moral law for
her, no eternal ideal standard; but what is right is determined by the
environment. Instead of Kant's categorical imperative of the moral law,
proclaimed as a divine command in every soul, George Eliot found in the
conscience and in the moral intuitions simply inherited experiences. In
_Daniel Deronda_ she says, "Our consciences are not all of the same
pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws; they are the voice of
sensibilities as various as our memories."

George Eliot's rejection of any absolute standard of moral conduct or of
happiness continually asserts itself in her pages. We must look at the
individual, his inherited moral power, his environment, his special
motives, if we would judge him aright. In the last chapters of _The Mill on
the Floss_, when writing of Maggie's repentance, this idea appears. Maggie
is not to be tried by the moral ideal of Christianity, nor by any such
standard of perfection as Kant proposed, but by all the circumstances of
her place in life and her experience. We are accordingly told that--

Moral judgments must remain false and hollow unless they are checked
and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances
that mark the individual lot.

George Eliot says in one of the mottoes in _Felix Holt_ that moral
happiness is "mainly a complex of habitual relations and dispositions."
Even more explicit is her assertion, in one of the mottoes of _Daniel
Deronda_, of the relativity of moral power.

Looking at life in the growth of a single lot, who having a practised
vision may not see that ignorance of the true bond between events, and
false conceit of means whereby sequences may be compelled--like that
falsity of eyesight which overlooks the gradations of distance, seeing
that which is afar off as if it were within a step or a grasp--
precipitate the mistaken soul on destruction?

She does not teach, however, that man is a mere victim of circumstances,
that he is a creature ruled by fate. His environment includes his own moral
heredity, which may overcome the physical circumstances which surround him.
In _Middlemarch_ she says, "It always remains true that if we had been
greater, circumstances would have been less strong against us." The same
thought appears in Zarca's appeal to Fedalma to be his true daughter, in
one of the most effective scenes of _The Spanish Gypsy_. Moral devotedness
is the strongest of all forces,