In The Professor, Jane Eyre and Middlemarch the moral neutrality or objectivity of the modernist gaze at life is beginning to develop. In these books we breathe a moral atmosphere a world away from that of, say, Vanity Fair, and even quite different from that of such a much less obtrusively moralistic writer (in most of her novels) as Jane Austen. This new moral atmosphere is what Heather Glen notices about Jane Eyre when she remarks that

Glen goes through the whole novel, giving further examples of the pragmatic cast of Jane's motivations, motivations that exist on a parallel plane with her moral and religious ideas, but develop according to their own internal dynamics: ‘Reunited with [Rochester] at Ferndean, she shows considerably more interest in provoking his sexual jealousy than in ensuring that he is reformed’ (97). Glen does not refer this character of the novel to the influence of physio-psychology, but what she describes is precisely the phenomenon that I have tried to explain.

In France, the scientific observation of the passions had begun to emerge much earlier than it did in England. Already in the seventeenth century works like the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld (whom Nietzsche valued) and La Princesse de Clèves of Madame de Lafayette were moving toward a trans-moral moral psychology.