originally so catholic as that of Comte should assume a sectarian character, was a contingency she foreboded and deprecated.”  In this last remark we doubtless have the explanation of George Eliot’s dissent from Comte.  She believed in an organic, vital development of a higher social structure, which will be brought about in the gradual evolution of humanity.  Comte’s social structure was artificial, the conception of one mind, and therefore as ill adapted to represent the wants of mankind as any other system devised by an individual thinker.  His philosophy proper, his system of positive; thought, she accepted with but few reservations.  Her views in this direction, as in many others, were substantially those presented by Lewes in his many works bearing on positivism.  She was profoundly indebted to Comte, although in her later years she largely passed beyond his influence to the acceptance of the new evolution philosophy.  In fact, she belonged to that school of English positivists which has only accepted the positive philosophy of Comte, and which has rejected his later work in the direction of social and religious construction.  Lewes was the earliest of English thinkers to look at Comte in this way; but other representative members of the school are John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison and John Morley.  Zealously accepting Comte’s position that philosophy must limit itself to positive data and methods, they look upon the “Religion of Humanity,” with Prof.  Tyndall, as Catholicism minus Christianity, and reject it.

She certainly came nearer to Comte in some directions than to Herbert Spencer, for the latter has not so fully recognized those elements of the mental and social life which most attracted her attention.  Her theory of duty is one which he does not accept.  He insists in his Data of Ethics that duty will become less and less obligatory and necessary in the future, because all action will be in harmony with the impulses of the inner man and with the conditions of the environment.  This conclusion is entirely opposed to the moral-theory of George Eliot, and is but one instance of their wide divergence.  He insists, in his Study of Sociology, that the religious consciousness will not change its lines of evolution.  He distinctly rejects the conclusion arrived at by George Eliot, that there is no Infinite Reality knowable to man, and that the substance and reality of religion is purely subjective.  “That the object-matter of religion,” he says, “can be replaced by another object-matter, as supposed by those who think the ‘religion of humanity’ will be the religion of the future, is a belief countenanced neither by induction nor by deduction.  However dominant may become the moral sentiment enlisted on behalf of humanity, it can never exclude the sentiment alone properly called religious, awakened by that which is behind humanity and behind all other things.”  George Eliot was content with humanity, and believed