knowledge which made her an unbeliever. She had no love of mere doubt, no
desire to disagree with accepted doctrines, but she was not content unless
she could get at the facts and reach what was just and reasonable. "It is
seldom," says this person, "that a mind of so much power is so free from
the impulse to dissent, and that not from too ready credulousness, but
rather because the consideration of doubtful points was habitually crowded
out, one may say, by the more ready and delighted acceptance of whatever
accredited facts and doctrines might be received unquestioningly. We can
imagine George Eliot in youth, burning to master all the wisdom and
learning of the world; we cannot imagine her failing to acquire any kind of
knowledge on the pretext that her teacher was in error about something else
than the matter in hand; and it is undoubtedly to this natural preference
for the positive side of things that we are indebted for the singular
breadth and completeness of her knowledge and culture. A mind like hers
must have preyed disastrously upon itself during the years of comparative
solitude in which she lived at Foleshill, had it not been for that
inexhaustible source of delight in every kind of intellectual acquisition.
Languages, music, literature, science and philosophy interested her alike;
it was early in this period that in the course of a walk with a friend she
paused and clasped her hands with a wild aspiration that she might live 'to
reconcile the philosophy of Locke and Kant!' Years afterward she remembered
the very turn of the road where she had spoken it."

The spiritual struggles of Maggie Tulliver give a good picture of Marian
Evans' mental and spiritual experiences at this time. Her friends and
relatives were scandalized by her scepticism. Her father could not at all
sympathize with her changed religious attitude, and treated her harshly.
She refused to attend church, and this made the separation so wide that it
was proposed to break up the home. By the advice of friends she at last
consented to outwardly conform to her father's wishes, and a partial