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,—­