Having listened to the ‘In Our Time’ programme on Spinoza, and heard a paraphrasing of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (the conclusion), I searched the text and found the actual quote:
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Having visisted the cemeteries at Montmartre and Pere Lachaise, and having used a map to find the graves of the famous, it was interesting, that I found myself drawn most of all to the graves of the unknown, which, of course, far out-number those of the more familiar. What had all these hundreds of anonymous people done in their lives, and what was the effect of their actions on our present day existence?