Her teaching, like most teaching, is a mingled good and evil.  In more than one direction her ethical and religious influence was most wholesome and effective.  She brought into clear light a few great facts, and made them the more conspicuous by the strong emphasis she gave them.  This is, in the main, the method of all teaching and of all progress.  Development seldom proceeds in a direct line, but rather, so far as man is concerned, by forcible emphasis laid on some great fact which has been previously neglected.  The idealism of a previous age had shown the value of certain facts and tendencies in human nature, but it had exaggerated some faculties and capacities of man, as well as neglected others.  In consequence, our own time swings to the other extreme, and cannot have too much of evolution and positivism.

Idealism is in human nature, and will give itself expression.  Positivism is also a result of our experience and of our study of the universe, both material and mental; it is a result of the desire for definite knowledge.  As a re-action against the excesses of idealism it is a powerful leaven, and it brings into necessary prominence those facts which are neglected by the opposite philosophy.  It takes account of facts, and scorns mysticism; and it thus appeals to a deep-seated bias of the time.

George Eliot’s books have an interest as an attempt at an interpretation of life from its more practical and realistic side, and not less as a re-action against the influences of very nearly all the great literary minds of the earlier half of the century in England.  Under the lead of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and influenced by German thought and literature, a remarkable movement was then developed in English literature.  The outcome of that movement has been surpassed only by that of the age of Shakspere.  Freshness of thought, love of nature, profound humanitarian convictions, and spontaneity wedded to great largeness of ideas, characterize this period and its noble work.  Such an age is almost invariably followed by an age of re-action, criticism, realism and analysis.  An instinctive demand for a portrayal of the more positive side of life, and the influence of science, have developed a new literary school.  For doctrine it teaches agnosticism, and in method it cares mainly for art and beauty of form.  Towards the development of the new school George Eliot has been a leading influence, though her sympathies have not gone with all its tendencies and results.

If Wordsworth exaggerated the importance of the intuitive and personal, George Eliot equally exaggerated the value of the historic and hereditary.  It was desirable, however, that the relations of life to the past should be brought out more distinctly by a literary development of their relations to the present, and that the influence of social heredity should be seen as affecting life on all sides.  Tradition is a large and persistent element in the better life