would doubtless have become a mystic in fact. Her tendency in this
direction hints at the close affinity between the evolutionists of to-day
and the idealists of a century ago. They unite in making matter and mind
identical, and in regarding feeling as a source of truth. These are the two
essential thoughts on which all mysticism rests. As modern science becomes
the basis of speculation about religion, and gives expression to these
doctrines, it will develop mysticism. Indeed, it is difficult to know
wherein much that George Eliot wrote differs from mysticism. Her subjective
immortality derived much of its acceptableness and beauty from those poetic
phases given to it by idealistic pantheism. Her altruism caught the glow of
the older humanitarianism, Her conception of feeling and emotional sympathy
is touched everywhere with that ideal glamour given it by the mystical
teachings of an earlier generation. Had she lived half a century earlier
she might have been one of Fichte's most ardent disciples, and found in his
subjective idealism the incentive to a higher inspiration than that
attained to under the leadership of Comte. Her religion would then have
differed but little from what it did in fact, but there would have been a
new sublimity and a loftier spirit at the heart of it.

George Eliot retains the traditional life, piety and symbolism of
Christianity, but she undertakes to show they have quite another meaning
than that usually given them. Her peculiarity is that she should wish to
retain the form after the substance is gone. Comte undertook to give a new
outward expression to those needs of the soul which lead to worship and
piety; but George Eliot accepted the traditional symbolisms as far better
than anything which can be invented. If we would do no violence to feeling
and the inner needs of life, we must not break with the past, we must not
destroy the temple of the soul. The traditional worship, piety and
consecration, the poetic expression of feeling and sentiment, must be kept
until new traditions, a new symbolism, have developed themselves out of the
experiences of the race. God is a symbol for the great mystery of the
universe and of being, the eternity and universality of law. Immortality is
a symbol for the transmitted impulse which the person communicates to the
race. The life and death of Christ is a symbol of that altruistic spirit of
renunciation and sorrow willingly borne, by which humanity is being l