ecessary effects.

George Eliot never swerves from this conception of the universe, physical
and moral; everywhere cause is but another name for effect. The unbending
order adopts man into its processes, helps him when he conforms to them,
and gives him pain when he disregards them. The whole secret of man's
existence is to be found in the agreement of his life with the invariable
sequences of nature and moral activity; harmony with them brings true
development, discord brings pain and sorrow. The unbending nature of law,
and man's relations to it, she has portrayed in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story,"
when describing Tina's sorrows.

While this poor little heart was being bruised with a weight too heavy
for it, Nature was holding on her calm inexorable way, in unmoved and
terrible beauty. The stars were rushing in their eternal courses; the
tides swelled to the level of the last expectant weed; the sun was
making brilliant day to busy nations oil the other side of the
expectant earth. The stream of human thought and deed was hurrying and
broadening onward. The astronomer was at his telescope; the great ships
were laboring over the waves; the toiling eagerness of commerce, the
fierce spirit of revolution, were only ebbing in brief rest, and
sleepless statesmen were dreading the possible crisis of the morrow.
What were our little Tina and her trouble in this mighty torrent,
rushing from one awful unknown to another? Lighter than the smallest
centre of quivering life in the water-drop, hidden and uncared for as
the pulse of anguish in the breast of the tiniest bird that has
fluttered down to its nest with the long-sought food, and has found the
nest torn and empty.

The effect of the uniformities of nature upon man, as George Eliot regarded
them, is not quite that which would be inferred from these words alone.
While she believed that nature is as unbending and pitiless as is here
indicated, yet that unbending uniformity, which never changes its direction
for man, is a large influence towards the development of his higher life.
It has the effect on man to develop feeling which is the expression of all
that is best and most human in his life.

George Eliot believed that the better and nobler part of man's life is to
be found in feeling. It is the first expression which he makes as a
sentient being, to have emotions; and his emotions more truly represent him
than t