The basis of Bray’s philosophy was idealism and pantheism, assuming form under the influence of modern science.  He quoted Emerson frequently, and the school of thought Emerson represents affected him greatly.  On the other hand, he was then a strong phrenologist, had imbibed much of the teaching of Combe’s Constitution of Man, and he eagerly embraced those notions of the relations of body and mind which have been propagated in the name of physical science.

The same double influence is to be seen at work upon the next thinker who was destined to give direction to George Eliot’s philosophy.  Feuerbach was a disciple of Hegel, whose influence is deeply marked through all his earlier writings.  He also was affected by physical science, and he found in sensationalism an element for his system.  To him all thought is the product of experience; he founded his ideas on materials which can be appropriated only through the activity of the senses.  The external world affects the senses and generates feeling, feeling produces ideas.  Feeling re-acts upon the external world, interprets it according to its own wants.  Feeling is thus the source of all knowledge; feeling is the basis alike of religion and philosophy.  Feuerbach, as well as Bray, finds that man creates the outward world in consciousness; all that is out of man which he can know, is but a reflection of what is in him.  This conception of consciousness, this pure idealism, becomes the source of Feuerbach’s philosophy of religion.  He says that religion is based on the differences between man and the brute; man has consciousness, which is only present in a being to whom his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought.  Man thinks, converses with himself, is at once I and Thou, can put himself in the place of another.  Religion is identical with self-consciousness, and expresses man’s sense of the infinitude of his own faculties.  Man learns about himself through what is objective to him, but the object only serves to bring out what is in him; his own nature becomes the absolute to him.  Consciousness marks the self-satisfaction, self-perfection of man, that all truth is in him.  As feeling is the cause of the outward world, or of that notion of it man has, it becomes the organ of religion.  The nature of God is nothing else than an expression of the nature of feeling.  As man lives mainly in feeling, finds there the sources of all his mental and moral life, he comes to regard feeling as the divinest part of his nature, the noblest and most excellent; so it becomes to him the organ of the divine.  When man thinks what is infinite he in reality does nothing more than to perceive and affirm that to him feeling has an infinite power.  If you feel the infinite, you feel and affirm the infinitude of the power of feeling.  The object of the intellect is intellect objective to itself; the object of feeling is feeling objective to itself.  God is pure, unlimited, free feeling.  In religion, consciousness of the