_ 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 thinker