Zadie Smith’s essay, “Middlemarch and Everybody,” pages 29-41 in Changing My Mind (Penguin, 2009), fills in a succession for the “Wisdom from Experience” movement: Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) — from the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam, biblical scholar and philosopher; the Enlightenment tradition from Michel de Montaigne to Joseph Priestley; George Eliot (1819-1880), born Marian Evans in Great Britain —  editor, translator, novelist and philosopher.

Eliot’s novel  “Middlemarch,” Smith says [and the rest of this entry is direct quote from Smith’s essay], “is a book about the effects of experience that changes with experience” (p. 31). George Eliot contended “that human experience is as powerful a force as theory or revealed fact. Experience transforms perspective, and transformations in perspective, to Eliot, constitute real changes in the world. . . . Experience, for Eliot, was a powerful way of knowing” (p. 32).

“When [in Middlemarch] Dorothea [Brooke] truly becomes great (only really in the last third of the novel), when she comes to the aid of Lydgate and Rosamund), it is because she has at last recognized the value of emotional experience. [Eliot writes]:

“‘All the active thought with which she had before been representing to herself the trials of Lydgate’s lot. . . all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance (pp. 32-33).’

“For Eliot, in the absence of God, all our moral tests must take place on this earth and have their rewards and punishments here. We are one another’s lesson, one another’s duty. This turns out to be a doctrine peculiarly suited to a certain kind of novel writing. Middlemarch is a dazzling dramatization of earthly human striving” (p. 38).