for imagination corresponds to personal feeling; it sets aside all limits, all laws painful to the feelings, and thus makes objective to man the immediate, absolutely unlimited satisfaction of his subjective wishes.  The belief in miracle accepts wishes as realities.  In fact, the fundamental dogmas of Christianity are simply realized wishes of the heart.  This is true, because the highest law of feeling is the immediate unity of will and deed, of wishing and reality.  To religion, what is felt or wished is regarded as real.  In the Redeemer this is realized, wish becomes fact.  All things are to be wrought, according to religion, by belief.  Thus the future life is a life where feeling realizes every desire.  Its whole import is that of the abolition of the discordance which exists between wish and reality.  It is the realization of a state which corresponds to the feelings, in which man is in unison with himself.  The other world is nothing more than the reality of a known idea, the satisfaction of a conscious desire, the fulfilment of a wish.  “The sum of the future life is happiness, the everlasting bliss of personality, which is here limited and circumscribed by nature.  Faith in the future life is therefore faith in the freedom of subjectivity from the limits of nature; it is faith in the eternity and infinitude of personality, and not of personality viewed in relation to the idea of the species, in which it forever unfolds itself in new individuals, but of personality as belonging to already existing individuals; consequently, it is the faith of man in himself.  But faith in the kingdom of heaven is one with faith in God; the context of both ideas is the same; God is pure absolute subjectivity released from all natural limits; he is what individuals ought to be and will be; faith in God is therefore the faith of man in the infinitude and truth of his own nature; the Divine Being is the subjective human being in his absolute freedom and unlimitedness.”

It is not probable that George Eliot confined her philosophic studies to the writings of Charles Bray and Feuerbach, but it is quite certain that in their books which she did faithfully study, are to be found some of the leading principles of her philosophy.  What gives greater confirmation to the supposition that her philosophy was largely shaped under their influence is the fact that her intimate friend, Sara Hennell, drew from the same sources for the presentation of theories quite identical with hers.  Sara Hennell’s Thoughts in Aid of Faith, published in 1860, is an attempt to show that the religious sentiments may be retained when the doctrines of theology are intellectually rejected, that a disposition of the heart akin to Paul’s may be present though conviction be extinct.  In securing this result, she too takes Feuerbach as her guide, and his teachings she claims are fully corroborated by the philosophy of Herbert Spencer.  Religion she regards as the result of the tendency of man’s mind towards