Life is enriched and flooded with light by the emotions, and feeling, true and tender and pure, is as much the symbol of humanity as reason itself.  It was therefore well that some one should attempt to justify the emotional life against the aspersions of those who have done it grave injustice.  It is true that man is not a being who wholly arrives at his method of life through reason, but feeling lends quite as important aid.  He does not only think, but he has emotions as well; he not only weighs evidence, but he acts by impulse.  He is continually led by the emotions, sentiments and impulses created for him by the life of ages past.  Without emotion there could be no art, no poetry and no music.  Without emotion there would be no religion and no spiritual life.  Sentiment sweetens, beautifies and endears all that is human and natural.

Emotion and the affections, however, seem to be shorn of their highest beauty and glory when they are restricted to a merely earthly origin and compass of power.  It is altogether impossible to believe that their own impulse to look beyond the human is a delusion, and that they really have nothing to report that is valid from beyond the little round which man treads.  To believe in the human beauty and glory of the feelings, and to rejoice in their power to unite us to our kind, need imply no forgetfulness of their demand for a wider expression and a higher communion.

Her theory of the origin of feeling is not to be accepted.  It means something more than an inheritance of ancestral experience.  It is the result rather than the cause of reason, for reason has an influence she did not acknowledge, and an original capacity which she never saw.  Her view of feeling was mainly theoretical, for she was led in her attitude towards the facts of life, not by sentiment, but by reason.  Hers was a thoughtful rather than an impulsive mind, and given to logic more than to emotion.

Her enthusiasm for altruism, her zeal for humanity, lends a delightful feature to her books.  It gives a glow and a consecration to her work, and makes her as great a prophet as positivism is capable of creating.  And it is no idle power she awakens in her positivist faith in man.  She shames those who claim a broader and better faith.  Zeal for man is no mean gospel, as she gives life and meaning to it in her books.  To live for others, too many are not likely to do.  She made altruism beautiful, she made it a consecration and a religion.  Those who cannot accept her agnosticism and her positivism may learn much from her faith in man and from her enthusiasm for humanity.  No faith is worth much which does not lead to a truer and a more helpful love of man.  Any faith is good in so far as it makes us more humane and sympathetic.  In this regard, the radicalism of George Eliot was a great advance on much of the free-thinking of our century.  She desired to build, not to destroy.  She was no iconoclast, no hater of what other men love and venerate.  Her tendencies were all on the side of progress, good order and social growth.