This last sentiment has been expanded in the best known of her verses, which have been adopted, we believe, as a Positivist hymn, because they express so well the belief of the sect in all that man can call his future. They have been too often quoted to be introduced here. They admit of the construction that the dead are immortal only in the sense that their good deeds and example have entered into many lives, inspiring fresh endeavours for the exaltation of humanity, and that thus they may be said to have a continued life on earth. "So to live is heaven;" "This is life to come" – are the conclusions announced in the hymn. Her poems are more explicit on the subject of her religious philosophy, and convey it in a clearer and more compact fashion, than her prose writings. We have seen the 'Spanish Gypsy' recognised as a mass of Positivism; the 'Legend of Jubal ' is no less so, being entirely founded on, and illustrative of, the doctrine that man's future life is in his works. "Stradivarius" repeats the theme; and "A Minor Prophet," the dream of the scientific man, of the material world of the future as modified by science, is only the foil to her own dream of the moral world of the future as modified by the religion of humanity.
All this, vague enough as a profession of faith, is in unison, so far as it goes, with the principles of Positivism. We do not know that anything of importance will at any time be added to the foregoing evidence of what George Eliot had adopted as her creed. It is very evident that the religion thus constituted is only the projected image of her own spirit. Her intense enjoyment of life, her curiosity and interest in all that concerns the race, her natural goodness, her freedom from common temptations, rendered easy for her the adoption of the doctrine that we should shape our lives for the benefit of humanity at large. She would have done this – at any rate she would have done as she did – without consciously holding any such creed. She would have talked Positivism as Monsieur Jourdain talked prose. Had she never heard of Comte or Dr Congreve, she would have been a disciple of the religion of humanity. Its shaping effect was not on her nature, but on her works. When it had assumed for her an organised and external form, she became its apostle. In place of representing life as she observed it, she represented it with reference to the religion of humanity. In place of depicting people as she found them, she depicted them as shaped or controlled by a theoretical influence. Whether we think this an advantage may be gathered from preceding passages in this paper.
It is to be noted that George Eliot is in unison with the Positivists up to a certain point only. While they have, for the manifestation of their religion, a sort of liturgy and a church, there is no evidence that she ever considered humanity to be a proper object of worship. With this exception, they would probably consider her creed to be in accord with theirs. It may, as in her case, and doubtless in many others, be a possible rule of life for individual natures. But it must also be judged as a means for its professed end, of effecting, through general acceptance, the exaltation of humanity. For this it demands that every member shall, in the way for which his abilities best suit him, labour for the good of the race, sinking his own private interests in those
