The Data of Ethics

The Data of Ethics

Spencer, Herbert

New York: Appleton & Co., 1879

1879

George Eliot to Herbert Spencer, 27 June 1879. “I rejoice not in the cause, but in the fact of your having broken the contemplated order of your series for the sake of securing this portion of your Ethics, and if I did not believe it to be an impertinence to tell an author what one would wish him to do, I should say a little more of the value that many would attach to a continuation of this weft as something more needed than even the completion of the Sociological portion. Of course, as you predict, you will be partly misunderstood and misrepresented. That is destiny unshunnable. All one must care about is that some grains of corrective knowledge or useful stimulus will be here and there swallowed and digested. I have an evil pleasure in observing that you have as good a crop of little misprints as I should have left myself.” GEL 7: 172-3 

Spencer, Herbert, The Data of Ethics, George Eliot's Reading, George Eliot Archive, edited by Beverley Park Rilett. https://GeorgeEliotArchive.org, Accessed September 7, 2026. https://georgeeliotarchive.org/items/show/57176

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