ABSTRACT
The final chapter of this study will explore Eliot’s sense of the multiple connections between aspects of mental life and religious belief. This aspect of her writing sheds an interesting light on her search for a viable form of belief, but also throws into especially sharp relief her awareness both of the cognitive and ethical potentiality of the mind and of the fundamental instability and unpredictability of its relationship with the external world. Her review of R. M. Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect exemplifies her profound ambivalence towards cultural forms and belief-systems from the past. There, she echoes Auguste Comte’s view that ‘theological and metaphysical speculation have reached their limit, and that the only hope of extending man’s sources of knowledge and happiness is to be found in positive science and in the universal application of its principles’. She perceives a stark disjunction between forms from the past and the reality of contemporary life: ‘Our civilization, and, yet more, our religion, are an anomalous blending of lifeless barbarisms, which have descended to us like so many petrifactions from distant ages, with living ideas, the offspring of a true process of development.’1 At the same time, Eliot warmly extols the virtues of research into the past, advocating a constant re-appraisal and re-definition of cultural forms and beliefs rather than their wholesale abandonment. In her view, ‘divine revelation is not contained exclusively or pre-eminently in the facts and inspirations of any one age or nation, but is co-extensive with the history of human development, and is perpetually unfolding itself to our widened experience and investigation’.2
