The time in which her mind was formed is marked on the side of social ethics, in that a broad and powerful humanitarian wave spread over English life and thought. Negatively it manifested itself in that it was a period of storm and stress toward the birth of tolerance--tolerance with all forms of belief and even unbelief. In the English Church itself, it was the period of clear accentuations of shades of belief that differed to a very marked degree from one another. The Church of Rome was brought nearer to the Anglican believer, and was robbed of its Apocalyptic horrors by a Newman and a Manning; a definite political act was the Irish Church Act. But an especial feature of this tolerance was the social recognition of agnosticism, in its scientific aspect through a Darwin, and in its more ethical aspect through a Mill, a Herbert Spencer, and a Matthew Arnold; while divines of the English Church itself, like Stanley, Maurice, Kingsley, and Jowett, bridged over the gaps between dogmatism and agnosticism. The repeal of the Test Act (according to which the signing of the Thirty-nine Articles was a condition for obtaining a scholarship or fellowship) abolished all disqualifications from freethinkers at the great universities. Quakers and Jews had before been admitted to Parliament, and now took prominent and leading places. But more positively, the philosophy of Auguste Comte with its English exponents, especially Mill, impressed the religious feeling of humanitarianism. There had been a wave of this before, a wave the commotion of which was felt even in our days. It was the humanitarianism of Rousseau, under which George Sand stood. But this differs in a marked manner from that of our friend. With Rousseau it was _deductive_, based upon the inalienable rights of man, of the individual,--a deductive sociology. In our times it was essentially guided by the prevailing spirit and methods of thought of Charles Darwin, Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Clifford, and Matthew Arnold, with the regenerated and refined sense of truth which they have given to the world. It has thus led to an _inductive_ sociology and inductive humanitarianism, freed from all romantic character and admixture, essentially sober and sane, though none the less passionate and deep-seated. The last wave of Rousseauesque feeling filtered through German sources to us in Carlyle and Ruskin. But this mode of thought was foreign to George Eliot. She disliked all forms of exaggeration.