Surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him—­which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.  Our subtlest analogies of schools and sects must miss the essential truth, unless it be lit up by the love that sees in all forms of human thought and-work the life-and-death struggles of separate human beings.

George Eliot would have us believe, that until we can feel with man, enter sympathetically into his emotions and yearnings, we cannot know him.  It is because we have common emotions, common experiences, common aspirations, that we are really able to understand man; and not because of statistics, natural history, sociology or psychology.  The objective facts have their place and value, but the real knowledge we possess of mankind is subjective, grows out of fellow-feeling.

The mental life of man, according to George Eliot, is simply an expansion of the emotional life.  At first the mental life is unconscious, it is instinctive, simply the emotional response of man to the sequences of nature.  This instinctive life of the emotions always remains a better part of our natures, and is to be trusted rather than the more formal activities of the intellectual faculties.  In the most highly developed intellects even, there is a subconscious mental activity, an instinctive life of feeling, which is rather to be trusted than reason itself.  This is a frequently recurring statement, which George Eliot makes in the firmest conviction of its truthfulness.  It appears in such a sentence as this, in The Mill on the Floss:  “Watch your own speech, and notice how it is guided by your less conscious purposes.”  In Daniel Deronda it finds expression in the assertion that “there is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.”  It is more explicitly presented in Adam Bede.

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulses by the name of inspiration?  After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us.

George Eliot puts into the mouth of Mordecai the assertion that love lies deeper than any reasons which are to be found for its exercise.  In the same way, she would have us believe that feeling is safer than reason.  Daniel Deronda questions Mordecai’s visions, and doubts if he is worth listening to, except for pity’s sake.  On this the author comments, in defence of the visions, as against reason.