God, and what we call laws of nature are but attributes of Deity.”  Matter is known to us only as the cause of sensations, while the soul is the principle of sensation, dependent upon the nervous system; the nervous system depending upon life, and life upon organization.  All knowledge comes to man through the action of the external world upon the senses; all truth, all progress, come to us out of experience.  “Reason is dependent for its exercise upon experience, and experience is nothing more than the knowledge of the invariable order of nature, of the relations of cause and effect.”  All acts of men are ruled by necessity.  Pain produces our ideas of right and wrong, and happiness is the test of all moral action.  There are no such things as sin and evil, only pains and pleasures.  Evil is the natural and necessary limitation of our faculties, and our consequent liability to error; and pain, which we call evil, is its corrective.  Nothing, under the circumstances, could have happened but that which did happen; and the actions of men, under precisely the same circumstances, must always issue in precisely the same results.  Death, treated of in a separate chapter, is shown to be good, and a necessary aid to progress.  Society is regarded as an organism, and man is to find his highest life in the life of others.  “The great body of humanity (considered as an individual), with its soul, the principle of sensation, is ever fresh and vigorous and increasing in enjoyment.  Death and birth, the means of renewal and succession, bear the same relation to this body of society as the system of waste and reproduction do to the human body; the old and useless and decayed material is carried out, and fresh substituted, and thus the frame is renovated and rendered capable of ever-increasing happiness....  The minds, that is to say, the ideas and feelings of which they were composed, of Socrates, Plato, Epicurus, Galileo, Bacon, Locke, Newton, are thus forever in existence, and the immortality of the soul is preserved, not in individuals, but in the great body of humanity....  To the race, though not to individuals, all beautiful things are preserved forever; all that is really good and profitable is immortal.”

Nearly every idea here presented was accepted by George Eliot and re-appears in her writings.  In Bray’s later books much also is to be found which she embraced.  He therein says that all outside of us is a delusion of the senses. [Footnote:  This summary of Bray’s philosophy is condensed from an article in the Westminster Review for April, 1879.] The senses conspire with the intellect to impose upon us.  The constitution of our faculties forces us to believe in an external world, but it has no more reality than our dreams.  Each creature is the creator of its own separate, different world.  The unity of outward things is imposed on them by the faculty of individuality, and is a mere fiction of the mind.  Matter is a creature of the imagination, and is a pure assumption.