teachings become so important. The true novelist, who is gifted with
genius, who creates character and situation with a master's hand, must have
some theory of life. He must have some notion of what life means, what the
significance of the pathos and tragedy of human experience, and why it is
that good and evil in conduct do not produce the same results. Such a
theory of life, if firmly grasped and worked out strongly, becomes a
philosophy. Much depends with the novelist on that philosophy, what it
places foremost, what it sees destiny to mean. It will affect his insight,
give shape to his plots, decide his characters, guide his ethical
interpretations, fix his spiritual apprehension. It was because George
Eliot adopted a new and remarkable philosophy, one that teaches much which
the instincts of the race have rejected, and repudiates much which the race
has accepted as necessary to its welfare, that her teachings become so
noteworthy. Genius first of all she had, and the artist's creative power;
but the way she used these, and the limitations she put upon them by her
philosophy, give her books an interest which not even her wonderful genius
could alone produce. That philosophy is in debate; and it is not yet
decided whether it is mainly false because growing out of wrong methods,
or if it be in reality a true explanation of existence. Its revolutionary
character, its negative spirit, its relations to ethics and religion,
make it remarkable, and even startling. Profound thinkers, men of
commanding philosophic apprehension and power of generalization, have
accepted it; physical science has largely lent its aid to the support of
its conclusions. Yet on its side genius, imagination, creative instinct,
artistic apprehension, have not given their aid. Without them it is
defective, and cannot command the ideal sentiments and hopes of the race.
First to fill this gap came George Eliot, and she yet remains its only
great literary ally and coadjutor. Tyndall, Haeckel and DuBois Raymond can
give us science; but this is not enough. Comte, Mill and Spencer can give
us philosophy; but that is inadequate. They have also essayed, one and all,
to say some true word about morals, religion and the social ideals; but
they have one and all failed. They are too speculative, too far away from
the vital movements of life, know too little of human experience as it
throbs out of the heart and sentiments. They can explain their theories
in terms of science, ethics and philosophy; but George Eliot explains them
in terms of life. They have speculated, she has felt; they have made
philosophies, she has created ideal characters and given us poetry; they
have studied nature, she has studied experience and life; they have tried
to resolve the mind into its constituent elements; she has entered into the
heart and read its secrets; they have looked on to see what history meant,
she has lived all heart tragedies and known all spiritual aspirations.
George Eliot was not a mere disciple of any of the great teachers of
evolution. Though of their school, and largely in accord and sympathy with
them, yet she often departed from the way they went, and took a position
quite in opposition to theirs. Her standpoint in philosophy was arrived at
quite independently of their influence, and in many of its main features
her philosophy was developed before she had any acquaintance either with
them or their books. She wrote concerning John Stuart Mill, [Footnote:
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' "Last words from George Eliot," is Harper Magazine
for March 1882. The names of Mill and Spencer are not given in this
article, but the words from her letters so plainly refer to them that they
have been quoted here as illustrating her relations to these men.]--
I never had any personal acquaintance with him, never saw him to my
knowledge except in the House of Commons; and though I have studied his
books, especially his _Logic_ and _Political Economy_ with much
benefit, I have no consciousness of their having made any marked epoch
in my life.
Concerning another leading positivist she has said,--
Of [Herbert Spencer's] friendship I have had the honor and advantage
for twenty years, but I believe that every main bias of my mind had
been taken before I knew him. Like the rest of his readers, I am, of
course, indebted to him for much enlargement and clarifying of thought.
Not long previous to her death, in reading Bridges' version of _The General
View of Positivism_, she expressed her dissent more often than her assent,
and once she said,--
I cannot submit my intellect or my soul to the guidance of Comte.
George Eliot did not take up her residence in London until her
thirty-second year, and previous to that time her acquaintance with the
positivist leaders must have been slight. Before that age the opinions of
most persons are formed, and such was the case with George Eliot. It is
likely her opinions underwent many changes after this date, but only in the
direction of those already established and in modification of the
philosophy already accepted. She became an evolutionist without the aid of
those men who are supposed to be the originators of this theory. Every new
idea or new way of interpreting nature and life grows into form gradually,
and under the influence of many different minds. The evolution philosophy
was long accepted before it became a doctrine or was formulated into a
philosophy. The same influences worked in many quarters to produce the same
conclusions. It was given to George Eliot to come under a set of influences
which led her to accept all the leading ideas of evolution before she had
any opportunity to know that philosophy as it has been elaborated by the
men whose names are most often connected with it. A brief account of the
successive philosophic influences which most directly and personally
touched her mind will largely help towards the comprehension of her
teachings.
The most intimate friend of her youth, who gave her a home when trouble
came with her family, and stimulated her mind to active inquiry after
truth, was a philosopher of no mean ability. Charles Bray not only was the
first philosopher she knew, but her opinions of after years were mainly in
the direction he marked out for her. In his _Philosophy of Necessity_,
published in 1841, he maintained that the only reality is the _Great
Unknown_ which we name God, that all natural laws are actions of the first
cause. He taught that the world is created in our own minds, the result of
some unknown cause without us, which we call matter; but it is thus God
mirrors himself to us. "All we see is but the vesture of God, and what we
call laws of nature are but attributes of Deity." Matter is known to us
only as the cause of sensations, while the soul is the principle of
sensation, dependent upon the nervous system; the nervous system depending
upon life, and life upon organization. All knowledge comes to man through
the action of the external world upon the senses; all truth, all progress,
come to us out of experience. "Reason is dependent for its exercise upon
experience, and experience is nothing more than the knowledge of the
invariable order of nature, of the relations of cause and effect." All acts
of men are ruled by necessity. Pain produces our ideas of right and wrong,
and happiness is the test of all moral action. There are no such things
as sin and evil, only pains and pleasures. Evil is the natural and
necessary limitation of our faculties, and our consequent liability to
error; and pain, which we call evil, is its corrective. Nothing, under the
circumstances, could have happened but that which did happen; and the
actions of men, under precisely the same circumstances, must always issue
in precisely the same results. Death, treated of in a separate chapter, is
shown to be good, and a necessary aid to progress. Society is regarded as
an organism, and man is to find his highest life in the life of others.
"The great body of humanity (considered as an individual), with its soul,
the principle of sensation, is ever fresh and vigorous and increasing in
enjoyment. Death and birth, the means of renewal and succession, bear
the same relation to this body of society as the system of waste and
reproduction do to the human body; the old and useless and decayed material
is carried out, and fresh substituted, and thus the frame is renovated
and rendered capable of ever-increasing happiness.... The minds, that is
to say, the ideas and feelings of which they were composed, of Socrates,
Plato, Epicurus, Galileo, Bacon, Locke, Newton, are thus forever in
existence, and the immortality of the soul is preserved, not in
individuals, but in the great body of humanity.... To the race, though
not to individuals, all beautiful things are preserved forever; all that
is really good and profitable is immortal."
Nearly every idea here presented was accepted by George Eliot and
re-appears in her writings. In Bray's later books much also is to be found
which she embraced. He therein says that all outside of us is a delusion of
the senses. [Footnote: This summary of Bray's philosophy is condensed from
an article in the Westminster Review for April, 1879.] The senses conspire
with the intellect to impose upon us. The constitution of our faculties
forces us to believe in an external world, but it has no more reality than
our dreams. Each creature is the creator of its own separate, different
world. The unity of outward things is imposed on them by the faculty of
individuality, and is a mere fiction of the mind. Matter is a creature of
the imagination, and is a pure assumption. It is the centre of force, as
immaterial as spirit, as ethereal and unsubstantial. As centres of force
imply locality, and locality space, so space must have an extension of its
own. Not so; it is a pure creation of the mind. The same holds true of
time. The world of mind, the moral world as well, are our own creations.
Man has no power over himself; nothing could have been otherwise than as
it is. Repentance and remorse are foolish regrets over what could not have
been otherwise. All actions and motives are indifferent; only in their
consequences can any distinction be observed between them. Such as minister
to man's pleasure he calls good; such as produce pain he calls evil.
Thereis no good but pleasure, and no evil but pain. Hence there is no
distinction between moral and physical evil. Morality is the chemistry of
the mind, its attractions and repulsions, likes and dislikes. God is an
illusion, as are all moral conclusions based on his existence, Nor has
man any reality; he is the greatest illusion and delusion of all. The
faculty of individuality gives us all our ideas and feelings, and creates
for us what we call our minds. A mind is an aggregate of a stream of
consciousness. Ideas, feelings, states of consciousness, do not inhere in
anything; each is a distinct entity. "Thinking is," is what we should say,
not "I think." Here we are at the ground fact of what constitutes being, on
solid footing; consciousness cannot deceive us. Thinking is, even if mind
and matter, self and not-self, are illusory. It is, even if we deny both
the external and internal causes of consciousness. We know our own
consciousness, that alone. All is inference beside. When we consider what
inferences are most probable, we are led to build up a constructive
philosophy. Consciousness says we have a body, body a brain, and pressure
on the brain stops consciousness; hence a close connection between the
brain and consciousness. The two go together, and in the brain we must lay
the foundation of our philosophy. The mental faculties create the world of
individual consciousness, it the outside world. We know only what is
revealed in consciousness. Matter and mind are one. Life and mind are
correlates of physical force; they are the forms assumed by physical force
when subjected to organic conditions. Yet there is no such thing as mere
physical force. Every atom of matter acts intelligently; it has so acted
always. The conscious intelligence of the universe has subsided into
natural law, and acts automatically. This universal agent of life in all
things is God. All consciousness and physical force are but "the varied
God." There is in reality no agent but mind, conscious or unconscious. God
is nature; matter is mind solidified. Matter is force as revealed by the
senses. It is the body, force is the soul. In nature, as in man, body and
soul are one and indivisible. Mind builds up organisms. There is a living
will, conscious or unconscious, in all things. The One and All requires the
resignation of the individual and personal, of all that is selfish, to the
Infinite whole.
The basis of Bray's philosophy was idealism and pantheism, assuming form
under the influence of modern science. He quoted Emerson frequently, and
the school of thought Emerson represents affected him greatly. On the other
hand, he was then a strong phrenologist, had imbibed much of the teaching
of Combe's _Constitution of Man_, and he eagerly embraced those notions of
the relations of body and mind which have been propagated in the name of
physical science.
The same double influence is to be seen at work upon the next thinker who
was destined to give direction to George Eliot's philosophy. Feuerbach was
a disciple of Hegel, whose influence is deeply marked through all his
earlier writings. He also was affected by physical science, and he found in
sensationalism an element for his system. To him all thought is the product
of experience; he founded his ideas on materials which can be appropriated
only through the activity of the senses. The external world affects the
senses and generates feeling, feeling produces ideas. Feeling re-acts upon
the external world, interprets it according to its own wants. Feeling is
thus the source of all knowledge; feeling is the basis alike of religion
and philosophy. Feuerbach, as well as Bray, finds that man creates the
outward world in consciousness; all that is out of man which he can know,
is but a reflection of what is in him. This conception of consciousness,
this pure idealism, becomes the source of Feuerbach's philosophy of
religion. He says that religion is based on the differences between man and
the brute; man has consciousness, which is only present in a being to whom
his species, his essential nature, is an object of thought. Man thinks,
converses with himself, is at once I and Thou, can put himself in the place
of another. Religion is identical with self-consciousness, and expresses
man's sense of the infinitude of his own faculties. Man learns about
himself through what is objective to him, but the object only serves to
bring out what is in him; his own nature becomes the absolute to him.
Consciousness marks the self-satisfaction, self-perfection of man, that
all truth is in him. As feeling is the cause of the outward world, or of
that notion of it man has, it becomes the organ of religion. The nature of
God is nothing else than an expression of the nature of feeling. As man
lives mainly in feeling, finds there the sources of all his mental and
moral life, he comes to regard feeling as the divinest part of his nature,
the noblest and most excellent; so it becomes to him the organ of the
divine. When man thinks what is infinite he in reality does nothing more
than to perceive and affirm that to him feeling has an infinite power.
If you feel the infinite, you feel and affirm the infinitude of the power
of feeling. The object of the intellect is intellect objective to itself;
the object of feeling is feeling objective to itself. God is pure,
unlimited, free feeling. In religion, consciousness of the object and
self-consciousness coincide. The object of any subject is nothing else than
the subject's own nature taken objectively. God is like our thoughts and
dispositions; consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God
is self-knowledge. Religion is the unveiling of a man's hidden treasures,
the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love
secrets. It is to the understanding Feuerbach attributes man's capacity for
objectifying himself or of attributing to the outward world those qualities
which really exist only within. Man's consciousness of God is nothing else
than his consciousness of his species. "Man has his highest being, his God,
in himself; not in himself as an individual, but in his essential nature,
his species. No individual is an adequate representative of his species,
but only the human individual is conscious of the distinction between the
species and the individual. In the sense of this distinction lies the root
of religion. The yearning of man after something above himself is nothing
else than the longing after the perfect type of his nature, the yearning to
be free from himself, _i.e._, from the limits and defects of his
individuality. Individuality is the self-conditioning, the self-limitation
of the species. Thus man has cognizance of nothing above himself, of
nothing beyond the nature of humanity; but to the individual man this
nature presents itself under the form of an individual man. All feelings
which man experiences towards a superior man, nay, in general, all moral
feelings which man has towards man, are of a religious nature. Man feels
nothing towards God which he does not also feel towards man." The dogmas of
Christianity are interpreted by Feuerbach from this standpoint of
conceiving religion as a projection of feeling upon the outward world. So
he explains the incarnation as man's love for man, man's yearning to help
his fellows, the renunciation and suffering man undergoes for man. The
passion of Christ represents freely accepted suffering for others in love
of them. The trinity typifies the participated, social life of the species;
it shows the father, mother and son as the symbols of the race. The _logos_
or son is the nature of the imagination made objective, the satisfaction of
the need for mental images, the reflected splendor of the imagination.
Faith in providence is faith in one's own worth; it indicates the divine
reality and significance of our own being. Prayer is an expression of the
power of feeling, a dialogue of man with his own heart. Faith is confidence
in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws
of nature and reason. Its specific object is miracle; faith and miracle are
absolutely inseparable. That which is objectively miracle is subjectively
faith. Faith is the miracle of feeling; it is nothing else than belief in
the absolute reality of subjectivity. The power of miracle is the power of
the imagination, for imagination corresponds to personal feeling; it sets
aside all limits, all laws painful to the feelings, and thus makes
objective to man the immediate, absolutely unlimited satisfaction of his
subjective wishes. The belief in miracle accepts wishes as realities. In
fact, the fundamental dogmas of Christianity are simply realized wishes of
the heart. This is true, because the highest law of feeling is the
immediate unity of will and deed, of wishing and reality. To religion, what
is felt or wished is regarded as real. In the Redeemer this is realized,
wish becomes fact. All things are to be wrought, according to religion, by
belief. Thus the future life is a life where feeling realizes every desire.
Its whole import is that of the abolition of the discordance which exists
between wish and reality. It is the realization of a state which
corresponds to the feelings, in which man is in unison with himself. The
other world is nothing more than the reality of a known idea, the
satisfaction of a conscious desire, the fulfilment of a wish. "The sum of
the future life is happiness, the everlasting bliss of personality, which
is here limited and circumscribed by nature. Faith in the future life is
therefore faith in the freedom of subjectivity from the limits of nature;
it is faith in the eternity and infinitude of personality, and not of
personality viewed in relation to the idea of the species, in which it
forever unfolds itself in new individuals, but of personality as belonging
to already existing individuals; consequently, it is the faith of man in
himself. But faith in the kingdom of heaven is one with faith in God; the
context of both ideas is the same; God is pure absolute subjectivity
released from all natural limits; he is what individuals ought to be and
will be; faith in God is therefore the faith of man in the infinitude and
truth of his own nature; the Divine Being is the subjective human being in
his absolute freedom and unlimitedness."
It is not probable that George Eliot confined her philosophic studies to
the writings of Charles Bray and Feuerbach, but it is quite certain that in
their books which she did faithfully study, are to be found some of the
leading principles of her philosophy. What gives greater confirmation to
the supposition that her philosophy was largely shaped under their
influence is the fact that her intimate friend, Sara Hennell, drew from the
same sources for the presentation of theories quite identical with hers.
Sara Hennell's _Thoughts in Aid of Faith_, published in 1860, is an attempt
to show that the religious sentiments may be retained when the doctrines of
theology are intellectually rejected, that a disposition of the heart akin
to Paul's may be present though conviction be extinct. In securing this
result, she too takes Feuerbach as her guide, and his teachings she claims
are fully corroborated by the philosophy of Herbert Spencer. Religion she
regards as the result of the tendency of man's mind towards philosophy, the
outgrowth of the activity of his mental faculties seeking satisfaction for
themselves in explaining the world given for his contemplation and study.
"The growth of religion in the human intelligence (thereby distinguished
from mere blind emotion), is coincident with, or rather immediately
consequent upon, the power of forming abstract ideas; that is to say, it is
a generalization effected by the operation of the intellect upon the
sentiments and emotions, when these have attained to so great extent and
distinctness as to become self-conscious." Man early objectifies the
qualities he finds in himself and his fellows, regards them as entities, is
prostrated in awe and worship before them, conceives them to be gods. He
attributes to outward objects his subjective states, and regards them as
like himself, only infinitely more powerful. His emotions he believes are
caused by these objective beings, and he thinks he is inspired, that the
gods are at work within him. Feeling becomes the voice of God, the
revelator of religions and theologies. Christianity Miss Hennell regards as
"the form in which the religious affections, struggling against earthly
limitations, have created for themselves the satisfaction they demand, and,
therefore, in so far, real, just as the affections are real." Feeling, she
says, is real as logic, and must equally have its real foundation. That is,
feeling gives us the truth, actually answers to the realities of things as
man can know them. She is here an ontologist, and she is convinced that
feeling is a direct witness of the deeper knowledge and reality which man
seeks in religion. The permanency and validity of religion she believes in,
and she testifies to its wholesome and ennobling effect upon the race.
"Christianity, having formed an actual portion of the composition both of
our own individual experience and of the world's history, can no more be
annihilated out of them than the sum of what we learned during a certain
number of years of our childhood, from the one, or the effects of any
notable occurrence, such as the fall of the Roman Empire, or the Norman
invasion, from the other;--Christianity on every view, whether of its truth
or falsity, and consequently of its good or bad effect, has undoubtedly
contributed to make us what we are; without it we should have grown into
something incalculably different from our present selves.... And how can it
be otherwise than real to us, this belief that has nourished the souls
of us all, and seems to have moulded actually anew their internal
constitution, as well as stored them up with its infinite variety of
external interests and associations? What other than a very real thing has
it been in the life of the world, sprang out of, and again causing to
spring forth, such volumes of human emotion? making a current, as it were,
of feeling, that has drawn within its own sphere all the moral vitality of
so many ages. In all this reality of influence there is indeed the
testimony of Christianity having truly formed an integral portion of the
organic life of humanity."