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