George Eliot was pre-eminently a novelist and a poet; but she is also the truest literary representative the nineteenth century has yet afforded of its positivist and scientific tendencies.  What Comte and Spencer have taught in the name of philosophy, Tyndall and Haeckel in the name of science, she has applied to life and its problems.  Their aims, spirit and tendencies have found in her a living embodiment, and re-appear in her pages as forms of genius, as artistic creations.  They have experimented, speculated, elaborated theories of the universe, drawn out systems of philosophy; but she has reconstructed the social life of man through her creative insight.  What they mean, whither they lead, is not to be discovered nearly so plainly in their books as in hers.  She is their interpreter through that wonderful insight, genius and creative power which enabled her to see what they could not themselves discover,—­the effect of their teachings on man as an individual and as a social being.

Whoever would know what the agnostic and evolution philosophy of the time has to teach about man, his social life, his moral responsibilities, his religious aspirations, should go to the pages of George Eliot in preference to those of any other.  The scientific spirit, the evolution philosophy, live in her pages, reveal themselves there in all their strength and in all their weakness.  She was a thinker equal to any of those whose names stand forth as the representatives of the philosophy she accepted, she was as competent, as they to think out the problems of life and to interpret social existence in accordance with their theories of man and nature.  Competent to grasp and to interpret the positive philosophy in all its details and in all its applications, she also had that artistic spirit of reconstruction which enabled her to apply to life what she held in theory.  Along with the calm philosophic spirit which thinks out “the painful riddle of the earth,” she had the creative spirit of the artist which delights in portraying life in all its endeavors, complexities and consequences.  She not only accepted the theory of hereditary transmission as science has recently developed it, and as it has been enlarged by positivism into a shaping influence of the past upon the present, but she made this law vital with meaning as she developed its consequences in the lives of her characters.  To her it was not merely a theory, but a principle so pregnant with meaning as to have its applications in every phase of human experience.  Life could not be explained without it; the thoughts, deeds and aspirations of men could be understood only with reference to it; much that enters into human life of weal and woe is to be comprehended only with reference to this law.  In regard to all the other evolution problems and principles her knowledge was as great, her insight as clear, and her constructive use of them as original.