An appreciation of her philosophical commitments is necessary in order to understand her efforts to construct an immanent ground for moral life. It is this disposition and its potential for refinement as moral knowledge that she sought to realize in her novels. On her view the imagination grounds our disposition to feel sympathy for our fellow human beings. Her decision to write novels rather than conventional philosophy reflects her desire to actively engage the imaginative and affective, as well as the cognitive, powers of her readers. Eliot's critics rarely treat her literature and her philosophy as a genuinely integrated whole.3 Despite the existence of several excellent monographs about her intellectual milieu, much remains to be said about Eliot as a philosopher.4 I argue that her novels should be understood as attempts to practice philosophy in an alternative key. Knoepflmacher asserted that until we are able to appreciate George Eliot simultaneously as an artist and a philosopher we will fail "to do full justice to her work."2 His comment remains apposite today. She was among the first in Britain to theorize the ethical potential of the novel and to treat it as a serious medium for philosophical thought.1 For her, the question had become: how can we ground these values within nature and revere them in the absence of God? When she turned to writing novels, she sought to show that the values posited by religion as transcendent could be understood in naturalistic terms. Although she understood the phenomenon of religion to be a function of the imagination, she was a firm adherent to ethical values rooted in Christianity. Strongly influenced by Feuerbach, Evans approached religion in terms of a natural history of the genesis and development of human values. This movement sought to reinterpret scripture as an historical record of the thoroughly human endeavor to make sense of life, death, suffering and the place of human being within nature. All three theorists were significant figures for the German higher criticism movement, and its influence on British thought owes much to her. She also translated David Strauss's The Life of Jesus in 1846, Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity in 1854, and Benedict Spinoza's Ethics in 1856. She wrote many of its articles, including book reviews, opinion pieces on social and political themes, and reports on contemporary writing from Europe, especially Germany. Several years before "George Eliot" was conceived, the thirty-year-old Evans was the clandestine editor of London's premier journal of ideas, The Westminster Review. Marian Evans began to write novels under the pseudonym George Eliot toward the end of 1856.
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