Again, she learns that “more helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.”  Man is in this way brought to live for man, to suffer in his sufferings, to be mercifully tender and pitiful with him in his temptations and trials.  Sympathy builds up the moral life, gives an ethical meaning to man’s existence.  Thus humanity becomes a providence to man, and it is made easier for him to bear his sufferings and to be comforted in his sorrows.  Nemesis is stern, but man is pitiful; retribution is inexorable, but humanity is sympathetic.  Nature never relents, and there is no God who can so forgive us our sins as to remove their legitimate effects; but man can comfort us with his love, and humanity can teach us to overcome retribution by righteous conduct.

All idealistic rights are to be laid aside, according to her theory, all personal claims and motives are to be renounced.  In the duties we owe to others, life is to find its rightful expression.  In Janet’s Repentance she says,—­

The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.  No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience:  a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires and impulses.

To live for self, George Eliot seems to regard as immoral; self is to be ignored except in so far as it can be made to serve humanity.  As rights are individual they are repudiated, and the demand for them is regarded as revolutionary and destructive.

That man is a moral being because he is a social being she carries to its farthest extreme in some of her teachings, as when she makes public opinion the great motive power to social improvement.  Felix Holt pronounces public opinion—­the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honorable and what is shameful—­to be the greatest power under heaven.  In the “Address to Working Men, by Felix Holt,” published in Blackwood’s Magazine, Felix is made to say to his fellows,—­

Any nation that had within it a majority of men—­and we are the majority—­possessed of much wisdom and virtue, would not tolerate the bad practices, the commercial lying and swindling, the poisonous adulteration of goods, the retail cheating and the political bribery which are carried on boldly in the midst of us.  A majority has the power of creating a public opinion.  We could groan and his-s before we had the franchise:  if we had groaned and hissed in the right place, if we had discerned better between good and evil, if the multitude of us artisans and factory hands and miners and laborers of all sorts had been skilful, faithful, well-judging, industrious, sober—­and