The Victorians had a great feeling for “duty” as something almost transcendental. George Eliot held it in high regard, too: one day, out strolling with a companion, she remarked that out of the three words “God, Immortality, Duty,” she considered the first inconceivable and the second unbelievable, but the third was “peremptory and absolute.” Darwin also wrote of the “deep feeling of right or duty” as the “most noble of all the attributes of man” (and, as with moral attributes in general, he speculated about its origins in the social group). Leslie Stephen himself seems to have been thinking
...more
