"one of her special favorites", and which he read aloud to her during the 119. In November and December she says she has been

last months of her life.

"swimming in Comte" and "taking deep draughts of reading, the Politique 120. In January, 1866, she attempts the Synthèse and

positive, Euripides etc.".

"hopes to get some edification from it", and at the end of the year Lewes is 121. "more and more impressed by what he can understand of it". She and Lewes

121. Cross II, 318,336.

read the Politique positive at Biarrity in January 1867, and she wrote 122. Mrs. Congreve, "The first chapter of the fourth volume is among the finest,

122. vide supra, p.

123.

and finely written. My gratitude increases continually for the illumination Comte has contributed to my life".

This gratitude found expression in her

123. Cross II, 339-340. In August, 1868, she reads again this first chapter of volume IV. Cross III, 23. See also III, 51.

readiness to defend Comte's teachings and in her letter of July, 1861, to Miss Hennell, whose admiration for an article which attacked Comte "puzzled 124.

and shocked" her.

124. Cross II, 235-6.

Positivism may be one-sided, but "Comte was a great

thinker and should be reverenced".

These expressions of sympathy are

interesting, but more important are the expressions of what may be said to be typically positivistic ideas, ideas immensely strengthened if not inspired

by Comte's teaching. We may distinguish these into four main groups:

1. ideas on the continuity of society seen in an emphasis on the past;

2. ideas, also, centering on continuity, which emphasize race or family; 3. ideas on the solidarity of humanity, emphasizing sympathy as the bond between man and man; 4. the idea of humanity as the object of worship in a new religion, the Great Being of the Religion of Humanity. In letters of 1863 we find a reflection of her feeling that the past is important when she writes of Renan's Vie de Jésus as valuable in "helping the popular imagination to feel that the sacred past is of one woof with the human present, 125. which ought to be sacred too". In accord with this reverence, for the past

125. Cross II, 274, see also 284.

In

is her emphasis on race, race-sympathy and race-duty. Her exaltation of sympathy is in general the work of her agreement with the idea of the solidarity of society, one of the most apparent of all her ruling ideas. February, 1862, she writes of the Civil War in America, "My best consolation is that an example on so tremendous a scale (as the war) of the need of for the education of mankind through the affections and sentiments, as a basis for true development, will have a strong influence on all thinkers, and be a check to the arid narrow antagonism which, in some quarters, is held to be the only form of liberal thought". In a letter to Dr. Allbutt written

126. Cross II, 252.

126.

probably in 1868, in which she speaks of her own motive for writing, we have an important document:

"My books are a form of utterance that dissatisfies me less, because they are deliberately, carefully constructed on a basis which even in my doubting mind is never shaken by a doubt, and they are not determined, as conversation inevitably is, by considerations of momentary expediency. The basis I mean is my conviction as to the relative goodness and nobleness of human dispositions and motives. And the inspiring principle which alone gives me courage to write is, that of so presenting our human life as to help my readers in getting a clearer conception and more active admiration of those vital elements which bind men together and give a higher worthiness to their existence; and also to help them

in gradually dissociating these elements from the more transient forms on which an outworn teaching tends to make them dependent. But since you have read my books you must perceive that the bent of my mind is conservative rather than destructive and that denial has been wrung from me by hard experience not adopted as a pleasant rebellion. Still, I see clearly that we ought, each of us, not to sit down and wail, but to be heroic and constructive, if possible, like the strong souls who lived before, as in other cases of religious decay". 127.

127. 0.Browning, Life of George Eliot, 118-9.

On duty she has typically positivistic views. She conceives it as something

done for the good of humanity and not mere blind obedience to an impulse to 128.

self-sacrifice, and she sees even in the discipline of war, hated for

128. Cross III, 13.

129.

itself, "an incalculable contribution to the sentiment of duty":

Her

129. Cross III, 182. Cf. Mill, Comte, p. 135 on war and work.

belief that work should be a function of man as a social unit not a task undertaken merely for the sake of earning a living, is positivistic in tone. She writes to Madame Bodichon in April 1868:

women

"What I should like to be sure of as a result of higher education for a result that will come to pass over my grave - is their recognition of the great amount of social unproductive labour which needs/to be done by women, and which is now either not done at all or done wretchedly. No good can come to women, more than to my class of male mortals, while each aims at doing the highest kind of work which ought rather to be held in sanctity as what only the few can do well. I believe and I want it to be well shown, that a more thorough education will tend to do away with the odious vulgarity of our notions about functions and employment, and to propagate the true gospel, that the deepest disgrace is to insist on doing work for which we are unfit do work of any sort badly". 130.

130. Cross III, 6.

to

Of George Eliot's ideas on the religion of humanity we find several illustrations. In May, 1869, she writes to Mrs. Stowe, "I believe that religion too has to be modified, "developed", according to the dominant phrase

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