James P. Hogan Mind, Machines and Evolution
McGinn The character of Mind. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind 2ed (1996)
H. L. Meyers The Creatures of Man
McMaster Bujold, Lois MV7, Cetaganda
Potter Karen Dom nadziei
211. Sylvia Andrew Demony przeszśÂośÂci
Cerise DeLand [Stanhope Challenge 02] Lady Featherstone's Fervent Affair (pdf)
Adams Douglas 02 Restauracja na kośÂcu wszechśÂwiata
Turba Philosophorum
Carey Suzanne Us
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
awareness, and refinement of perception, and whose
way of giving expression to the range of our human in-
wardness makes so very much of contemporary social
science research and writing pale badly in comparison.
In fact, George Eliot, all through Middlemarch
(1872), more than anticipates Freud: she relentlessly
examines the unconscious, uses several of her characters
to do so, and, too, clearly indicates an acute sense of
what Freud only later in his richly productive career
knew to call ego psychology : the way we come to
terms with the unconscious through various mental ma-
neuvers. Moreover, she did not isolate psychology from
sociology or, for that matter, politics. The central figure
61
CHAPTER II
in the novel is, really, the town itself, its stubbornly
held customs, values, but also the changes that gradually
come to bear on it. The various characters in this care-
fully plotted story, so richly endowed with social and
psychological wisdom, are meant to embody the full
range of a particular, historical moment and scene the
rural England of the earlier part of the nineteenth cen-
tury. But, naturally, Eliot wants us to move beyond that
world, however fine and telling her evocation of it; she
is in pursuit of moral knowledge of a kind that, she
hopes, transcends the limits of time and place.
The author of Scenes of a Clerical Life summoned oc-
casional, guarded irony for her social descriptions in
that respectful group portrait of ministers and their pa-
rishioners; but Middlemarch is a secular story, and its
church life, such as it is, offers a mere nod to ceremonial
commemoration. True, at certain moments Eliot tips
her hand as the onetime earnest student of religious
philosophy, who actually intended, as a young woman,
to write an ecclesiastical history of England. She brings
us to a church; she gives us a clergyman but through
him we learn of the fast slipping hold of religious con-
viction on these essentially secular folk, each earnestly
or warily or cleverly or mischievously trying to make do,
if not make off with any and all good fortune available.
At times, actually, she is more scornful, as a social critic,
than Freud would dare be: a striking departure for this
daughter of Robert Evans, a loyal member of the Angli-
can Church and the manager of a country estate, whom
she, in her last, autobiographical writing, described as a
country parson. Here in book 4 of Middlemarch is bibli-
cal life under a psychological lens that is sardonically
62
WHERE WE STOOD: 1900
secular: When the animals entered the Ark in pairs,
one may imagine that allied species made much private
remark on one another, and were tempted to think that
so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were
eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the ra-
tions (I fear the part played by the vultures on that occa-
sion would be too painful for art to represent, those
birds being disadvantageously naked about the gullet,
and apparently without rites and ceremonies).
As if the above were not enough, the authorial voice
escalates its scorn, makes a damaging connection be-
tween the far-distant past and the nineteenth-century
English country scene being evoked: The same sort of
temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed
Peter Featherstone s funeral procession; most of them
having their minds bent on a limited store which each
would have liked to get the most of. She quite obvi-
ously need not have used that capitalized phrase to ac-
complish her comparative assertion. When Dorothea,
rather than the novelist directly, is speaking, we learn
more gently, even wistfully, of a falling away from reli-
gion on the part of a central character in the story, an
ardent idealist who first marries a biblical scholar, as a
matter of fact, the older, desiccated Casaubon. At one
point Dorothea tells Will Ladislaw, I have always been
finding out my religion since I was a little girl ; but she
is quick to point out what has now transpired: I used
to pray so much now I hardly ever pray.
Dorothea is not George Eliot, but neither is she un-
like her in important respects a strong intellectuality,
an articulate reformist spirit, a shrewd sense of others
(which does not necessarily translate into a firm grasp of
63
CHAPTER II
one s own inner nature). Young Mary Ann Evans was a
devoutly introspective Christian lady who read far and
deep in not only the Bible but any number of theo-
logical sources. It took her several decades of secular [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
