ilosophy, which is conceived as a poet would conceive it, there is
promise that its future is to be one that is lasting. Even for poetry there
must be thought, and the larger, profounder it is the better for the
poetry, if it is imaginatively conceived and expressed. It is not thought,
or even philosophy, which annuls poetry, but want of ideal and creative
insight. To Goethe, Wordsworth or Browning there was a gain by enlargement
of intellectual materials, but these were suffused in true poetic fire, and
came forth a new creation. In so far as George Eliot has attained this
result is she a poet, and is she sure of the future suffrages of those who
accept her philosophy. At the least, her admirers must rejoice at the
enlarged range of expression she secured by the use of the poetic form.

IX.

PHILOSOPHIC ATTITUDE.

George Eliot was pre-eminently a novelist and a poet; but she is also the
truest literary representative the nineteenth century has yet afforded of
its positivist and scientific tendencies. What Comte and Spencer have
taught in the name of philosophy, Tyndall and Haeckel in the name of
science, she has applied to life and its problems. Their aims, spirit and
tendencies have found in her a living embodiment, and re-appear in her
pages as forms of genius, as artistic creations. They have experimented,
speculated, elaborated theories of the universe, drawn out systems of
philosophy; but she has reconstructed the social life of man through her
creative insight. What they mean, whither they lead, is not to be
discovered nearly so plainly in their books as in hers. She is their
interpreter through that wonderful insight, genius and creative power which
enabled her to see what they could not themselves discover,--the effect of
their teachings on man as an individual and as a social being.

Whoever would know what the agnostic and evolution philosophy of the time
has to teach about man, his social life, his moral responsibilities, his
religious aspirations, should go to the pages of George Eliot in preference
to those of any other. The scientific spirit, the evolution philosophy,
live in her pages, reveal themselves there in all their strength and in all
their weakness. She was a thinker equal to any of those whose names stand
forth as the representatives of the philosophy she accepted, she was as
competent, as they to think out the problems of life and to interpret
social existence in accordance with their