of the race, while the past certainly has a powerful influence over the present.  This fact was neglected by Wordsworth, and especially is it neglected by the intuitive philosophies.  They ignore the lessons of the past, and assume that a new and perfect world is to be evolved from the depths of consciousness.  That to think a better world is to create a better world, they seem to take for granted, while the fact is that the truer life is the result of a painful and long-continued struggle against adverse conditions.  What has been, persists in remaining, and the past, with all its narrowness and prejudices, continues to influence men more powerfully than does clear thought or regard for the truth.  Emotion and sentiment cling about what has become sacred with age.  Channels for thought and activity having once been made, it is very difficult to abandon them for untried paths approved even by reason.

The historic view is one of much importance, and is likely to be overlooked by the poets and novelists.  It is also ignored by the radicals in morals and religion.  Much which George Eliot says on this subject is of great value, and may be heeded with the utmost profit.  Her words of wisdom, however, lose much of their value because they utterly ignore those spontaneous and supernatural elements of man’s higher life which lift it quite out of the region of dependence on history.

There is something to be said in behalf of George Eliot’s attitude towards religion, which caused her to hold it in reverence, even when rejecting the objective validity of its dogmas.  Yet much more is to be said for that other attitude, which is faithful to the law of reason, and believes that reason is competent to say some truer and larger word on a subject of such vital importance and such constant interest to man.  That both reason and tradition are to be listened to reverently is true, but George Eliot so zealously espoused the cause of tradition as to give it an undue prominence.  Her lesson was needed, however, and we may be all the better able to profit by it because she was so much an enthusiast in proclaiming its value.  The even poise of perfect truth is no more to be had from her pages than from those of others.

The emphasis she laid on feeling and sentiment was a needed one, as a counterpoise to the exaggerations of rationalism.  Man does live in his feelings more than in his reason.  He is a being of sentiment, a creature of impulse, his social life is one of the affections.  In all the ranges of his moral, religious and social life he is guided mainly by his emotions and sentiments.  It cannot be said, however, as George Eliot would have us say, that these are human born and have no higher meaning.  They are the outgrowth of spiritual reality, as well as of human experience; they repeat the foregleams and foresights of a

            “far-off divine event,
  To which the whole creation moves.”