s
subjective, grows out of fellow-feeling.

The mental life of man, according to George Eliot, is simply an expansion
of the emotional life. At first the mental life is unconscious, it is
instinctive, simply the emotional response of man to the sequences of
nature. This instinctive life of the emotions always remains a better part
of our natures, and is to be trusted rather than the more formal activities
of the intellectual faculties. In the most highly developed intellects
even, there is a subconscious mental activity, an instinctive life of
feeling, which is rather to be trusted than reason itself. This is a
frequently recurring statement, which George Eliot makes in the firmest
conviction of its truthfulness. It appears in such a sentence as this, in
_The Mill on the Floss_: "Watch your own speech, and notice how it is
guided by your less conscious purposes." In _Daniel Deronda_ it finds
expression in the assertion that "there is a great deal of unmapped country
within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of
our gusts and storms." It is more explicitly presented in _Adam Bede_.

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulses by the
name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process,
we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all
given to us.

George Eliot puts into the mouth of Mordecai the assertion that love lies
deeper than any reasons which are to be found for its exercise. In the same
way, she would have us believe that feeling is safer than reason. Daniel
Deronda questions Mordecai's visions, and doubts if he is worth listening
to, except for pity's sake. On this the author comments, in defence of the
visions, as against reason.

Suppose he had introduced himself as one of the strictest reasoners: do
they form a body of men hitherto free from false conclusions and
illusory speculations? The driest argument has its hallucinations, too
hastily concluding that its net will now at last be large enough to
hold the universe. Men may dream in demonstrations, and cut out an
illusory world in the shape of axioms, definitions and propositions,
with a final exclusion of fact signed Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking
will save us mortals from mistake in our imperfect apprehension of the
matter to be thought about. And since the unemotional intellect may
carry us into a mathematical dr