George Eliot thought of herself as a teacher, as did her contemporaries. Their view that her writing was not simply influenced in a relatively haphazard way by her philosophical and scientific reading but was a deliberate and consistent attempt to synthesize in fiction an elaborate and coherent theoretical analysis of the human situation is studied in this book, originally published in 1984. Eliot's Associationist philosophy, her Feuerbachian readings of religion, her ethic of Submission and her sense that Positivism can be transcended in art and vision are here subjected to a thorough Marxist, Nietzschean and psycho-analytical critique.