thought, and it would be hard to find anywhere a greater and a more
vivid contrast than that between Carlyle and George Eliot. For George
Eliot's philosophy was centred in the well-being of the Race.

Carlyle's was summed up in the worth of the Individual.

George Eliot teaches in prose and still more in poetry that
Personality, with its hopes, loves, faiths, aspirations, must all be
relinquished, and its agonies and pains endured, should Humanity gain
by the sacrifice and the endurance.

She considers the Individual as part of collective humanity, and that
he does not live for himself, he has no continuance of personal life,
he has no permanence, except as a living influence on the Race. This
is the Positivist creed, the Racial Creed.

Beyond the influence that it exerts, spiritual personality is doomed.
It is not humanity in God but humanity in itself which is to exist
from age to age, solely in the memory of succeeding generations.

"Oh may I join the Choir Invisible
Of those immortal dead, who live again
In minds made better by their presence."

Permanence and continuance and immortality are in the race alone.
George Eliot's strong accentuation of the race is the Gospel of
annihilation to the individual. Yet the most personal and imaginative
of poets has treated this lofty altruism in his strange, sad,
beautiful poem of "The Pilgrims," with a fervour greater even than
that of George Eliot.