"essential humanity" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It means the basic, core qualities of human nature. You can use it to describe qualities such as kindness, mercy, empathy, and compassion. For example: "His essential humanity was manifest in his concern for others."
How have human beings, and their essential humanity, changed in the past 16 years?
Yet even the most ruthless villains are drawn with an unexpected sensitivity to their essential humanity.
But Kelman has never been afraid of exposing his characters' vanities and foibles, without ever compromising their essential humanity.
His aunts, uncles, parents and wife have all sat before the jury to vouch for his essential humanity.
"Crazy people scare me," Lorenzo confesses, but soon he is spending enough time in their midst to discover their essential humanity, and, of course, his own.
"What attracts us to these objects is their essential humanity," writes the exhibition's curator, Paul J. Smith, in his catalog essay.
And she discovered that performing in Yiddish, when Jewishness is simply taken for granted, can liberate an artist and audience to concentrate on a play's essential humanity.
There is a strange intimacy to these nocturnal black and white images of a bedraggled vanguard: that essential humanity that comes from deep looking.
While every university requires that high demand professional education subsidize lower demand, but essential, humanities, arts and sciences, the issue is not one of kind but of degree.
Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide.
Yet there's one moment in the film that gets past attitude to make a discovery: in a pair of matched shots, Reitman shows similar mottling and freckling on Mavis's and Matt's backs, as if suggesting that the wild-life artist and the local man share an essential, common humanity and heritage and, indeed, the way of all flesh.
