that all religion arises out of the subjective elements of human life.  At the same time that she made religion a development from feeling, she limited the moral law to emotional sanctions.  On the contrary, Spencer is much more a rationalist, and insists on the intellectual basis both of morals and of religion.  He makes less of feeling than she; and in this fact is to be found a wide gulf of separation between them.  She could have been no more content with his philosophy than she was indebted to it in the construction of her own.  As much one as they are in their philosophic basis and general methods, they are antagonistic in their conceptions about man and in the place assigned to nature in the development of religion.  To George Eliot, religion is the development of feeling.  To Spencer, it is the result of our “thought of a power of which humanity is but a small and fugitive product.”  In these, as in other directions, they were not in sympathy.  Her realism, her psychologic method, her philosophic theories, her scientific sympathies, she did not derive from him, diligently as she may have studied his books.

George Eliot agreed with Comte and all other positivists in setting aside every inquiry into causes, and limiting philosophy to the search after laws.  The idea of causes is idealistic, and a cause of any kind whatever is, according to these thinkers, not to be found.  “The knowledge of laws,” says Comte, “is henceforth to take the place of the search after causes.”  In other words, it is impossible for man to find out why anything is, he can only know how it is.  George Eliot entirely agreed with Comte as to the universal dominion of law.  She also followed him in his teachings about heredity, which he held to be the cause of social unity, morality, and the higher or subjective life.  His conception of feeling as the highest expression of human life confirmed the conclusions to which she had already arrived from the study of Feuerbach.  She was an enthusiastic believer in the Great Being, Humanity; she worshipped at that shrine.  More to her than all other beliefs was her belief that we are to live for others.  With Comte she said, “Altruism alone can enable us to live in the highest and truest sense.”  She would have all our doctrines about rights eliminated from morality and politics.  They are as absurd, says Comte, as they are immoral.

George Eliot had a strong tendency towards philosophical speculations.  While yet a student she expressed an ardent desire that she might live to reconcile the philosophy of Locke with that of Kant.  In positivism, as developed and modified by Lewes, she found that reconciliation.  She went far towards accepting the boldest speculations of the agnostic science of the time, but she modified it again and again to meet the needs of her own broader mind and heart.  Yet it is related of her that in parting with one of the greatest English poets, probably Tennyson,