The intimate sympathy of George Eliot and Miss Hennell indicates that they followed much the same studies, and it is certain they arrived at very similar conclusions.  That the one was directly influenced or led by the other there seem to be no reasons for believing.  All that is probable is, that there was a close affinity of thought and purpose between them, and that they arrived at similar philosophical conclusions.  The same is to be said in regard to George Eliot’s relations to George Henry Lewes.  Her theories of life, as has been already clearly indicated, were firmly fixed before she knew him, and her philosophical opinions were formed.  The similarity of their speculative opinions doubtless had something to do with bringing them together; and it is certain that the tenor of their thoughts, their views about life, and their spiritual aspirations, were very much alike, giving promise of a most thorough sympathy in all their intellectual and moral pursuits.  If she was influenced by him, he was quite as much influenced by her.  Lewes accepted the philosophical side of Comte’s Positive Philosophy, but the religious side of it he rejected and strongly condemned.  In his History of Philosophy, he says, “Antagonism to the method and certain conclusions of the Politique positive led me for many years to regard that work as a deviation from the Positive Philosophy in every way unfortunate.  My attitude has changed now that I have learned (from the remark of one very dear to me) to regard it as an Utopia, presenting hypotheses rather than doctrines, suggestions for inquirers rather than dogmas for adepts—­hypotheses carrying more or less of truth, and serviceable as a provisional mode of colligating facts, to be confirmed or contradicted by experience.”  It is altogether probable, as in this case, that George Eliot gave Lewes the suggestive aid of her acute mind.  If she was aided by him, it was only as one strong mind aids another, by collision and suggestion rather than by direct teaching.

Lewes may have had the effect to deepen and establish firmly the conclusions already reached by George Eliot, and a consideration of his philosophy must confirm this conjecture.  He, too, makes feeling the basis of all knowing.  From this point, however, he diverges widely from Herbert Spencer and the other English empiricists.  Spencer regards matter and mind as two phases of an underlying substance, which he presents as the unknown and unknowable.  Lewes at once denies the duality implied in the words matter and mind, motion and feeling, and declares these are one and the same thing, objectively or subjectively presented.  Feeling is motion, and motion is feeling; mind is the spiritual aspect of the material organism, and matter is the objective aspect of feeling.  Feeling is not the cause of motion, as idealism would suggest; and motion does not cause or turn into feeling, as materialism teaches.  The two are absolutely identical; there is no dualism or antithesis.