George Eliot does not entirely avoid the supernatural, but she treats it as unexplainable.  Instances of her use of it are to be found in Adam Bede’s experience while at work on his father’s coffin, in the visions of Savonarola, and in Mordecai’s strange faith in a coming successor to his own faith and work.  For Adam Bede’s experience there is no explanation given, nor for that curious power manifest in the “Lifted Veil.”  On the other hand, the spiritual power of Savonarola and Mordecai have their explanation, in George Eliot’s philosophy, in that intuition which is inherited insight.  In her treatment of such themes she manifests her appreciation of the great mystery which surrounds man’s existence, but she shows no faith in a spiritual world which impinges on the material, and ever manifests itself in gleams and fore-tokenings.

It is to be noted, however, that many traces of mysticism appear in her works.  This might have been expected from her early love of the transcendentalists, as well as from her frequent perusal of Thomas a Kempis.  More especially was this to be expected from her conception of feeling as the source of all that is best in man’s life.  The mystics always make feeling the source of truth, prefer emotion to reason.  All thinkers who lay stress on the value of feeling are liable to become mystics, even if materialists in their philosophy.  Here and there in her pages this tendency towards mysticism, which manifests itself in some of the more poetic of the scientists of the present time, is to be seen in George Eliot.  Some of her words about love, music and nature partake of this character.  Her sayings about altruism and renunciation touch the border of the mystical occasionally.  Had she been less thoroughly a rationalist she would doubtless have become a mystic in fact.  Her tendency in this direction hints at the close affinity between the evolutionists of to-day and the idealists of a century ago.  They unite in making matter and mind identical, and in regarding feeling as a source of truth.  These are the two essential thoughts on which all mysticism rests.  As modern science becomes the basis of speculation about religion, and gives expression to these doctrines, it will develop mysticism.  Indeed, it is difficult to know wherein much that George Eliot wrote differs from mysticism.  Her subjective immortality derived much of its acceptableness and beauty from those poetic phases given to it by idealistic pantheism.  Her altruism caught the glow of the older humanitarianism, Her conception of feeling and emotional sympathy is touched everywhere with that ideal glamour given it by the mystical teachings of an earlier generation.  Had she lived half a century earlier she might have been one of Fichte’s most ardent disciples, and found in his subjective idealism the incentive to a higher inspiration than that attained to under the leadership of Comte.  Her religion would then have differed but little from what it did in fact, but there would have been a new sublimity and a loftier spirit at the heart of it.