I'm still on George Eliot, here. Because her insights are so right on. Because she was frackin' brilliant.

How brilliant? Mary Anne Evans, aka George Eliot, was a wildly successful female novelist from her very first published novel, Adam Bede… in the Victorian Age.

Despite living openly with a man who happened to be married to someone else, Eliot held a weekly salon attended by England's best and brightest lights. She counted that epitome of moral rectitude, Queen Victoria herself, among her most ardent fans.

When you can even get those who disapprove of you to approve of your work?… that's brilliance, folks.

Here's what Eliot has to say about prejudices:

 

"To minds strongly marked by the positive and negative qualities that create severity — strength of will, conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great power of self-control, and a disposition to exert control over others — prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth.

Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye — however it may come — these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up that void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton."          –George Eliot, from The Mill on the Floss

 

Interesting that she links those who tend to be severe, and those who have a vacuum in the spontaneous ideas department, with those who tend to form prejudices.

Gives us a better grasp on the handle of human nature.