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.