inspires her ideal hopes, kindles her enthusiasms.  Religion, apart from human encouragement and elevation, the suppression of human sin and sorrow, and the increase of human sympathy and joy, has little attraction for her.  She takes no ground of opposition to the beliefs of others, expresses no contempt for any form of belief in God; but she measures all beliefs by their moral influence and their power to enkindle the enthusiasm of humanity.

The pantheistic theism defended by Lewes in his book on Comte, in 1853, seems to have been also accepted by George Eliot.  We are told that her mind long wavered between the two, though pantheism was less acceptable than theism, on account of its moral indifference.  It was undoubtedly the moral bearings of the subject which all the time had the greatest weight with her, and probably Kant’s position had not a little effect on her opinions.  She came, at least, to find final satisfaction in agnosticism, to believe that all intellectual speculations on the subject are in vain.  At the same time, her moral convictions grew stronger, and she believed in the power of moral activity to work out a solution of life when no other can be found.  At this point she stood with Kant rather than with Comte, in accepting the moral nature as a true guide.  She very zealously believed with Fichte in a moral order of the world, approving of the truth which underlies the words of Fichte’s English disciple, Matthew Arnold, when he discourses of “the Eternal, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness.”  Her positive convictions and beliefs on the subject lie in this direction, and she firmly accepted the idea of a moral order and purpose.  So much she thought we can know and rely on; beyond this she believed we can know nothing.  Her later convictions on this subject have been expressed in a graphic manner by one of her friends.  “I remember how,” says this person, “at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows’ Garden, of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of man,—­the words God, Immortality, Duty,—­pronounced, with terrible emphasis, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.  Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensed law.  I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned towards me like a sibyl’s in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates.” [Footnote:  F.W.H.  Myers in The Century Magazine for November, 1881.] All her later writings, at least, confirm this testimony to her assertion of the inconceivableness of God, and her open denial of faith in theism.  She cannot have gone so far as to assert the non-existence of God, affirming only that she could not conceive of such a being as actually existing.  She could not believe in a personal God, but Lewes’s conception of a dynamic life was doubtless acceptable.