There is occasion for surprise that a mind so acute and logical as George Eliot’s did not perceive that the evolution philosophy has failed to settle any of the greater problems suggested by Kant.  The studies of Darwin and Spencer have certainly made it impossible longer to accept Locke’s theory of the origin of all knowledge in individual experience, but they have not in any degree explained the process of thought or the origin of ideas.  The gulf between the physiological processes in the brain and thought has not been bridged even by a rope walk.  The total disparity of mind and matter resists all efforts to reduce them to one.  The utmost which the evolution philosophy has so far done, is to attempt to prove that mind is a function of matter or of the physiological process.  This conclusion is as far as possible from being that of the unity of mind and matter.

That man is very ignorant, and that this world ought to demand the greater share of his attention and energies, are propositions every reasonable person is ready to accept.  Granted their truth, all that is necessarily true in agnosticism has been arrived at.  It is a persistent refusal to see what lies behind outward facts which gives agnosticism all its practical justification.  Art itself is a sufficient refutation of the assertion that we know nothing of what lies behind the apparent.  That we know something of causes, every person who uses his own mind may be aware.  At the same time, the rejection of the doctrine of rights argues obedience to a theory, rather than humble acceptance of the facts of history.  That doctrine of rights, so scorned by George Eliot, has wrought most of the great and wholesome social changes of modern times.  Her theory of duties can show no historic results whatever.

To separate George Eliot’s theories from her genius it seems impossible to do, but this it is necessary to do in order to give both their proper place.  All praise, her work demands on its side where genius is active.  It is as a thinker, as a theorizer, she is to be criticised and to be declared wanting.  Her work was crippled by her philosophy, or if not crippled, then it was made less strong of limb and vigorous of body by that same philosophy.  It is true of her as of Wordsworth, that she grew prosy because she tried to be philosophical.  It is true of her as it is not true of him, that her work lacks in the breadth which a large view of the world gives.  His was no provincial conception of nature or of man.  Hers was so in a most emphatic sense.  The philosophy she adopted is not and cannot become the philosophy of more than a small number of persons.  In the nature of the case it is doomed to be the faith of a few students and cultured people.  It can stir no common life, develop no historic movements, inaugurate no reforms, nor give to life a diviner meaning.  Whether it be true or not,—­and this need not here be asked,—­this social and moral limitation of its power is enough to condemn it for