The "Religion Of Humanity"

George Eliot is of both an artist and philosopher, and not until we learn to deal with her simultaneously in these two roles will we be able to do full justice to her works. Many a great writers both of her times and those followed, like Thomas Hardy, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, to name a few, have been influenced by her profound sensibility, delicate depiction and philosophical analysis of the characters as well as her deep insight into the perplexity of humanity and psychological dilemma she revealed in her novels.The Victorian Age is the prime time for realistic novels, when the writers cast their eyes on the social reality of the Victorian England, portraying faithfully the life of all classes while describing the various crisis of England. George Eliot, when compared with a lot of her contemporaries, employed a more precise perspective in her concern over humanity instead of the condescending moral sermon which was prevalent in her times. She sees the vulnerability of humanity as common rather than contemptible, to which she has neither hostility nor self-deceptive illusion, as for George Eliot, novels are more of moral allegories than pictures of significant incidents, to which she has devoted all her life. She herself particularly disliked didactic novels, yet at no point in her career did she ever completely abandon the idea that novels serve to instruct their readers. The basis of this idea lies in her belief that art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying the bounds of our personal lot.This paper explores the contributions of three philosophers to Eliot's works: Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Benedictus Spinoza. The first half of the paper is as thorough a summary as possible of the philosophies of each thinker. The second half attempts to discover some of these philosophical ideas embedded within certain themes in Eliot's fiction in three rough and necessarily overlapping, areas: Eliot's vision of society and how it develops, her ideas regarding the nature of the interaction between the society and the individual, and her views relating to ethical behavior, i.e., the moral responsibility of the individual and his relative potentials for spiritual freedom and growth.After summarizing each gentleman's philosophies, I will show how many general aspects of their theories are similar, both in content and influences upon each other. These similarities constitute one of the reasons I believe George Eliot was attracted to these particular philosophers and why they made an impact on her work.Finally, all the facts, philosophies, ideas, thoughts and reflections being discussed are boiled down to how George Eliot manifests her religion, so to speak, which is the "religion of humanity" through her novels.