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The Essays of "George Eliot", Complete.
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From the Note-Book of an Eccentric,
and Other Essays,
by George Eliot.
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The Wisdom of the Child.
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George Eliot soars again to another spiritual height, or better, opens to a spiritual truth of simplicity -
"It may not be an original idea, but never mind, if it be a true one, that the proper result of intellectual cultivation is to restore the mind to that state of wonder and interest with which it looks on everything in childhood. Thus Jean Jacques Rousseau, couched on the grass by the side of a plant that he might examine its structure and appearance at his ease, would have seemed to a little child so like itself in taste and feeling that it would have lain down by him, in full confidence of entire sympathy between them in spite of his wizard-like, Armenian attire."
but again, relapses, and now this time, seriously -
" ... while the wonder of the wise man is the result of knowledge disclosing mystery, the simplicity and purity of his moral principles, the result of wide experience and hardly-attained self-conflict. A truce to your philosophers whose elevation above their fellow-beings consists in their ability to laugh at the ties which bind women and children, who have looked just so far into the principles of ethics as to be able to disconcert a simple soul that talks of vice and virtue as realities. The child which abstains from eating plums because grandmamma forbade is their superior in wisdom: it exercises faith and obedience to law—two of the most ennobling attributes of humanity which these philosophers have cast off. ... "
from the spiritual heights, just as she did after she soared to heights in the middle of the previous article, and this time it's not just flat.
" ... Self-renunciation, submission to law, trust, benignity, ingenuousness, rectitude—these are the qualities we delight most to witness in the child, and these are the qualities which most dignify the man."
It was almost a reaction of fear of soaring ingrained in a soul that had suffered inquisition not too long ago, in an immediately prior life.
" ... If he were to admit that all things were lawful to him, he would add, “I will not be thought under the power of any; I will not circumscribe or bring into bondage the action of any one of my highest endowments.” He feels that in submitting to the restraint of a self-imposed law, he would be presenting humanity in its grandest aspect. But it is only the highest human state at which he aims—not anything superhuman. ... "
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September 27, 2021 - September 27, 2021.
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