's idea, that the spiritual life is developed out of tradition, that
the world's experiences have produced for us intangible hopes, yearnings
and aspirations; awe, reverence and sense of subtle mystery: mystic trust,
faith in invisible memories, joy in the unseen power of thought and love;
and that these create for us a spiritual world most real in its nature, and
most powerful in its influence. On every hand man is touched by the
invisible, mystical influences of the past, spiritual voices call to him
out of the ages, unseen hands point the way he is to go. He breathes this
atmosphere of spiritual memories, he is fed on thoughts other men have made
for his sustenance, he is inspired by the heroisms of ages gone before. In
an article in the _Westminster Review_ in July, 1856, on "The Natural
History of German Life," in review of W.H. Riehl's books on the German
peasant, and on land and climate, she presents the idea that a people can
be understood only when we understand its history. Society, she says, has
developed through many generations, and has built itself up in many
memories and associations. To change it we must change its traditions.
Nothing can be done _de novo_; a fresh beginning cannot be had. The dream
of the French Revolution, that a new nation, a new life, a new morality,
was to be created anew and fresh out of the cogitations of philosophers, is
not in any sense to be realized. Tradition forever asserts itself, the past
is more powerful than all philosophers, and new traditions must be made
before a new life can be had for society. These ideas are well expressed by
George Eliot in her review of Riehl's books.

He sees in European society _incarnate history_, and any attempt to
disengage it from its historical elements must, he believes, be simply
destruction of social vitality. What has grown up historically can only
die out historically, by the gradual operation of necessary laws. The
external conditions which society has inherited from the past are but
the manifestation of inherited internal conditions in the human beings
who compose it; the internal conditions and the external are related to
each other as the organism and its medium, and development can take
place only by the gradual consentaneous development of both. As a
necessary preliminary to a purely rational society, you must obtain
purely rational men, free from the sweet and bitter prejudices of
h