Abundant moments of indecision and delay shape George Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda (1876), which treats uncertainty as a recursive movement between interior and exterior, potentiality and activity. This chapter shows how Eliot explores action’s convoluted antecedents, drawing on intellectual trends in mid-century comparative method and physiological psychology, especially the latter’s portrait of embodied willing and pathologies of volition. These contexts frame a reading of the novel’s twin stances of practical experience and intellectual reflection: hesitation, the bewildering experience of having a “will which is and yet is not yet,” and its rational cousin, comparison, “our precious guide.” Formal fluctuations and portrayals of mental caprice would seem at cross-purposes with Eliot’s narrative control and moral coherence. Yet in discovering a “kinship” between certainty and doubt, she reinvigorates her novelistic ethics and recasts sympathy as guaranteed by “closer comparison between the knowledge which we call rational & the experience which we call emotional.” Her characters set store by irresolute stances of hesitation and comparison, and predictive affects like trust and hope.

This chapter concludes the discussion of interpretation by focusing on the emotions and mental processes of the interpreter. Each case presents at least one dilemma that cannot be solved through pure legal deduction. What options, then, does the interpreter have? First, they will seek the illusory comfort of legal objectivity, and convince themselves that the answer is out there, buried somewhere in the record. But it is not. Second, the interpreter will try to exercise responsible agency and provide an answer that best resonates with their ethical or political commitments. But the interpreter does not really know which interpretive outcome is preferable. Third, the interpreter will turn to the standard practices of the community and write pages upon pages of corollary analysis, hoping that the intractable issue will magically vanish. Finally, the interpreter will stick to their decision and defend it as the sole logical solution.