ABSTRACT
This passionate, intricate description of the processes of scientific research throws into prominence Eliot’s profound sense of the varied powers of the mind. Lydgate rejects the ‘inspiration’ to be found in ‘indifferent drawing or cheap narration’ (p. 164); at the heart of his intellectual life is a vivid consciousness of what lies beyond the merely observable, with what can only be ‘ideally’, and not physically, ‘illuminated’ by the ‘inward light’ of the imagination, with what can be discovered through ‘that arduous invention’ which, instead of simply reacting to and recording the external world, actively makes hypotheses about, and manipulates, that world. As a novelist, Eliot aims not only to represent the observed world but also to engage imaginatively with its inhabitants, to analyse and express the thoughts, emotions and motivations of individual subjects which, in their infinitely complex actions and interactions, compose the social world. Her aesthetic ambitions as a writer, of course, are inseparable from an ethical vision, the articulation of which dominates her works, fictional and non-fictional. Eliot demands from her readers an alertness to the world around them, an engagement, rational and emotional, with that world, and an imaginative grasp of the areas of experience which she represents in her writing and which may be otherwise unfamiliar to those readers. The powers of the mind, not only sensory, but also rational, emotional and
imaginative, are the defining force in the enterprises of the scientist, novelist and ethicist.
