Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Daniel Deronda often comes across as a more futuristic novel than the rest of George Eliot’s oeuvre. Its moral idealism tends to puzzle the reader for being too metaphysical and ethereal. So far, Eliot’s general idealism has been discussed in terms of her engagement with philosophers such as Feuerbach, Spinoza, Auguste Comte, J. S. Mill, and Herbert Spencer. In this article, the same issue is explored by way of historical significance rather than direct influence. By reading Daniel Deronda in the context of British ethical idealism, especially the writings of F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green, I argue that the novel contributed significantly to a major development of Victorian moral philosophy. In particular, the novel deploys a dialectical language of speculation that helped to shape a shift of interest to a more metaphysical approach to moral ideals. Addressing issues such as the fallibility of present judgment, the importance of integration rather than antithesis, and the heuristic value of a teleological future, Daniel Deronda self‐consciously tests out the validity of a dialectical form of moral envisioning. To read Daniel Deronda this way can help define a crucial aspect of Eliot’s thinking that cannot be easily or sufficiently articulated in such terms as scientific positivism and German idealism, though both of which have been important in shaping Eliot’s other novels before Daniel Deronda . In creating independently an ethical idealism that is equally metaphysical but intellectually less restrictive than that of Bradley or Green, Daniel Deronda shows not only the convergence of literary and philosophical writings but also the importance of considering literary works for the study of Victorian moral philosophy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".