feeling, objective and subjective, as simply the outer and inner, the
concave and convex, sides of one and the same reality. Mind is the same as
matter, except that it is viewed from a different aspect. In this opinion
he resembles Schelling more than any other thinker, as he does in some
other of his speculations. As a monist, his conclusions are similar to
those of the leading German transcendentalists. Indeed, the evolution
philosophy he expounds is, in some of its aspects, but a development of the
identity philosophy of Schelling. In its monism, its theory of the
development of mind out of matter, and its conception of law, they are one
and the same. The evolution differs from the identity philosophy mainly in
its more scientific interpretation of the influence of heredity and the
social environment. The one is undoubtedly an outgrowth from the other,
while the audacious nights of speculation indulged in by Lewes rival
anything attempted even by Schelling.

Lewes was one of the earliest English disciples of Auguste Comte, and he
probably did more than any other person to introduce the opinions of that
thinker to English students. He was a zealous and yet not a blind disciple,
rejecting for the most part the later speculations of Comte. Comte's
theories of social and religious construction were repugnant to Lewes's
mind, but his positive methods and his entire rejection of theology were
acceptable. Comte's positivism was the foundation of his own philosophy,
and he did little more than to expand and more carefully work out the
system of his predecessor. In psychology he went beyond Comte, through his
physiological studies, and by the adoption of the methods and results of
evolution. His discovery of the sociological factors of mind was a real
advance on his master.

George Eliot's connection with Lewes had much to do with the
after-development of her mind. An affinity of intellectual purpose