The new method, as developed in sympathy with agnosticism, fails in literature just as science fails to be a complete interpretation of the universe.  The process which answers in the material world does not answer in the spiritual.  The instruments which tell the secrets of matter, close the avenues to the revelations of mind.  The methods of experiment and demonstration which have brought the universe to man’s knowledge, have not been sufficient to make the soul known to itself.  Any literary methods imitating physical science must share in its limitations without its power over the materials with which it has to deal.  Literature has hitherto been made helpful and delightful and acceptable because of its ideal elements.  Belief in a spiritual world, belief in the imperative law of righteousness as a divine command, runs through all effective literature.  However realistic the poets have been when they have reached their highest and best, they have believed that the soul, and what belongs to it, is the only reality.  Divorced of this Element, literature is at once lowered in tone, a dry-rot seizes upon it and eats away its finest portions.  If Goethe and Shakspere are realists in literary method, as some of their interpreters would claim, yet to them the spiritual is supreme, the soul is monarch.  So it is with Homer, with Dante, with Scott, with Cervantes, with Victor Hugo, with every supremely artistic and creative mind.  Great minds instinctively believe in the creative power of the mind, in its capacity for self-direction.  An unbiassed mind gifted with genius sees over and through all obstacles, leaps to magnificent results, will not be restrained by the momentary conditions of the present.  Education or social environment, however adverse, will not long hinder the poet from his work.  He writes for the future, if the present will not accept him, confident that what his soul has to utter can be truly uttered only as his own individuality impels, and that if he is faithful to his genius the world will listen in due time.  This power of personality lies at the basis of all genuine literature, teaching faith in the soul, faith in a providential ordering of the world, and overturning all agnostic theories about realism and environment.

This instinctive faith in mind is the basis of all genuine idealism.  The idealist is not the creator of an imaginary world, peopling it with shapes that never existed; but he is one who believes in ideas, and in mind as their creator and the vehicle of their expression.  Contemporary with George Eliot was a group of men who believed in the mind as something other than the temporary product of an evolutionary process.  With them she may be contrasted, her work may be measured by theirs.  Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning and Buskin shared with her the radical ideas of the time.  Not one of them has been fettered by narrow theories or cramped by old social doctrines.  The broad, inquiring, scientific spirit of the time