^{Note 1 in page 268} Most of the critics who discuss her determinism do so in order to criticize. See, especially, Gerald Bullett, George Eliot: Her Life and Books (London, 1947): “Determinism is a form of death because it makes everything, including our own thinking, a mindless mechanism.” More recently, William J. Hyde in “George Eliot and the Climate of Realism,” PMLA, lxxii (March 1957), has written: “What matters is that George Eliot based her sequence of action not so much on direct observation and recording of life, as she did her characters, but on a preconceived moral theory of consequences that served to direct it toward an end” (p. 163). This is an argument similar to David Cecil's in his The Early Victorian Novelists (London, 1934). See especially p. 319. Again, Robert Preyer in a valuable article, “Beyond the Liberal Imagination: Vision and Unreality in ‘Daniel Deronda’,” Victorian Studies, iv (September 1960), argues that the Deronda half of the novel is important because in it for the first time George Eliot breaks through the restricting dogma of determinism. Implicitly Mr. Preyer assumes that determinism for George Eliot is equivalent to necessitarianism.

^{Note 2 in page 268} See especially her essay on the German philosopher Gruppe (Leader, 28 July 1855, pp. 723–724) in which she makes plain her distaste for German system-making and praises Gruppe for his refusal to indulge in it. One of her most famous comments on the dangers of dogma and general systems comes in The Mill on the Floss:

All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality—without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human. (Bk. vii, ch. ii) All quotations from George Eliot's works, unless otherwise noted, are from the Cabinet Edition, 24 vols. (London and Edinburgh, n.d.).

^{Note 3 in page 269} See, for example, CD. Broad, Determinism, Indeterminism and Libertarianism (Cambridge, England, 1934).

^{Note 4 in page 269} George Eliot's contemporary, J. A. Froude, though not a philosopher himself, took this position. He wrote, “a conviction assures us that there is somewhere a point of freedom. What that point is, where other influences terminate and responsibility begins, will always be of intricate and often impossible solution. But if there is such a point at all, it is fatal to necessitarianism, and man is what he has been hitherto supposed to be—an exception in the order of nature, with a power not differing in degree but differing in kind from those of other creatures” (“Spinoza,” Westminster Review, lxiv, July 1855, 20). To Sara Hennell George Eliot wrote about this article, “I don't at all agree with Froude's own views” (The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, 7 vols., New Haven, 1954–56, ii, 211 henceforward GEL).

^{Note 5 in page 269} Silas Marner, Ch. xiv.

^{Note 6 in page 269} Adam Bede, Ch. xvii.

^{Note 7 in page 269} Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism, tr. J H. Bridges, Academic Reprints (Stanford, n.d.), pp. 28–29.

^{Note 8 in page 270} GEL, V, 403.

^{Note 9 in page 270} It is important, however, to see that though George Eliot's thought seems pervaded by the details of positivistic and contemporary scientific philosophy, her position was probably not so much caused by them as refined by them. Her temperament and her own broad intellect shaped most of her major beliefs before she was exposed to the systematic philosophies of Mill, Spencer, and Comte. She wrote,

I never had any personal acquaintance with J. S. Mill . . . and though I have studied his books, especially his Logic and Political Economy, with much benefit, I have no consciousness of their having made any marked epoch in my life.

Of Mr. Herbert Spencer's friendship I have had the honour and advantage for twenty years, but I believe that every main bias of my mind had been taken before I knew him. Like the rest of his readers, I am of course indebted to him for much enlargement and clarifying of thought. (GEL, vi, 163)

For more on this point, see Paul Bourl'honne, George Eliot: essaie de biographie intellectuelle et morale, 1819–1854 (Paris, 1933), p. 112, and Michael Wolff, “Marian Evans to George Eliot: The Moral and Intellectual Foundation of her Career,” a microfilmed doctoral dissertation (Princeton, 1958), pp. 145–146. The latter is the most useful and thorough intellectual biography of George Eliot I have seen.

^{Note 10 in page 270} Pater's ideas met with George Eliot's fairly strong disapproval, despite the similarity of their views on history and systems. See GEL, v, 455.

^{Note 11 in page 270} Several critics have called attention to the persistent web imagery in Middlemarch. Quentin Anderson, for instance, suggests that “the master image of the book ... is the image of human relationships as a web” (“George Eliot in Middlemarch,”

From Dickens to Hardy, The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford, London, 1959, vi, 276–277).

^{Note 12 in page 271} Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Ch. ii, “Looking Backward.” This chapter in particular is useful to anyone interested in establishing the “non-intellectual” influences on the development of her mature views.

^{Note 13 in page 271} The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London, 1958), p. 127.

^{Note 14 in page 271} Middlemarch, “Finale.”

^{Note 15 in page 272} Mill on the Floss, Bk. iv, Ch. i.

^{Note 16 in page 272} F. W. H. Myers, Essays Modern (London, 1885), p. 269.

^{Note 17 in page 272} GEL, vi, 99.

^{Note 18 in page 273} She said she hated “the ugly word” (GEL, vi, 66).

^{Note 19 in page 273} As I have already suggested, George Eliot's views on determinism and necessitarianism, as far as I can find them expressed explicitly in her writings, are strikingly similar to (though not necessarily dependent on) those of Mill and, less completely, of Comte. All three writers emphasize the moral implications of the views, and Mill, with George Eliot, stresses the importance of the individual in a deterministic scheme and the possibility of his altering in some measure the course of things. Anyone wishing to find a more systematic and full exposition of the position would do well to read the Sixth Book of Mill's System of Logic, “On the Logic of the Moral Sciences,” especially Chapters ii, x, and xi. In the following discussion I shall be relying heavily on Mill's exposition. All references are to the first edition, A System of Logic; Ratiocinative and Inductive (London, 1843), 2 vols.

^{Note 20 in page 273} Autobiography of John Stuart Mill (New York, 1924), p. 119. Both Mill and George Eliot regard the problem of freewill in terms which would be unacceptable to contemporary philosophical analysts, although their manner of solution is similar. The central distinction lies in what the analysts might call their failure to perceive that the “will” is not a faculty, acting, as it were, divorced from the whole person. Gilbert Ryle has been the most outspoken of contemporary philosophers on this point. He rejects, as Mill and George Eliot did not, the extension of the mechanical model of the universe from physical nature to moral and voluntary acts, and has therefore changed all the major terms of the discussion of “freewill.” See especially his The Concept of Mind (London, 1949), Ch. iii. Ryle's essay on the subject, “It Was to Be,” in Dilemmas (Cambridge, England, 1953), is a good example of his method.

^{Note 21 in page 273} GEL, vi, 66.

^{Note 22 in page 273} Stephen Pepper, Ethics (New York, 1960), p. 46.

^{Note 23 in page 273} Foundation of Ethics (Oxford, 1939), p. 230.

^{Note 24 in page 273} See especially A. J. Ayer, Philosophical Essays (London, 1954), Ch. xii; P. H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics, Penguin Books (London, 1954), Chs. xix-xx, and, by the same author, “Freewill and Moral Responsibility,” Mind, lvii (1948), 45–61; also Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (London, 1959), passim.

^{Note 25 in page 274} GEL, vi, 98.

^{Note 26 in page 274} See, for example, her argument against “men of maxims” in note 2, above.

^{Note 27 in page 274} GEL, ii, 403.

^{Note 28 in page 274} Essays, “The Natural History of German Life: Riehl.”

^{Note 29 in page 274} Indeed, it is astonishing that there are so few records of her criticism of Comte. His assertion, that “the only real life is the collective life of the race; that individual life has no existence except as an abstraction” (A General View, p. 404), must certainly have infuriated her as did Young's poetry or Dr. Cumming's evangelical preaching.

^{Note 30 in page 274} System of Logic, ii, 494. Here is Comte's view on the subject: “invariability in all primary aspects is found compatible with modifications in points of secondary importance. These modifications become more numerous and extensive as the phenomena are more complex. The reason of this is that the causes from a combination of which the effects proceed being more varied and more accessible, offer greater facilities to our feeble power to interfere with advantage . . . the extensive modifications of which society admits, go far to keep up the common mistake that social phenomena are not subject to any constant law” (A General View, pp. 31–32).

^{Note 31 in page 275} See, for example, her essay on Riehl.

^{Note 32 in page 275} George Eliot, p.. 155.

^{Note 33 in page 275} This, however, is to say little more than that if you know everything about a man you know everything about him. Gilbert Ryle makes an important distinction between being able to predict what will happen and determining it, and he suggests that there is nothing binding on a person whose actions have been predicted. In other words, ability to predict does not imply necessitarianism (Dilemmas, Ch. ii).

^{Note 34 in page 275} System of Logic, ii, 484.

^{Note 35 in page 275} John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, 2 vols. (New York, 1874), ii, 296–297.

^{Note 36 in page 275} I recognize the circularity of this reasoning. To say that a cause is controllable by other causes is simply to push the question back, not to resolve it. The act of controlling a cause is itself caused, and one might go on infinitely asking what causes the cause which causes the cause, etc. This is precisely the kind of difficulty the analytic philosophers would object to. One must recognize, for example, the difference between robbing a bank because one wants the money and robbing it because one is forced at gunpoint to do so. Nowell-Smith makes explicit, it seems to me, the point of view that Mill is taking up here when he attacks the libertarians who, making the objection of circularity to an argument like Mill's, ask, “Can we justly blame a man if vicious actions are due to hereditary epilepsy or to the influence of a corrupt and vicious court?” Nowell-Smith replies, “To this the answer is that we can and do. So long as we persist in supposing that, to be moral, an action must be uncaused, we could only push the moral responsibility back in time; and this, so far from solving the problem, merely shows the impossibility of any solution on these lines” (“Freewill and Moral Responsibility,” p. 50).

^{Note 37 in page 277} System of Logic, ii, 485.

^{Note 38 in page 277} Hume in the eighteenth century and Nowell-Smith in the twentieth make the same point. Hume says, “By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will” (An Inquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, sec. 8); Nowell-Smith puts it a little differently, “To be ‘free’ in this sense is to be free to do what one wants to do, not to be able to act in spite of one's desires” (Ethics, p. 279).

^{Note 39 in page 277} History of the English Novel, 10 vols. (London, 1930), viii, 235.

^{Note 40 in page 277} System of Logic, ii, 486.

^{Note 41 in page 278} Foundation of Ethics, p. 231.

^{Note 42 in page 278} “Mackay's Progress of the Intellect,” The Writings of George Eliot, Warwickshire Edition, 25 vols. (Boston, 1907), xxii, 279.

^{Note 43 in page 278} Ibid.

^{Note 44 in page 279} “For if it be true that Nature at certain moments seems charged with a presentiment of one individual lot, must it not also be true that she seems unmindful, unconscious of another?” (Adam Bede, Ch. xxvii).