s final."

Deronda's ear caught all these negative whisperings; nay, he repeated
them distinctly to himself. It was not the first but it was the most
pressing occasion on which he had had to face this question of the
family likeness among the heirs of enthusiasm, whether prophets or
dreamers of dreams, whether the

"Great benefactors of mankind, deliverers,"

or the devotees of phantasmal discovery--from the first believer in his
own unmanifested inspiration, down to the last inventor of an ideal
machine that will achieve perpetual motion. The kinship of human
passion, the sameness of mortal scenery, inevitably fill fact with
burlesque and parody. Error and folly have had their hecatombs of
martyrs. Reduce the grandest type of man hitherto known to an abstract
statement of his qualities and efforts, and he appears in dangerous
company: say that, like Copernicus and Galileo, he was immovably
convinced in the face of hissing incredulity; but so is the contriver
of perpetual motion. We cannot fairly try the spirits by this sort of
test. If we want to avoid giving the dose of hemlock or the sentence of
banishment in the wrong case, nothing will do but a capacity to
understand the subject-matter on which the immovable man is convinced,
and fellowship with human travail, both near and afar, to hinder us
from scanning and deep experience lightly. Shall we say, "Let the ages
try the spirits, and see what they are worth?" Why, we are the
beginning of the ages, which can only be just by virtue of just
judgments in separate human breasts--separate yet combined. Even
steam-engines could not have got made without that condition, but must
have stayed in the mind of James Watt.

This track of thinking was familiar enough to Deronda to have saved him
from any contemptuous prejudgment of Mordecai, even if their
communication had been free from that peculiar claim on himself
strangely ushered in by some long-growing preparation in the Jew's
agitated mind. This claim, indeed, considered in what is called a
rational way, might seem justifiably dismissed as illusory and even
preposterous; but it was precisely what turned Mordecai's hold on him
from an appeal to his ready sympathy into a clutch on his struggling
conscience. 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 (which also have their kinship and likeness).
And Deronda's consci