world, that it has been applied with the hope of securing the same thorough investigation of the phenomena presented by history, ethics and religion.  Even here the method has justified itself, and has in recent years opened up new and valuable results, giving to the world an enriched conception of the life of man.  The speculative mind has been stimulated to fresh activity, and new philosophies, of vast and imposing proportions, have been the result.  The studies of Charles Darwin, and the elaboration of the theory of evolution, have given a marvellous incentive to the new method, resulting in its wide-spread application to all the questions of nature and life.

A method so productive in all directions must have its effect on literature.  What claims the attention of all thinking men cannot long be kept out of poetry and art.  In painting and in music it has been largely developed in the direction of a more intimate and sympathetic interpretation of nature and man.  In literature the new method has been mainly brought into application hitherto in the form of photographic studies of human life.  To describe what is, to make a true word-picture, has been the chief aim.  With George Eliot began a wider use of the new method and its application in a more sympathetic spirit to the deeper problems of the mind and heart.  She was not content to paint the surface of nature, to give photographic sketches of the outside of human life, but she wished to realize every subtle fact and every most secret impulse.  An admirer of the Dutch school in painting, and of Jane Austen as a novelist, she was not content with their results and methods, wishing to interpret the spirit as well as the letter of nature and life.

In literature, the new method as developed in recent years consists in an application of psychology to all the problems of man’s nature.  George Eliot’s intimate association with the leaders of the scientific movement in England, naturally turned her mind into sympathy with their work, and made her desirous of doing in literature what they were doing in science.  In the special department of physiological psychology, no one did more than George Henry Lewes, and her whole heart went out in genuine appreciation of his work.  He studied the mind as a function of the brain, as being developed with the body, as the result of inherited conditions, as intimately dependent on its environment.  Here was a new conception of man, which regarded him as the last product of nature, considered as an organic whole.  This conception George Eliot everywhere applied in her studies of life and character.  She studied man as the product of his environment, not as a being who exists above circumstances and material conditions.  “In the eyes of the psychologist,” says Mr. James Sully, “the works of George Eliot must always possess a high value by reason of their large scientific insight into character and life.”  This value consists, as he indicates, in the fact that she interprets the inner personality as it is understood by the scientific student of human nature.  She describes those obscure moral tendencies, nascent forces, and undertones of feeling and thought, which enter so much into life.  She lays much stress on the subconscious mental life, the domain of vague emotion and rapidly fugitive thought.