There is
          One great society alone on earth: 
          The noble Living and the noble Dead.

Underneath this growth and diversity of opinion we see George Eliot’s oneness of character, just, for that matter, as we see it in Mill’s long and grave march from the uncompromising denials instilled into him by his father, then through Wordsworthian mysticism and Coleridgean conservatism, down to the pale belief and dim starlight faith of his posthumous volume.  George Eliot was more austere, more unflinching, and of ruder intellectual constancy than Mill.  She never withdrew from the position that she had taken up, of denying and rejecting; she stood to that to the end:  what she did was to advance to the far higher perception that denial and rejection are not the aspects best worth attending to or dwelling upon.  She had little patience with those who fear that the doctrine of protoplasm must dry up the springs of human effort.  Any one who trembles at that catastrophe may profit by a powerful remonstrance of hers in the pages before us (iii. 245-250, also 228).

The consideration of molecular physics is not the direct ground of human love and moral action, any more than it is the direct means of composing a noble picture or of enjoying great music.  One might as well hope to dissect one’s own body and be merry in doing it, as take molecular physics (in which you must banish from your field of view what is specifically human) to be your dominant guide, your determiner of motives, in what is solely human.  That every study has its bearing on every other is true; but pain and relief, love and sorrow, have their peculiar history which make an experience and knowledge over and above the swing of atoms.

With regard to the pains and limitations of one’s personal lot, I suppose there is not a single man or woman who has not more or less need of that stoical resignation which is often a hidden heroism, or who, in considering his or her past history, is not aware that it has been cruelly affected by the ignorant or selfish action of some fellow-being in a more or less close relation of life.  And to my mind there can be no stronger motive than this perception, to an energetic effort that the lives nearest to us shall not suffer in a like manner from us.

As to duration and the way in which it affects your view of the human history, what is really the difference to your imagination between infinitude and billions when you have to consider the value of human experience?  Will you say that since your life has a term of threescore years and ten, it was really a matter of indifference whether you were a cripple with a wretched skin disease, or an active creature with a mind at large for the enjoyment of knowledge, and with a nature which has attracted others to you?

For herself, she remained in the position described