Where get, you say, a binding law, a rule
  Enforced by sanction, an Ideal throned
  With thunder in its hand?  I answer, there
  Whence every faith and rule has drawn its force
  Since human consciousness awaking owned
  An Outward, whose unconquerable sway
  Resisted first and then subdued desire
  By pressure of the dire impossible
  Urging to possible ends the active soul
  And shaping so its terror and its love. 
  Why, you have said it—­threats and promises
  Depend on each man’s sentence for their force: 
  All sacred rules, imagined or revealed,
  Can have no form or potency apart
  From the percipient and emotive mind. 
  God, duty, love, submission, fellowship,
  Must first be framed in man, as music is,
  Before they live outside him as a law. 
  And still they grow and shape themselves anew,
  With fuller concentration in their life
  Of inward and of outward energies
  Blending to make the last result called Man,
  Which means, not this or that philosopher
  Looking through beauty into blankness, not
  The swindler who has sent his fruitful lie
  By the last telegram:  it means the tide
  Of needs reciprocal, toil, trust and love—­
  The surging multitude of human claims
  Which make “a presence not to be put by”
  Above the horizon of the general soul. 
  Is inward reason shrunk to subtleties,
  And inward wisdom pining passion-starved?—­
  The outward reason has the world in store,
  Regenerates passion with the stress of want,
  Regenerates knowledge with discovery,
  Shows sly rapacious self a blunderer,
  Widens dependence, knits the social whole
  In sensible relation more defined.

As these words would indicate, George Eliot’s faith in the moral meaning and outcome of the world is very strong.  All experience is moral, she would have us believe, and capable of teaching man the higher life.  That is, all experience tends slowly to bring man into harmony with his environment, and to teach him that certain actions are helpful, while others are harmful.  This teaching is very definite and emphatic in her pages, often rising into a lofty eloquence and a rich poetic diction, as her mind is wrought upon by the greatness and the impressiveness of the moral lessons of life.

However effective the outward order of nature may be in creating morality, it is to be borne in mind that ethical rules can have no effect “apart from the percipient and emotive mind.”  It is, in reality, the social nature which gives morality its form and meaning.  It is a creation of the social organism.  Its basis is found, indeed, in the invariable order of nature, but the superstructure is erected out of and by society.  “Man’s individual functions,” says Lewes, “arise in relations to the cosmos; his general functions arise in relations to the social medium; thence moral life emerges.  All the animal impulses become