W. Call in the Westminster Review for July, 1881.] has indicated very clearly the nature and extent of her dissent from Comte. He remarks that "her apologetic representation of the _Politique_ as an _Utopia_ evinces that she did not admit the cogency of its reasoning, or regard the entire social reconstruction of Comte as demonstrably valid. Her dissatisfaction with some of his speculations, as expressed to ourselves in the spring of 1880, was very decided.... All membership with the positivist community she steadily rejected. That a philosophy originally so catholic as that of Comte should assume a sectarian character, was a contingency she foreboded and deprecated." In this last remark we doubtless have the explanation of George Eliot's dissent from Comte. She believed in an organic, vital development of a higher social structure, which will be brought about in the gradual evolution of humanity. Comte's social structure was artificial, the conception of one mind, and therefore as ill adapted to represent the wants of mankind as any other system devised by an individual thinker. His philosophy proper, his system of positive; thought, she accepted with but few reservations. Her views in this direction, as in many others, were substantially those presented by Lewes in his many works bearing on positivism. She was profoundly indebted to Comte, although in her later years she largely passed beyond his influence to the acceptance of the new evolution philosophy. In fact, she belonged to that school of English positivists which has only accepted the positive philosophy of Comte, and which has rejected his later work in the direction of social and religious construction. Lewes was the earliest of English thinkers to look at Comte in this way; but other representative members of the school are John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison and John Morley. Zealously accepting Comte's position that philosophy must limit itself to positive data and methods, they look upon the "Religion of Humanity," with Prof. Tyndall, as Catholicism minus Christianity, and reject it.

She certainly came nearer to Comte in some directions than to Herbert Spencer, for the latter has not so fully recognized those elements of the mental and social life which most attracted her attention. Her theory of duty is one which he does not accept. He insists in his _Data of Ethics_ that duty will become less and less _obligatory_ and necessary in the future, because all action will be in harmony with the impulses of the inner man and with the conditions of the environment. This conclusion is entirely opposed to the moral-theory of George Eliot, and is but one instance of their wide divergence. He insists, in his _Study of Sociology_, that the religious consciousness will not change its lines of evolution. He distinctly rejects the conclusion arrived at by George Eliot, that there is no Infinite Reality knowable to man, and that the substance and reality of religion is purely subjective. "That the object-matter of religion," he says, "can be replaced by another object-matter, as supposed by those who think the 'religion of humanity' will be the religion of the future, is a belief countenanced neither by induction nor by deduction. However dominant may become the moral sentiment enlisted on behalf of humanity, it can never exclude the sentiment alone properly called religious, awakened by that which is behind humanity and behind all other things." George Eliot was content with humanity, and believed that all religion arises out of the subjective elements of human life. At the same time that she made religion a development from feeling, she limited the moral law to emotional sanctions. On the contrary, Spencer is much more a rationalist, and insists on the intellectual basis both of morals and of religion. He makes less of feeling than she; and in this fact is to be found a wide gulf of separation between them. She could have been no more content with his philosophy than she was indebted to it in the construction of her own. As much one as they are in their philosophic basis and general methods, they are antagonistic in their conceptions about man and in the place assigned to nature in the development of religion. To George Eliot, religion is the development of feeling. To Spencer, it is the result of our "_thought_ of a power of which humanity is but a small and fugitive product." In these, as in other directions, they were not in sympathy. Her realism, her psychologic method, her philosophic theories, her scientific sympathies, she did not derive from him, diligently as she may have studied his books.

George Eliot agreed with Comte and all other positivists in setting aside every inquiry into causes, and limiting philosophy to the search after laws. The idea of causes is idealistic, and a cause of any kind whatever is, according to these thinkers, not to be found. "The knowledge of laws," says Comte, "is henceforth to take the place of the search after causes." In other words, it is impossible for man to find out _why_ anything is, he can only know _how_ it is. George Eliot entirely agreed with Comte as to the universal dominion of law. She also followed him in his teachings about heredity, which he held to be the cause of social unity, morality, and the higher or subjective life. His conception of feeling as the highest expression of human life confirmed the conclusions to which she had already arrived from the study of Feuerbach. She was an enthusiastic believer in the Great Being, Humanity; she worshipped at that shrine. More to her than all other beliefs was her belief that we are to live for others. With Comte she said, "Altruism alone can enable us to live in the highest and truest sense." She would have all our doctrines about _rights_ eliminated from morality and politics. They are as absurd, says Comte, as they are immoral.

George Eliot had a strong tendency towards philosophical speculations. While yet a student she expressed an ardent desire that she might live to reconcile the philosophy of Locke with that of Kant. In positivism, as developed and modified by Lewes, she found that reconciliation. She went far towards accepting the boldest speculations of the agnostic science of the time, but she modified it again and again to meet the needs of her own broader mind and heart. Yet it is related of her that in parting with one of the greatest English poets, probably Tennyson, when he said to her, "Well, good-by, you and your molecules," she replied, "I am quite content with my molecules." Her speculations led to the rejection of anything like a positive belief in God, to an entire rejection of faith in a personal immortality, and to a repudiation of all idealistic conceptions of knowledge derived from supersensuous sources. Her theories are best represented by the words environment, experience, heredity, development, altruism, solidarité, subjective immortality. These speculations confront the reader in nearly every chapter of her novels, and they gave existence to all but a very few of her poems.

X.

DISTINCTIVE TEACHINGS.

Science was accepted by George Eliot as furnishing the method and the proof for her philosophic and religious opinions. She was in hearty sympathy with Spencer and Darwin in regard to most of their speculations, and the doctrine of evolution was one which entirely approved itself to her mind. All her theories were based fundamentally on the hypothesis of universal law, which she probably interpreted with Lewes, in his _Foundations of a Creed_, as the uniformities of Infinite Activity. Not only in the physical world did she see law reigning, but also in every phase of the moral and spiritual life of man. In reviewing Lecky's _Rationalism in Europe_, she used these suggestive words concerning the uniformity of sequences she believed to be universal in the fullest sense:

The supremely important fact that the gradual reduction of all
phenomena within the sphere of established law, which carries as a
consequence the rejection of the miraculous, and has its determining
current in the development of physical science, seems to have engaged
comparatively little of his attention; at least he gives it no
prominence. The great conception of uniform regular sequence, without
partiality and without caprice--the conception which is the most potent
force at work in the modification of our faith, and of the practical
form given to our sentiments--could only grow out of that patient
watching of external fact, and that silencing of preconceived notions,
which are urged upon the mind by the problems of physical science.
[Footnote: Fortnightly Review, May, 1865.]

The uniformities of nature have the effect upon man, through his nervous organization, of developing a responsive feeling and action. He learns to respond to that uniformity, to conform his actions to it. The habits thus acquired are inherited by his children, and moral conduct is developed. Heredity has as conspicuous a place in the novels of George Eliot as in the scientific treatises of Charles Darwin. She has attempted to indicate the moral and social influences of heredity, that it gives us the better part of our life in all directions. Heredity is but one phase of the uniformity of nature and the persistence of its forces. That uniformity never changes for man; his life it entirely ignores. He is crushed by its forces; he is given pain and sorrow through its unpitying disregard of his tender nature. Not only the physical world, but the moral world also, is unfailing in the development of the legitimate sequences of its forces. There is no cessation of activity, no turning aside of consequences, no delay in the transformation of causes into necessary effects.

George Eliot never swerves from this conception of the universe, physical and moral; everywhere cause is but another name for effect. The unbending order adopts man into its processes, helps him when he conforms to them, and gives him pain when he disregards them. The whole secret of man's existence is to be found in the agreement of his life with the invariable sequences of nature and moral activity; harmony with them brings true development, discord brings pain and sorrow. The unbending nature of law, and man's relations to it, she has portrayed in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," when describing Tina's sorrows.

While this poor little heart was being bruised with a weight too heavy
for it, Nature was holding on her calm inexorable way, in unmoved and
terrible beauty. The stars were rushing in their eternal courses; the
tides swelled to the level of the last expectant weed; the sun was
making brilliant day to busy nations oil the other side of the
expectant earth. The stream of human thought and deed was hurrying and
broadening onward. The astronomer was at his telescope; the great ships
were laboring over the waves; the toiling eagerness of commerce, the
fierce spirit of revolution, were only ebbing in brief rest, and
sleepless statesmen were dreading the possible crisis of the morrow.
What were our little Tina and her trouble in this mighty torrent,
rushing from one awful unknown to another? Lighter than the smallest
centre of quivering life in the water-drop, hidden and uncared for as
the pulse of anguish in the breast of the tiniest bird that has
fluttered down to its nest with the long-sought food, and has found the
nest torn and empty.

The effect of the uniformities of nature upon man, as George Eliot regarded them, is not quite that which would be inferred from these words alone. While she believed that nature is as unbending and pitiless as is here indicated, yet that unbending uniformity, which never changes its direction for man, is a large influence towards the development of his higher life. It has the effect on man to develop feeling which is the expression of all that is best and most human in his life.

George Eliot believed that the better and nobler part of man's life is to be found in feeling. It is the first expression which he makes as a sentient being, to have emotions; and his emotions more truly represent him than the purely intellectual processes of the mind. She would have us believe that feeling is rather to be trusted than the intellect, that it is both a safer and a surer guide. In _Middlemarch_ she says that "our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotions." Her conception of the comparative worth of feeling and logic is expressed in _Romola_ with a characteristic touch.

After all has been said that can be said about the widening influence
of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly be such strong
agents unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling. The great
world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in
the struggle of the affections, seeking a justification for love and
hope.

In _Daniel Deronda_, when considering the causes which prevent men from desecrating their fathers' tombs for material gain, she says, "The only check to be alleged is a sentiment, which will coerce none who do not hold that sentiments are the better part of the world's wealth." To the same effect is her saying in _Theophrastus Such_, that "our civilization, considered as a splendid material fabric, is helplessly in peril without the spiritual police of sentiments or ideal feelings." She expresses the conviction in _Adam Bede_, that "it is possible to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings;" and she does not hesitate through all her writings to convey the idea, that sublime feelings are much to be preferred to profound thoughts or the most perfect philosophy. She makes Adam Bede say that "it isn't notions sets people doing the right thing--it's feelings," and that "feeling's a sort o' knowledge." Feeling gives us the only true knowledge we have of our fellow-men, a knowledge in every way more perfect than that which is to be derived from our intellectual inquiries into their natures and wants. In _Janet's Repentance_ this power of feeling to give us true knowledge of others, to awaken us to the deeper needs of our own souls, when we come in contact with those who are able to move and inspire us, is eloquently presented.

Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not
calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious,
effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is
quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing
tasselled flower. Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun-filled eyes
cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in thin vapor, and cannot
make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe
upon us with warm breath; they touch us with soft responsive hands;
they look at us with sad, sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing
tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts,
its faith and its love. Then their presence is a power; then they shake
us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion,
as flame is drawn to flame. [Footnote: Chapter XIX.]

She returns to the same subject when considering the intellectual theories of happiness and the proportion of crime there is likely to occur in the world. She shows her entire dissent from such a method of dealing with human woe, and she pleads for that sympathy and love which will enable us to feel the pain of others as our own. This fellow-feeling gives us the most adequate knowledge we can have.

It was probably a hard saying to the Pharisees, that "there is more joy
in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just
persons that need no repentance." And certain ingenious philosophers
of our own day must surely take offence at a joy so entirely out of
correspondence with arithmetical proportion. But a heart that has
been taught by its own sore struggles to bleed for the woes of
another--that has "learned pity through suffering"--is likely to find
very imperfect satisfaction in the "balance of happiness," "doctrine of
compensations," and other short and easy methods of obtaining thorough
complacency in the presence of pain; and for such a heart that saying
will not be altogether dark. The emotions I have observed are but
slightly influenced by arithmetical considerations: the mother, when
her sweet lisping little ones have all been taken from her one after
another, and she is hanging over her last dead babe, finds small
consolation in the fact that the tiny dimpled corpse is but one of a
necessary average, and that a thousand other babes brought into the
world at the same time are doing well, and are likely to live; and if
you stood beside that mother--if you knew her pang and shared it--it is
probable you would be equally unable to see a ground of complacency in
statistics. Doubtless a complacency resting on that basis is highly
rational; but emotion, I fear, is obstinately irrational; it insists on
caring for individuals; it absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative
view of human anguish, and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a
set-off against twelve miserable lives, which leaves a clear balance on
the side of satisfaction. This is the inherent imbecility of feeling,
and one must be a great philosopher to have got quite clear of all
that, and to have emerged into the serene air of pure intellect, in
which it is evident that individuals really exist for no other purpose
than that abstractions maybe drawn from them--abstractions that may
rise from heaps of ruined lives like the sweet savor of a sacrifice in
the nostrils of philosophers, and of a philosophic Deity. And so it
comes to pass that for the man who knows sympathy because he has known
sorrow, that old, old saying about the joy of angels over the repentant
sinner outweighing their joy over the ninety-nine just, has a meaning
which does not jar with the language of his own heart. It only tells
him that for angels too there is a transcendent value in human pain
which refuses to be settled by equations; that the eyes of angels too
are turned away from the serene happiness of the righteous to bend with
yearning pity on the poor erring soul wandering in the desert where no
water is; that for angels too the misery of one casts so tremendous a
shadow as to eclipse the bliss of ninety-nine. [Footnote: Chapter
XXII.]

Again, she says in the same story,--

Surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that
which enables us to feel with him--which gives us a fine ear for the
heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance
and opinion. Our subtlest analogies of schools and sects must miss the
essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms
of human thought and-work the life-and-death struggles of separate
human beings.

George Eliot would have us believe, that until we can feel with man, enter sympathetically into his emotions and yearnings, we cannot know him. It is because we have common emotions, common experiences, common aspirations, that we are really able to understand man; and not because of statistics, natural history, sociology or psychology. The objective facts have their place and value, but the real knowledge we possess of mankind is subjective, grows out of fellow-feeling.

The mental life of man, according to George Eliot, is simply an expansion of the emotional life. At first the mental life is unconscious, it is instinctive, simply the emotional response of man to the sequences of nature. This instinctive life of the emotions always remains a better part of our natures, and is to be trusted rather than the more formal activities of the intellectual faculties. In the most highly developed intellects even, there is a subconscious mental activity, an instinctive life of feeling, which is rather to be trusted than reason itself. This is a frequently recurring statement, which George Eliot makes in the firmest conviction of its truthfulness. It appears in such a sentence as this, in _The Mill on the Floss_: "Watch your own speech, and notice how it is guided by your less conscious purposes." In _Daniel Deronda_ it finds expression in the assertion that "there is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms." It is more explicitly presented in _Adam Bede_.

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulses by the
name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process,
we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all
given to us.

George Eliot puts into the mouth of Mordecai the assertion that love lies deeper than any reasons which are to be found for its exercise. In the same way, she would have us believe that feeling is safer than reason. Daniel Deronda questions Mordecai's visions, and doubts if he is worth listening to, except for pity's sake. On this the author comments, in defence of the visions, as against reason.

Suppose he had introduced himself as one of the strictest reasoners: do
they form a body of men hitherto free from false conclusions and
illusory speculations? The driest argument has its hallucinations, too
hastily concluding that its net will now at last be large enough to
hold the universe. Men may dream in demonstrations, and cut out an
illusory world in the shape of axioms, definitions and propositions,
with a final exclusion of fact signed Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking
will save us mortals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the
matter to be thought about. And since the unemotional intellect may
carry us into a mathematical dream-land where nothing is but what is
not, perhaps an emotional intellect may have absorbed into its
passionate vision of possibilities some truth of what will be--the more
comprehensive massive life feeding theory with new material, as the
sensibility of the artist seizes combinations which science explains
and justifies. At any rate, presumptions to the contrary are not to be
trusted. [Footnote: Chapter XLI.]

As explicit is a passage in _Theophrastus Such_, wherein imagination is regarded as a means of knowledge, because it rests on a subconscious expression of experience.

It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward
vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy
constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience,
which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the
habitual confusion of probable fact with the fictions of fancy and
transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs
every material object, every incidental fact, with far-reaching
memories and stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the
less obvious relations of human existence. [Footnote: Chapter XIII.]

Imagination, feeling and the whole inward life are being constantly shaped by our actions. Experience gives new character to the inward life, and at the same time determines its motives and its inclinations. The muscles develop as they are used; what has been once done it is easier to do again. In the same way, our deeds influence our lives, and compel us to repeat our actions. At least this is George Eliot's opinion, and one she is fond of re-affirming. After Arthur had wronged Hetty, his life was changed, and of this change wrought in his character by his conduct, George Eliot says,--

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we
know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with
inward facts which constitute a man's critical actions, it will be
better not to think ourselves wise about his character. There is a
terrible coercion in our deeds which may at first turn the honest man
into a deceiver, and then reconcile him to the change; for this
reason--that the second wrong presents itself to him in the guise of
the only practicable right. The action which before commission has been
seen with that blended common sense and fresh untarnished feeling which
is the healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterward with the lens of
apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call beautiful
and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much alike. Europe
adjusts itself to a _fait accompli_, and so does an individual
character--until the placid adjustment is disturbed by a convulsive
retribution. [Footnote: Chapter XXIX.]

What we have done, determines what we shall do, even in opposition to our wills. After Tito Melema had done his first act towards denying his foster-father, we have this observation of the author's:

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act
apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds
never; they have an indestructible life both in and out of our
consciousness; and that dreadful vitality of deeds was pressing hard on
Tito for the first time.

When Tito had openly denied that father, at an unexpected moment, we hear the ever-present chorus repeating this great ethical truth:

Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we
prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or
evil that gradually determines character.

As a river moves in the channel made for it, as a plant grows towards the sunlight, so man does again what he has once done. The impression of his act is left upon his nature, it is taken up into his motives, it leads to feeling and impulse, it repeats itself in future conduct. His deed lives in memory, it lives in weakness or strength of impulse, it lives in disease or in health, it lives in mental listlessness or in mental vigor. What is done, determines our natures in their character and tendency for the future. "A man can never separate himself from his past history," says George Eliot in one of the mottoes of _Felix Holt_. We cannot rid ourselves of the effects of our actions; they follow us forever. This truth takes shape in _Romola_ in these words:

Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves, as the life
of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have
once acted greatly, seems a reason why we should always be noble. But
Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition: he had now no
memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could
have a sense of falling.

A motto in _Daniel Deronda_ reiterates this oft-repeated assertion.

Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life,
And righteous or unrighteous, being done,
Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself
Be laid in stillness, and the universe
Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more.

Feeling is to be preferred to logic, according to George Eliot, because it brings us the results of long-accumulating experiences, because it embodies the inherited experiences of the race. She was an earnest believer in "far-reaching memories and stored residues of passion," for she was convinced that the better part of all our knowledge is brought to us by inheritance. The deeds of the individual make the habits of his life, they remain in memory, they guide the purposes of the will, and they give motives to action. Deeds often repeated give impulse and direction to character, and these appear in the offspring as predispositions of body and mind. In this way our deeds "throb in after-throbs" of our children; and in the same manner the deeds of a people live in the life of the race and become guiding motives in its future deeds. As the deeds of a person develop into habits, so the deeds of a people develop into national tendencies and actions.

George Eliot was a thorough believer in the Darwinian theories of heredity, and she has in all her books shown the effects of hereditary conditions on the individual and even upon a people. Family and race are made to play a very important part in her writings. Other novelists disregard the conditions and limitations imposed by heredity, and consider the individual as unrestricted by other laws than those of his own will; but George Eliot gives conspicuous prominence to the laws of heredity, both individual and social. Felix Holt never ceases in her pages to be the son of his mother, however enlarged his ideas may become and broad his culture. Rosamond Vincy also has a parentage, and so has Mary Garth. Daniel Deronda is a Jew by birth, the son of a visionary mother and a truth-seeking father. This parentage expresses itself throughout his life, even in boyhood, in all his thought and conduct. Heredity shapes the destiny of Tito Melema, Romola, Fedalma, Maggie Tulliver, Will Ladislaw, Gwendolen Harleth and many another character in George Eliot's novels. It is even more strongly presented in her poems. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ she describes Fedalma as a genuine daughter of her father, as inheriting his genius and tendencies, which are stronger than all the Spanish culture she had received. When Fedalma says she belongs to him she loves, and that love

is nature too,
Forming a fresher law than laws of birth,--

Zarca replies,--

Unmake yourself, then, from a Zincala--
Unmake yourself from being child of mine!
Take holy water, cross your dark skin white;
Round your proud eyes to foolish kitten looks;
Walk mincingly, and smirk, and twitch your robe:
Unmake yourself--doff all the eagle plumes
And be a parrot, chained to a ring that slips
Upon a Spaniard's thumb, at will of his
That you should prattle o'er his words again!

Fedalma cannot unmake herself; she has already danced in the plaza, and she is soon convinced that she is a Zincala, that her place is with her father and his tribe. The Prior had declared,--

That maiden's blood
Is as unchristian as the leopard's,

and it so proves. His statement of reasons for this conviction expresses the author's own belief.

What! Shall the trick of nostrils and of lips
Descend through generations, and the soul
That moves within our frame like God in worlds--
Convulsing, urging, melting, withering--
Imprint no record, leave no documents,
Of her great history? Shall men bequeath
The fancies of their palates to their sons,
And shall the shudder of restraining awe,
The slow-wept tears of contrite memory,
Faith's prayerful labor, and the food divine
Of fasts ecstatic--shall these pass away
Like wind upon the waters, tracklessly?
Shall the mere curl of eyelashes remain,
And god-enshrining symbols leave no trace
Of tremors reverent?

This larger or social heredity is that which claims much the larger share of George Eliot's attention, and it is far more clearly and distinctively presented in her writings. She gives a literary expression here to the teachings of the evolutionists, shows the application to life of what has been taught by Spencer, Haeckel and Lewes. In his _Foundations of a Creed_, Lewes has stated this theory in discussing "the limitations of knowledge." "It is indisputable," he says, "that every particular man comes into the world with a heritage of organized forms and definite tendencies, which will determine his feeling and thinking in certain definite ways, whenever the suitable conditions are present. And all who believe in evolution believe that these forms and tendencies represent ancestral experiences and adaptations; believe that not only is the pointer born with an organized tendency to point, the setter to set, the beaver to build, and the bird to fly, but that the man is born with a tendency to think in images and symbols according to given relations and sequences which constitute logical laws, that _what_ he thinks is the necessary product of his organism and the external conditions. This organism itself is a product of its history; it _is_ what it has _become_; it is a part of the history of the human race; it is also specially individualized by the particular personal conditions which have distinguished him from his fellow-men. Thus resembling all men in general characters, he will in general feel as they feel, think as they think; and differing from all men in special characters, he will have personal differences of feeling and shades of feeling, thought and combinations of thought.... The mind is built up out of assimilated experiences, its perceptions being shaped by its pre-perceptions, its conceptions by its pre-conceptions. Like the body, the mind is shaped through its history." In other words, experience is inherited and shapes the mental and social life. What some philosophers have called intuitions, and what Kant called the categories of the mind, Lewes regarded as the inherited results of human experience. By a slow process of evolution the mind has been produced and shaped into harmony with its environment; the results of inherited experience take the form of feelings, intuitions, laws of thought and social tendencies. Its intuitions are to be accepted as the highest knowledge, because the transmitted results of all human experience.

As the body performs those muscular operations most easily to which it is most accustomed, so men as social beings perform those acts and think those thoughts most easily and naturally to which the race has been longest accustomed. Man lives and thinks as man has lived and thought; he inherits the past. In his social life he is as much the child of the past as he is individually the son of his father. If he inherits his father's physiognomy and habits of thought, so does he socially inherit the characteristics of his race, its social and moral life. George Eliot was profoundly convinced of the value of this fact, and she has presented it in her books in all its phases. In her _Fortnightly Review_ essay on "The Influence of Rationalism," she says all large minds have long had "a vague sense" "that tradition is really the basis of our best life." She says, "Our sentiments may be called organized traditions; and a large part of our actions gather all their justification, all their attractions and aroma, from the memory of the life lived, of the actions done, before we were born." Tradition is the inherited experience of the race, the result of its long efforts, its many struggles, after a larger life. It lives in the tendencies of our emotions, in the intuitions and aspirations of our minds, as the wisdom which our minds hold dear, as the yearnings of our hearts after a wider social life. These things are not the results of our own reasonings, but they are the results of the life lived by those who have gone before us, and who, by their thoughts and deeds, have shaped our lives, our minds, to what they are. Tradition is the inherited experience, feeling, yearning, pain, sorrow and wisdom of the ages. It furnishes a great system of customs, laws, institutions, ideas, motives and feelings into which we are born, which we naturally adopt, which gives shape and strength to our growing life, which makes it possible for us to take up life at that stage it has reached after the experiences of many generations. George Eliot says in _Middlemarch_ that "a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition." We come into a world made ready for us, and find prepared for our immediate use a vast complex of customs and duties and ideas, the results of the world's experience. George Eliot believed, with Comte, that with each generation the influence of the past over the present becomes greater, and that men's lives are more and more shaped by what has been. In _The Spanish Gypsy_ she makes Don Silva say that

The only better is a Past that lives
On through an added Present, stretching still
In hope unchecked by shaming memories
To life's last breath.

This deep conviction of the blessed influence of the past upon us is well expressed in the little poem on "Self and Life," one of the most fully autobiographical of all her poems, where she makes Life bid Self remember

How the solemn, splendid Past
O'er thy early widened earth
Made grandeur, as on sunset cast
Dark elms near take mighty girth.
Hands and feet were tiny still
When we knew the historic thrill,
Breathed deep breath in heroes dead,
Tasted the immortals' bread.

In expressive sentences, in the development of her characters, and in many other ways, she affirms this faith in tradition. In one of the mottoes in _Felix Holt_ she uses a fine sentence, which is repeated in "A Minor Prophet."

Our finest hope is finest memory.

The finest hope of the race is to be found in memory of its great deeds, as its saddest loss is to be found in forgetfulness of a noble past. In _The Mill on the Floss_, when describing St. Ogg's, she attributes its sordid and tedious life to its neglect of the past and its inspiring memories.

The mind of St. Ogg's did not look extensively before or after. It
inherited a long past without thinking of it, and had no eyes for the
spirits that walk the streets, Since the centuries when St. Ogg with
his boat, and the Virgin Mother at the prow, had been seen on the wide
water, so many memories had been left behind, and had gradually
vanished like the receding hill-tops! And the present time was like the
level plain where men lose their belief in volcanoes and earthquakes,
thinking to-morrow will be as yesterday, and the giant forces that used
to shake the earth are forever laid to sleep. The days were gone when
people could be greatly wrought upon by their faith, still less change
it: the Catholics were formidable because they would lay hold of
government and property, and burn men alive; not because any sane and
honest parishioner of St. Ogg's could be brought to believe in the
Pope. One aged person remembered how a rude multitude had been swayed
when John Wesley preached in the cattle-market; but for a long while it
had not been expected of preachers that they should shake the souls of
men. An occasional burst of fervor in Dissenting pulpits on the subject
of infant baptism was the only symptom of a zeal unsuited to sober
times when men had done with change. Protestantism sat at ease,
unmindful of schisms, careless of proselytism; Dissent was an
inheritance along with a superior pew and a business connection; and
Churchmanship only wondered contemptuously at Dissent as a foolish
habit that clung greatly to families in the grocery and chandlering
lines, though not incompatible with prosperous wholesale dealing.
[Footnote: Chapter XII.]

This faith in tradition, as giving the basis of all our best life, is perhaps nowhere so expressively set forth by George Eliot as in _The Spanish Gypsy_. It is distinctly taught by all the best characters in the words they speak, and it is emphatically taught in the whole purpose and spirit of the poem. Zarca says his tribe has no great life because it has no great national memories. He calls his people

Wanderers whom no God took knowledge of
To give them laws, to fight for them, or blight
Another race to make them ampler room;
Who have no whence or whither in their souls,
No dimmest lure of glorious ancestors
To make a common breath for piety.

As his people are weak because they have no traditional life, he proposes by his deeds to make them national memories and hopes and aims.

No lure
Shall draw me to disown them, or forsake
The meagre wandering herd that lows for help--
And needs me for its guide, to seek my pasture
Among the well-fed beeves that graze at will.
Because our race has no great memories,
I will so live, it shall remember me
For deeds of such divine beneficence
As rivers have, that teach, men what is good
By blessing them. I have been schooled--have caught
Lore from Hebrew, deftness from the Moor--
Know the rich heritage, the milder life,
Of nations fathered by a mighty Past.

The way in which such a past is made is suggested by Zarca, in answer to a question about the Gypsy's faith; it is made by a common life of faith and brotherhood, that gives origin to a common inheritance and memories.

O, it is a faith
Taught by no priest, but by their beating hearts
Faith to each other: the fidelity
Of fellow-wanderers in a desert place
Who share the same dire thirst, and therefore share
The scanty water: the fidelity
Of men whose pulses leap with kindred fire,
Who in the flash of eyes, the clasp of hands,
The speech that even in lying tells the truth
Of heritage inevitable as birth,
Nay, in the silent bodily presence feel
The mystic stirring of a common life
Which makes the many one: fidelity
To that deep consecrating oath our sponsor Fate
Made through our infant breath when we were born
The fellow-heirs of that small island, Life,
Where we must dig and sow and reap with brothers.
Fear thou that oath, my daughter--nay, not fear,
But love it; for the sanctity of oaths
Lies not in lightning that avenges them,
But in the injury wrought by broken bonds
And in the garnered good of human trust.
And you have sworn--even with your infant breath
You too were pledged.

George Eliot's faith in tradition, as furnishing the basis of our best life, and the moral purpose and law which is to guide it, she has concentrated into one question asked by Maggie Tulliver.

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should
have no law but the inclination of the moment.

Although this question is asked in regard to an individual's past, the answer to it holds quite as good for the race as for the individual. She repudiates all theories which give the individual authority to follow inclination, or even to follow some inner or personal guide. The true wisdom is always social, always grows out of the experiences of the race, and not out of any personal inspiration or enlightenment. Tradition furnishes the materials for reason to use, but reason does not penetrate into new regions, or bring to us wisdom apart from that we obtain through inherited experiences. George Eliot compares these two with each other in _The Spanish Gypsy_ in the words of Sephardo.

I abide
By that wise spirit of listening reverence
Which marks the boldest doctors of our race.
For Truth, to us, is like a living child
Born of two parents: if the parents part
And will divide the child, how shall it live?
Or, I will rather say: Two angels guide
The path of man, both aged and yet young,
As angels are, ripening through endless years.
On one he leans: some call her Memory,
And some, Tradition; and her voice is sweet,
With deep mysterious accords: the other,
Floating above, holds down a lamp which streams
A light divine and searching on the earth,
Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields,
Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew
Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp
Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked
But for Tradition; we walk evermore
To higher paths, by brightening Reason's lamp.

Man leans on tradition, it is the support of his life, by its strength he is able to move forward. Reason is a lamp which lights the way, gives direction to tradition; it is a beacon and not a support. Tradition not only brings us the wisdom of all past experience, but it develops into a spiritual atmosphere in which we live, move and have our being. This was Comte's idea, that the spiritual life is developed out of tradition, that the world's experiences have produced for us intangible hopes, yearnings and aspirations; awe, reverence and sense of subtle mystery: mystic trust, faith in invisible memories, joy in the unseen power of thought and love; and that these create for us a spiritual world most real in its nature, and most powerful in its influence. On every hand man is touched by the invisible, mystical influences of the past, spiritual voices call to him out of the ages, unseen hands point the way he is to go. He breathes this atmosphere of spiritual memories, he is fed on thoughts other men have made for his sustenance, he is inspired by the heroisms of ages gone before. In an article in the _Westminster Review_ in July, 1856, on "The Natural History of German Life," in review of W.H. Riehl's books on the German peasant, and on land and climate, she presents the idea that a people can be understood only when we understand its history. Society, she says, has developed through many generations, and has built itself up in many memories and associations. To change it we must change its traditions. Nothing can be done _de novo_; a fresh beginning cannot be had. The dream of the French Revolution, that a new nation, a new life, a new morality, was to be created anew and fresh out of the cogitations of philosophers, is not in any sense to be realized. Tradition forever asserts itself, the past is more powerful than all philosophers, and new traditions must be made before a new life can be had for society. These ideas are well expressed by George Eliot in her review of Riehl's books.

He sees in European society _incarnate history_, and any attempt to
disengage it from its historical elements must, he believes, be simply
destruction of social vitality. What has grown up historically can only
die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws. The
external conditions which society has inherited from the past are but
the manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings
who compose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to
each other as the organism and its medium, and development can take
place only by the gradual consentaneous development of both. As a
necessary preliminary to a purely rational society, you must obtain
purely rational men, free from the sweet and bitter prejudices of
hereditary affection and antipathy; which is as easy as to get running
streams without springs, or the leafy shade of the forest without the
secular growth of trunk and branch.

The historical conditions of society may be compared with those of
language. It must be admitted that the language of cultivated nations
is in anything but a rational state; the great sections of the
civilized world are only approximately intelligible to each other, and
even that, only at the cost of long study; one word stands for many
things, and many words for one thing; the subtle shades of meaning, and
still subtler echoes of association, make language an instrument which
scarcely anything short of genius can wield with definiteness and
certainty. Suppose, then, that the effort which has been again and
again made to construct a universal language on a rational basis has
at length succeeded, and that you have a language which has no
uncertainty, no whims of idiom, no cumbrous forms, no fitful shimmer of
many-hued significance, no hoary archaisms "familiar with forgotten
years,"--a patent deodorized and non-resonant language, which effects
the purpose of communication as perfectly and rapidly as algebraic
signs. Your language may be a perfect medium of expression to science,
but will never express _life_, which is a great deal more than science.
With the anomalies and inconveniences of historical language, you will
have parted with its music and its passion, with its vital qualities
as an expression of individual character, with its subtle capabilities
of wit, with everything that gives it power over the imagination; and
the next step in simplification will be the invention of a talking
watch, which will achieve the utmost facility and despatch in the
communication of ideas by a graduated adjustment of ticks, to be
represented in writing by a corresponding arrangement of dots. A
"melancholy language of the future!" The sensory and motor nerves that
run in the same sheath are scarcely bound together by a more necessary
and delicate union than that which binds men's affections, imagination,
wit and humor with the subtle ramifications of historical language.
Language must be left to grow in precision, completeness and unity, as
minds grow in clearness, comprehensiveness and sympathy. And there is
an analogous relation between the moral tendencies of men and the
social conditions they have inherited. The nature of European men has
its roots intertwined with the past, and can only be developed by
allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the process of
development is going on, until that perfect ripeness of the seed which
carries with it a life independent of the root....