endeavored to show how these enter into and help to form his destiny.  In doing this she followed the lead of the positivists in the acceptance of feeling as the basis and the true expression of man’s inner life.  The emotional life is made the essential life; and all its phases of manifestation in art, poetry and religion are regarded as of great importance.  George Eliot viewed the higher problems of life from this point of view, giving to the forms in which the emotional side of man’s nature is expressed a supreme importance.  Religion, as the response of feeling to the mystery of existence, occupied a most important place in her philosophy.  That her interpretation of the emotional elements of life is the true one, that she has discovered their source or their real ideal significance, may well be doubted; but there is every reason for believing that she realized their great value, and she certainly tried in an earnest spirit to make them helpful in the life of ideal beauty and truthfulness.

All that agnostic science and the evolution philosophy had to teach, George Eliot accepted, its doctrine of descent, its new psychology, and its theories of society and human destiny.  Its doctrine of experience, its ethical theories, were equally hers.  Yet into her interpretation of existence went a woman’s heart, the widest and tenderest sympathy, and a quick yearning purpose to do what good she could in the world.  She saw with the lover’s eyes, motherhood revealed itself in her soul, the child’s trust was in her heart.  The new philosophy she applied to life, revealed its relations to duty, love, sorrow, trial and death.  To her it had a deep social meaning, a vital connection with the heart, its hopes and its burdens, and for her it touched the spiritual content of life with reality.  It was in this way she became the truest interpreter of the evolution philosophy, the best apostle of the ethics taught by agnostic science.  She not only speculated, she also felt and lived.  Philosophy was to her more than an abstract theory of the universe; into it entered a tender sympathy for all human weakness, a profound sense of the mystery of existence, and a holy purpose to make life pure and true to all she could reach.  This larger comprehension gives a new significance to her interpretation of evolution.  It makes it impossible that this philosophy should be fully understood without a study of her books.

It is because George Eliot was not a mere speculative thinker that her teachings become so important.  The true novelist, who is gifted with genius, who creates character and situation with a master’s hand, must have some theory of life.  He must have some notion of what life means, what the significance of the pathos and tragedy of human experience, and why it is that good and evil in conduct do not produce the same results.  Such a theory of life, if firmly grasped and worked out strongly, becomes a philosophy.  Much depends with the novelist on that philosophy,