ey had in being unable to practise the old ordinances of family
prayer. 'I hope,' she says, 'we are well out of that phase in which the
most philosophic view of the past was held to be a smiling survey of
human folly, and when the wisest man was supposed to be one who could
sympathise with no age but the age to come' (ii. 308).

For this wise reaction she was no doubt partially indebted, as so many
others have been, to the teaching of Comte. Unquestionably the
fundamental ideas had come into her mind at a much earlier period, when,
for example, she was reading Mr. R.W. Mackay's _Progress of the
Intellect_ (1850, i. 253). But it was Comte who enabled her to
systematise these ideas, and to give them that 'definiteness,' which, as
these pages show in a hundred places, was the quality that she sought
before all others alike in men and their thoughts. She always remained
at a respectful distance from complete adherence to Comte's scheme, but
she was never tired of protesting that he was a really great thinker,
that his famous survey of the Middle Ages in the fifth volume of the
_Positive Philosophy_ was full of luminous ideas, and that she had
thankfully learned much from it. Wordsworth, again, was dear to her in
no small degree on the strength of such passages as that from the
_Prelude_, which is the motto of one of the last chapters of her last
novel:--

The human nature with which I felt
That I belonged and reverenced with love,
Was not a persistent presence, but a spirit
Diffused through time and space, with aid derived
Of evidence from monuments, erect,
Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest
In earth, _the widely scattered wreck sublime_
_Of vanished nations_.

Or this again, also from the _Prelude_ (see iii. 389):--

There is
One great society alone on earth:
The noble Living and the noble Dead.

Underneath this growth and diversity of opinion we see George Eliot's
oneness of character, just, for that matter, as we see it in Mill's long
and grave march from the uncompromising denials instilled into him by
his father, then through Wordsworthian mysticism and Coleridgean
conservatism, down to the pale belief and dim starlight faith of his
posthumous volume. George Eliot was more austere, more unflinching, and
of ruder intellectual constancy than Mill. She never withdrew fro