I never had any personal acquaintance with him, never saw him to my knowledge except in the House of Commons; and though I have studied his books, especially his Logic and Political Economy with much benefit, I have no consciousness of their having made any marked epoch in my life.

Concerning another leading positivist she has said,—­

Of [Herbert Spencer’s] friendship I have had the honor and advantage for twenty years, but I believe that every main bias of my mind had been taken before I knew him.  Like the rest of his readers, I am, of course, indebted to him for much enlargement and clarifying of thought.

Not long previous to her death, in reading Bridges’ version of The General View of Positivism, she expressed her dissent more often than her assent, and once she said,—­

    I cannot submit my intellect or my soul to the guidance of Comte.

George Eliot did not take up her residence in London until her thirty-second year, and previous to that time her acquaintance with the positivist leaders must have been slight.  Before that age the opinions of most persons are formed, and such was the case with George Eliot.  It is likely her opinions underwent many changes after this date, but only in the direction of those already established and in modification of the philosophy already accepted.  She became an evolutionist without the aid of those men who are supposed to be the originators of this theory.  Every new idea or new way of interpreting nature and life grows into form gradually, and under the influence of many different minds.  The evolution philosophy was long accepted before it became a doctrine or was formulated into a philosophy.  The same influences worked in many quarters to produce the same conclusions.  It was given to George Eliot to come under a set of influences which led her to accept all the leading ideas of evolution before she had any opportunity to know that philosophy as it has been elaborated by the men whose names are most often connected with it.  A brief account of the successive philosophic influences which most directly and personally touched her mind will largely help towards the comprehension of her teachings.

The most intimate friend of her youth, who gave her a home when trouble came with her family, and stimulated her mind to active inquiry after truth, was a philosopher of no mean ability.  Charles Bray not only was the first philosopher she knew, but her opinions of after years were mainly in the direction he marked out for her.  In his Philosophy of Necessity, published in 1841, he maintained that the only reality is the Great Unknown which we name God, that all natural laws are actions of the first cause.  He taught that the world is created in our own minds, the result of some unknown cause without us, which we call matter; but it is thus God mirrors himself to us.  “All we see is but the vesture of