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.