 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 any 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 conscience
included sensibilities beyond the common, enlarged by his early habit of
thinking himself imaginatively into the experience of others.
    What was the claim this eager soul made upon him? - »You must believe my
beliefs - be moved by my reasons - hope my hopes - see the vision I point to -
behold a glory where I behold it!« To take such a demand in the light of an
obligation in any direct sense would have been preposterous - to have seemed to
admit it would have been dishonesty; and Deronda, looking on the agitation of
those moments, felt thankful that in the midst of his compassion he had
preserved himself from the bondage of false concessions. The claim hung, too, on
a supposition which might be - nay, probably was - in discordance with the full
fact: the supposition that he, Deronda, was of Jewish blood. Was there ever a
more hypothetic appeal?
    But since the age of thirteen Deronda had associated the
