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 from the position that she had taken up, of denying and rejecting; she stood to that to the end: what she did was to advance to the far higher perception that denial and rejection are not the aspects best worth attending to or dwelling upon. She had little patience with those who fear that the doctrine of protoplasm must dry up the springs of human effort. Any one who trembles at that catastrophe may profit by a powerful remonstrance of hers in the pages before us (iii. 245-250, also 228).