that at present my mind works with the most freedom and the keenest sense of poetry in my remotest past, and there are many strata to be worked through before I can begin to use, artistically, any material I may gather in the present. Curiously enough, à propos of your remark about Adam Bede, there is much less "out of my own life" in that book—i.e. the materials are much more a combination from imperfectly-known and widely-sundered elements than the Clerical Scenes.'
But while her imagination was thus ruminating, as it were, her whole spiritual life was taken up with an entirely different order of interests. Beginning with that thirst of knowledge for its own sake which goes to make the great scholar, it was soon diverted into the two chief channels of intellectual interest which characterised her age—the decay of the older religious ideals and the growth of a scientific conception of the universe, including man. And with her these two branches of speculation were reconciled by her recognition of the facts of human emotion underlying both. The following passage from an instructive note on The Spanish Gypsy, unfortunately too long to quote in its entirety, puts the germ of George Eliot's reconciliation of religion and science:—
'There is really no moral "sanction" but
