Lewes said that what a man thinks “is the necessary product of his organism and external conditions.”  The “organism itself is the product of its history; it is what it has become; it is a part of the history of the race.”  Because man is a creature of feeling he is susceptible to the influences of the outer world, and from the influences and experiences thus received the foundations of his mental life are laid.  The structure erected on this foundation, however, is the product of man’s social environment.  As a social being, he inherits mental capacities, and all the instruments of mental, moral and social development, as these have been produced in the past.  The social structure takes up and preserves the results of individual effort; and social capacity enlarges mental and moral power quite beyond what mere inheritance produces.

Lewes assigned as high a value to introspection as to observation in psychology, and said that whatever place is assigned to the one in scientific method must be assigned to the other.  He therefore accorded a high value to imagination and intuition, and to all ideal constructions of life and its meanings which are based on science.  All knowledge grows out of feeling, and must be expressible again in feeling, if it is to have any value.  Accordingly, man’s life is of little value apart from sentiment, and the emotional nature must always be satisfied.  As Lewes begins his philosophy in feeling, he holds that the final object of philosophy is to develop feeling into a perfect expression, in accordance with the ideal wants of man’s nature.  In other words, the final and supreme object of philosophy is the expression of religion and the founding of a moral and spiritual system of life.  He believed that religion will continue to regulate the evolution of humanity, and in “a religion founded on science and expressing at each stage what is known of the world and of man.”  As much as any zealous Christian believer he accepted man’s need of spiritual culture and religious development.  At the same time, his philosophy rejected a substantive absolute, or any other spiritual realities or existences apart from the universe given in feeling and consciousness.  Accordingly, man must find his ideal satisfactions, his spiritual realities and moral ideals, within the limits of the universe as known to philosophy, and in the organic life of the race.

George Eliot was also largely influenced by the teachings of Auguste Comte.  The place he assigned to positive knowledge and the inductive method, to feeling, to development and the influence of the past upon the present, were all accepted by her in an enthusiastic spirit.  Altruism commanded her hearty belief, and to its principles she devoted her life.  Comte’s conceptions in regard to sentiment, and the vital importance of religion and social organization, had her entire assent.  She differed from him in regard to spiritual and social organization, and she could not accept his arbitrary and artificial methods.  One of the leaders of positivism in England [Footnote:  Some Public Aspects of Positivism, the annual address before the Postivist Society, London, January 1, 1881, by Professor E.G.  Beesley, of University College.] has given this account of her relations to its organized movements and to its founder: