“The highest form of knowledge”: Plato, Bill Bullard, and George Eliot

An internet quotation credits this to Plato: "The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world." As so often when I check if a quotation is from the person it's attributed to, this comes from someone else, California educator Bill Bullard: "The highest form of knowledge is empathy, according to George Eliot, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world." The closest Eliot passage I've found is from "Janet's Repentance" in "Scenes of Clerical Life" (1857): "Yet surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 27 April 2023)