Though Miss Hennell is so earnest a believer in Christianity, yet she totally rejects the idea of any objective reality corresponding to its dogmas.  This conclusion is based on the philosophic notion, which she shares with Bray, Feuerbach, George Eliot, Spencer and Lewes, that man has no real knowledge whatever except that which is given in consciousness.  This philosophy, shared in common by these persons, is called by Lewes “reasoned realism,” and by Spencer “transfigured realism.”  It accepts the reality of an outward world, but says that all man knows of it is, that it produces impressions on his senses which are transmuted into sensations.  Sensations produce feelings, and feelings become ideas.  According to Spencer, the steps of knowledge are three:  the co-ordinating of sensations in a living organism; the registering of impressions within the organism in such a way as to build up a store of experiences; the transmission of the organism and its susceptibilities to offspring.  Miss Hennell accepts Spencer’s theory that feeling is the source of all our knowledge.  Not only, as she says, does it “constitute the essential and main vitality of our nature,” but when it is stored up in the human organism and inherited, it becomes the vital source out of which all moral and religious truth is built up.  Experience, transformed into inherited feeling, takes on the form of those intuitions which “are the only reliable ground of solid belief.”  “These sentiments which are born within us, slumbering as it were in our nature, ready to be awakened into action immediately they are roused by hint of corresponding circumstances, are drawn out of the whole of previous human existence.  They constitute our treasured inheritance out of all the life that has been lived before us, to which no age, no human being who has trod the earth and laid himself to rest with all his mortal burden upon her maternal bosom, has failed to add his contribution.  No generation has had its engrossing conflict, surely battling out the triumphs of mind over material force, and through forms of monstrous abortions concurrent with its birth, too hideous for us now to bear in contemplation, moulding the early intelligence by every struggle, and winning its gradual powers,—­no single soul has borne itself through its personal trial,—­without bequeathing to us of its fruit.  There is not a religious thought that we take to ourselves for secret comfort in our time of grief, that has not been distilled out of the multiplicity of the hallowed tears of mankind; not an animating idea is there for our fainting courage that has not gathered its inspiration from the bravery of the myriad armies of the world’s heroes.  All this best of humanity’s hard earnings has been hoarded with generous care by our alma natura naturans; so that at last, in our rich ages, the mens naturafa opens its gaze with awful wonder upon its environment of spiritual possessions.”