loved virtue, praised purity, and admired ethical uprightness.  Any other attitude than this argues something less than genius, though genius may be far from didactic and not given to preaching.  The moral intent of life is so inwoven with all its experiences, that the failure of any mind to be impressed with it, and profoundly affected, proves it wanting in insight, poetic vision and genius.  George Eliot is entirely in harmony, in this respect, with all the masters of the literary art.  Her ethical passion is a clear sign of her genius, and proves the vigor of her intellectual vision.  No one who rightly weighs the value of her books, and fairly estimates the nature of her teaching, can regret that she had so keen a love of ethical instruction.  The vigor, enthusiasm and originality of her teaching compensate for many faults.

Her teachings have a special interest because they afford a literary embodiment of the ethical theories of the evolution philosophy.  They indicate the form which is likely to be given to ethics if theism and individualism are discarded, and the peculiar effects upon moral life which will be induced by agnosticism.  She applied agnosticism to morals, by regarding good and evil as relative, and as the results, of man’s environment.  For her, ethics had no infinite sanctions, no intuitive promulgation of an eternal law; but she regarded morality as originating in and deriving its authority from the social relations of men to each other.  Our intuitive doing of right, or sorrow for wrong, is the result of inherited conditions.  In Romola she speaks of Tito as affected by—­

the inward shame, the reflex of that outward law which the great heart of mankind makes for every individual man, a reflex which will exist even in the absence of the sympathetic impulses that need no law, but rush to the deed of fidelity and pity as inevitably as the brute mother shields her young from the attack of the hereditary enemy. [Footnote:  Chapter IX.]

This teaching is often found in her pages, and in connection with the assertion of the relativity of morals.  There is no absolute moral law for her, no eternal ideal standard; but what is right is determined by the environment.  Instead of Kant’s categorical imperative of the moral law, proclaimed as a divine command in every soul, George Eliot found in the conscience and in the moral intuitions simply inherited experiences.  In Daniel Deronda she says, “Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws; they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories.”

George Eliot’s rejection of any absolute standard of moral conduct or of happiness continually asserts itself in her pages.  We must look at the individual, his inherited moral power, his environment, his special motives, if we would judge him aright.  In the last chapters of The Mill on the Floss, when writing of Maggie’s repentance, this idea appears.  Maggie is not to be tried by the moral ideal of Christianity, nor by any such standard of perfection as Kant proposed, but by all the circumstances of her place in life and her experience.  We are accordingly told that—­