Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (943 page)

Lewes assigned as high a value to introspection as to observation in psychology, and said that whatever place is assigned to the one in scientific method must be assigned to the other. He therefore accorded a high value to imagination and intuition, and to all ideal constructions of life and its meanings which are based on science. All knowledge grows out of feeling, and must be expressible again in feeling, if it is to have any value. Accordingly, man’s life is of little value apart from sentiment, and the emotional nature must always be satisfied. As Lewes begins his philosophy in feeling, he holds that the final object of philosophy is to develop feeling into a perfect expression, in accordance with the ideal wants of man’s nature. In other words, the final and supreme object of philosophy is the expression of religion and the founding of a moral and spiritual system of life. He believed that religion will continue to regulate the evolution of humanity, and in “a religion founded on science and expressing at each stage what is known of the world and of man.” As much as any zealous Christian believer he accepted man’s need of spiritual culture and religious development. At the same time, his philosophy rejected a substantive absolute, or any other spiritual realities or existences apart from the universe given in feeling and consciousness. Accordingly, man must find his ideal satisfactions, his spiritual realities and moral ideals, within the limits of the universe as known to philosophy, and in the organic life of the race.

George Eliot was also largely influenced by the teachings of Auguste Comte. The place he assigned to positive knowledge and the inductive method, to feeling, to development and the influence of the past upon the present, were all accepted by her in an enthusiastic spirit. Altruism commanded her hearty belief, and to its principles she devoted her life. Comte’s conceptions in regard to sentiment, and the vital importance of religion and social organization, had her entire assent. She differed from him in regard to spiritual and social organization, and she could not accept his arbitrary and artificial methods. One of the leaders of positivism in England [Footnote: Some Public Aspects of Positivism, the annual address before the Postivist Society, London, January 1, 1881, by Professor E.G. Beesley, of University College.] has given this account of her relations to its organized movements and to its founder:

“Her powerful intellect had accepted the teaching of Auguste Comte, and she looked forward to the reorganization of belief on the lines which he had laid down. Her study of his two great works was diligent and constant. The last time I saw her — a few days before her death — I found that she had just been reading over again, with closest attention, that wonderful treatise,
The General View of Positivism
, a book which always seems full of fresh wisdom, however often one comes back to it. She had her reservations, no doubt. There were details in Comte’s work which did not satisfy her. But all who knew her were aware — and I speak from an acquaintance of eighteen years — that she had not only cast away every shred of theology and metaphysics, but that she had found refuge from mere negativism in the system of Comte. She did not write her positivism in broad characters on her books. Like Shakspere, she was first an artist and then a philosopher; and I imagine she thought it to be her business as an artist rather to paint humanity as it is than as she would have it to be. But she could not conceal her intellectual conviction, and few competent persons read her books without detecting her standpoint. If any doubt could have existed, it was set at rest by that noble poem on ‘Subjective Immortality,’ the clearest, and at the same time the most beautiful, expression that has yet been given to one of the most distinctive doctrines of positivism; a composition of which we can already say with certainty that it will enter into the positivist liturgies of all countries and through all time. Towards positivism as an organization, a discipline, — in short, as a church, — her attitude must be plainly stated. She had much sympathy with it, as she showed by regularly subscribing to positivist objects, as, for instance, to the fund of the central organization in Paris presided over by M. Laffitte. But she sought membership neither in that nor any other church. Like most of the stronger and thoroughly emancipated minds in this period of transition and revolutionary disturbance, she looked not beyond her own conscience for guidance and authority, but judged for herself, appealing to no external tribunal from the solitary judgment-seat within. I do not for a moment suppose that she looked on the organization of a church as unattainable; but she did not regard it as attained.”

Another of her friends [Footnote: W.M.W. Call in the Westminster Review for July, 1881.] has indicated very clearly the nature and extent of her dissent from Comte. He remarks that “her apologetic representation of the
Politique
as an
Utopia
evinces that she did not admit the cogency of its reasoning, or regard the entire social reconstruction of Comte as demonstrably valid. Her dissatisfaction with some of his speculations, as expressed to ourselves in the spring of 1880, was very decided…. All membership with the positivist community she steadily rejected. That a philosophy originally so catholic as that of Comte should assume a sectarian character, was a contingency she foreboded and deprecated.” In this last remark we doubtless have the explanation of George Eliot’s dissent from Comte. She believed in an organic, vital development of a higher social structure, which will be brought about in the gradual evolution of humanity. Comte’s social structure was artificial, the conception of one mind, and therefore as ill adapted to represent the wants of mankind as any other system devised by an individual thinker. His philosophy proper, his system of positive; thought, she accepted with but few reservations. Her views in this direction, as in many others, were substantially those presented by Lewes in his many works bearing on positivism. She was profoundly indebted to Comte, although in her later years she largely passed beyond his influence to the acceptance of the new evolution philosophy. In fact, she belonged to that school of English positivists which has only accepted the positive philosophy of Comte, and which has rejected his later work in the direction of social and religious construction. Lewes was the earliest of English thinkers to look at Comte in this way; but other representative members of the school are John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, Frederic Harrison and John Morley. Zealously accepting Comte’s position that philosophy must limit itself to positive data and methods, they look upon the “Religion of Humanity,” with Prof. Tyndall, as Catholicism minus Christianity, and reject it.

She certainly came nearer to Comte in some directions than to Herbert Spencer, for the latter has not so fully recognized those elements of the mental and social life which most attracted her attention. Her theory of duty is one which he does not accept. He insists in his
Data of Ethics
that duty will become less and less
obligatory
and necessary in the future, because all action will be in harmony with the impulses of the inner man and with the conditions of the environment. This conclusion is entirely opposed to the moral-theory of George Eliot, and is but one instance of their wide divergence. He insists, in his
Study of Sociology
, that the religious consciousness will not change its lines of evolution. He distinctly rejects the conclusion arrived at by George Eliot, that there is no Infinite Reality knowable to man, and that the substance and reality of religion is purely subjective. “That the object-matter of religion,” he says, “can be replaced by another object-matter, as supposed by those who think the ‘religion of humanity’ will be the religion of the future, is a belief countenanced neither by induction nor by deduction. However dominant may become the moral sentiment enlisted on behalf of humanity, it can never exclude the sentiment alone properly called religious, awakened by that which is behind humanity and behind all other things.” George Eliot was content with humanity, and believed that all religion arises out of the subjective elements of human life. At the same time that she made religion a development from feeling, she limited the moral law to emotional sanctions. On the contrary, Spencer is much more a rationalist, and insists on the intellectual basis both of morals and of religion. He makes less of feeling than she; and in this fact is to be found a wide gulf of separation between them. She could have been no more content with his philosophy than she was indebted to it in the construction of her own. As much one as they are in their philosophic basis and general methods, they are antagonistic in their conceptions about man and in the place assigned to nature in the development of religion. To George Eliot, religion is the development of feeling. To Spencer, it is the result of our “
thought
of a power of which humanity is but a small and fugitive product.” In these, as in other directions, they were not in sympathy. Her realism, her psychologic method, her philosophic theories, her scientific sympathies, she did not derive from him, diligently as she may have studied his books.

George Eliot agreed with Comte and all other positivists in setting aside every inquiry into causes, and limiting philosophy to the search after laws. The idea of causes is idealistic, and a cause of any kind whatever is, according to these thinkers, not to be found. “The knowledge of laws,” says Comte, “is henceforth to take the place of the search after causes.” In other words, it is impossible for man to find out
why
anything is, he can only know
how
it is. George Eliot entirely agreed with Comte as to the universal dominion of law. She also followed him in his teachings about heredity, which he held to be the cause of social unity, morality, and the higher or subjective life. His conception of feeling as the highest expression of human life confirmed the conclusions to which she had already arrived from the study of Feuerbach. She was an enthusiastic believer in the Great Being, Humanity; she worshipped at that shrine. More to her than all other beliefs was her belief that we are to live for others. With Comte she said, “Altruism alone can enable us to live in the highest and truest sense.” She would have all our doctrines about
rights
eliminated from morality and politics. They are as absurd, says Comte, as they are immoral.

George Eliot had a strong tendency towards philosophical speculations. While yet a student she expressed an ardent desire that she might live to reconcile the philosophy of Locke with that of Kant. In positivism, as developed and modified by Lewes, she found that reconciliation. She went far towards accepting the boldest speculations of the agnostic science of the time, but she modified it again and again to meet the needs of her own broader mind and heart. Yet it is related of her that in parting with one of the greatest English poets, probably Tennyson, when he said to her, “Well, good-by, you and your molecules,” she replied, “I am quite content with my molecules.” Her speculations led to the rejection of anything like a positive belief in God, to an entire rejection of faith in a personal immortality, and to a repudiation of all idealistic conceptions of knowledge derived from supersensuous sources. Her theories are best represented by the words environment, experience, heredity, development, altruism, solidarité, subjective immortality. These speculations confront the reader in nearly every chapter of her novels, and they gave existence to all but a very few of her poems.

X.

DISTINCTIVE TEACHINGS.

Science was accepted by George Eliot as furnishing the method and the proof for her philosophic and religious opinions. She was in hearty sympathy with Spencer and Darwin in regard to most of their speculations, and the doctrine of evolution was one which entirely approved itself to her mind. All her theories were based fundamentally on the hypothesis of universal law, which she probably interpreted with Lewes, in his
Foundations of a Creed
, as the uniformities of Infinite Activity. Not only in the physical world did she see law reigning, but also in every phase of the moral and spiritual life of man. In reviewing Lecky’s
Rationalism in Europe
, she used these suggestive words concerning the uniformity of sequences she believed to be universal in the fullest sense:

The supremely important fact that the gradual reduction of all phenomena within the sphere of established law, which carries as a consequence the rejection of the miraculous, and has its determining current in the development of physical science, seems to have engaged comparatively little of his attention; at least he gives it no prominence. The great conception of uniform regular sequence, without partiality and without caprice — the conception which is the most potent force at work in the modification of our faith, and of the practical form given to our sentiments — could only grow out of that patient watching of external fact, and that silencing of preconceived notions, which are urged upon the mind by the problems of physical science. [Footnote: Fortnightly Review, May, 1865.]

The uniformities of nature have the effect upon man, through his nervous organization, of developing a responsive feeling and action. He learns to respond to that uniformity, to conform his actions to it. The habits thus acquired are inherited by his children, and moral conduct is developed. Heredity has as conspicuous a place in the novels of George Eliot as in the scientific treatises of Charles Darwin. She has attempted to indicate the moral and social influences of heredity, that it gives us the better part of our life in all directions. Heredity is but one phase of the uniformity of nature and the persistence of its forces. That uniformity never changes for man; his life it entirely ignores. He is crushed by its forces; he is given pain and sorrow through its unpitying disregard of his tender nature. Not only the physical world, but the moral world also, is unfailing in the development of the legitimate sequences of its forces. There is no cessation of activity, no turning aside of consequences, no delay in the transformation of causes into necessary effects.