Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/299

materials and respect for those who have gone before. Mr. Herbert Spencer owes seminal ideas to Baer, Professor Bain to Johannes Miiller, Helmholtz to Young, Darwin to Malthus, Malthus to Euler, Milne Edwards to Adam Smith, Bentham to Hutcheson. Newton has the demerit of having been preceded in his greatest discovery by three contemporaries, and Helmholtz by five. One of Laplace's theories was in s' Gravesande before him and the other in Kant. Comte, if Mill had not given him a release from the study of German, might have found his law of the three stages anticipated by Fries in 18 19. The Westminster Review adopted a new and characteristic motto when she joined it. There is another maxim of the same writer, which she would have been willing to make her own : "Alles Gescheidte ist schon gedacht worden ; man muss nur versuchen es noch einmal zu denken." Goethe's new commentators track the derivation of his sentences, as we in England know how much Latin and Italian poetry was boiled down in Gray's "Elegy," and from which lines of Coleridge Byron got the "Address to the Ocean." George Eliot's laborious preparation and vast reading have filled her books with reminiscences more or less definite. The suggestion that she borrowed the material of plots from George Sand, Freytag, Heyse, Kraszewski, Disraeli, or Mrs. Gaskell, amounts to nothing ; but the quack medicine which is employed to make the Treby congregation ridiculous is inherited from Faust. The resemblance of ideas is often no more than agreement. The politics of Felix Holt may be found in Guizot — "C'est de l'état intérieur de l'homme que depend l'état visible de la société." A Belgian statesman has said, "Plus on apporte d'eléments personnels, spontanes, humains, dans les institutions, moins elles sont appelees à régler la marche de la société." Probably George Eliot had read neither the one nor the other, though she may have met with the same thoughts constantly. But she had read Delphine, and the conclusion of Delphine is the conclusion of the story of Gwendolen : "On peut encore faire servir au bonheur des autres une vie qui ne nous promet à nous-