Introduction

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics and scholars working to define George Eliot’s ethical vision have long recognized both conceptions in her writings, beginning with the communion imperative, to which Eliot calls more explicit attention. In her articulation of the communion imperative, Eliot particularly highlights the moral imperative of a shared human pain and suffering she inherits from Feuerbach, as, for example, in her essay on Edward Young. The ethical significance of Eliot’s sentences is less easy to grasp than their existential insight. The various statements from The Essence of Christianity help to contextualize Eliot’s conception in the 1850s of an ethical relationship to other persons alternately as a consciousness of a shared humanity and human community, and as a consciousness of the other’s differences from oneself and fundamental otherness. In her writings of the 1850s and early 1860s, Eliot intermittently returns to this rarer emphasis on human differences.