the emotions, sentiments and
impulses created for him by the life of ages past. Without emotion there
could be no art, no poetry and no music. Without emotion there would be no
religion and no spiritual life. Sentiment sweetens, beautifies and endears
all that is human and natural.

Emotion and the affections, however, seem to be shorn of their highest
beauty and glory when they are restricted to a merely earthly origin and
compass of power. It is altogether impossible to believe that their own
impulse to look beyond the human is a delusion, and that they really have
nothing to report that is valid from beyond the little round which man
treads. To believe in the human beauty and glory of the feelings, and to
rejoice in their power to unite us to our kind, need imply no forgetfulness
of their demand for a wider expression and a higher communion.

Her theory of the origin of feeling is not to be accepted. It means
something more than an inheritance of ancestral experience. It is the
result rather than the cause of reason, for reason has an influence she did
not acknowledge, and an original capacity which she never saw. Her view of
feeling was mainly theoretical, for she was led in her attitude towards the
facts of life, not by sentiment, but by reason. Hers was a thoughtful
rather than an impulsive mind, and given to logic more than to emotion.

Her enthusiasm for altruism, her zeal for humanity, lends a delightful
feature to her books. It gives a glow and a consecration to her work, and
makes her as great a prophet as positivism is capable of creating. And it
is no idle power she awakens in her positivist faith in man. She shames
those who claim a broader and better faith. Zeal for man is no mean gospel,
as she gives life and meaning to it in her books. To live for others, too
many are not likely to do. She made altruism beautiful, she made it a
consecration and a religion. Those who cannot accept her agnosticism and
her positivism may learn much from her faith in man and from her enthusiasm
for humanity. No faith is worth much which does not lead to a truer and a
more helpful love of man. Any faith is good in so far as it makes us more
humane and sympathetic. In this regard, the radicalism of George Eliot was
a great advance on much of the free-thinking of our century. She desired to
build, not to destroy. She was no iconoclast, no hater of what other men
love and venerate. Her tendencies were all on the side of progres