philosophy of Comte. Bray had taught her, along with Kant, to
regard all knowledge as subjective, while Hennell and her other friends had
shown her the objective falsity of Christianity. Thus her mind was made
ready for Feuerbach's leading principle, that all religion is a product of
the mind and has no outward reality corresponding to its doctrines.
According to Feuerbach, the mind creates for itself objective images
corresponding to its subjective states, reproduces its feelings in the
outward world. In reality there is no objective fact corresponding to these
subjective ideas, but what the mind conceives to exist is a necessary
product of its own activity. The mind necessarily believes in God, which is
man's way of conceiving his species and realizing to himself the perfect
type of his own nature. God does not exist, and yet he is a true picture of
man's soul, a necessary product of his feeling and consciousness. All
religious ideas are true subjectively, and Christianity especially
corresponds to the inward wants and aspirations of the soul. To Feuerbach
it is true as a poetic interpretation of feeling and sentiment, and to him
it gives the noblest and truest conception of what the soul needs for its
inward satisfaction.

The influence of Feuerbach is to be seen in the profound interest which
Marian Evans ever took in the subject of religion. That influence alone
explains how it was possible for one who did not accept any religious
doctrines as true, who did not believe in God or immortality, and who
rejected Christianity as a historic or dogmatic faith, to accept so much as
she did of the better spirit of religion and to be so keenly in sympathy
with it. It was from the general scepticism and rationalism of the times
she learned to reject all religion as false to truth and as not giving a
just interpretation of life and its facts. It was from Feuerbach she
learned how great is the influence of religion, how necessary it is to
man's welfare, and how profoundly it answers to the wants of the soul. Like
so many keen minds of the century, she rejected, with a sweeping
scepticism, all on which a spiritual religion rests, all its facts,
arguments and reasons. She knew only nature and man; inspiration,
revelation, a spiritual world, had no existence for her. Yet she believed
most thoroughly in religion, accepted its phenomena, was deeply moved by
its spiritual aims, yearned after its perfect self-renunciation. Religion
wa