blended with human emotions.  In the process of evolution, starting from the merely animal appetite of sexuality, we arrive at the purest and most far-reaching tenderness.  The social instincts tend more and more to make sociality dominate animality, and thus subordinate personality to humanity....  The animal has sympathy, and is moved by sympathetic impulses, but these are never altruistic; the ends are never remote.  Moral life is based on sympathy; it is feeling for others, working for others, aiding others, quite irrespective of any personal good beyond the satisfaction of the social impulse.  Enlightened by the intuition of our community of weakness, we share ideally the universal sorrows.  Suffering harmonizes.  Feeling the need of mutual help, we are prompted by it to labor for others.” [Footnote:  Foundations of a Creed, vol.  I., pp. 147, 153.] Morality is social, not personal; the result of those instincts which draw men together in community of interests, sympathies and sufferings.  Its sanctions are all social; its motives are purely human; its law is created by the needs of humanity.  There is no outward coercive law of the divine will or of invariable order which is to be supremely regarded; the moral law is human need as it changes from age to age.  The increase of human sympathies in the process of social evolution gives the true moral ideal to be aspired after.  What will increase the social efficiency of the race, what will promote altruism, is moral.

Alike because of the invariable order of nature, and the social dependence of men on each other, are the effects of conduct wrought out in the individual.  George Eliot believes in “the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.”  All evil is injurious to man, destructive of the integrity of his life.  She teaches the doctrine of Nemesis with as much conviction, thoroughness and eloquence as the old Greek dramatists, making sin to be punished, and wrong-doing to be destructive.  Sometimes she presents this doctrine with all the stern, unpitying vigor of an Aeschylus, as a dire effect of wrong that comes upon men with an unrelenting mercilessness.  In Janet’s Repentance she says,—­

Nemesis is lame, but she is of colossal stature, like the gods; and sometimes, while her sword is not yet unsheathed, she stretches out her huge left arm and grasps her victim.  The mighty hand is invisible, but the victim totters under the dire clutch.

Her doctrine of Nemesis resembles that of the old Greeks more than that of the modern optimists and theists.  Hers is not the idealistic conception of compensation, which measures out an exact proportion of punishment for every sin, and of happiness for every virtuous action.  Wrong-doing injures others as well as those who commit the evil deed, and moral effects reach far beyond those who set them in operation.  Very explicitly is this fact presented in The Mill on the Floss.