VII.
When one sees his neighbor in pain, does one of necessity come to know that pain as Such, to realize its true nature as it is in his neighbor? Or does one often fall into an illusion about that pain, regard- ALTRUISM AND EGOISM 95 ing it as somehow not quite real? Schopenhauer would reply: The heartless man, who has no compas¬ sion, falls into a sort of illusion about his neighbor. He thinks more or less clearly that that pain of his neighbor’s is a sort of unreal pain, not as living as would be his own pain. But the pitiful man, the only quite unselfish man, — he perceives the reality of his neighbor’s suffering. He knows that that is no phantom suffering, but even such pain as his own would be.
We want to test this idea in a practical way. So we say: Let us judge of this sympathy by its fruits? Are we in fact certain to be led to unselfish acts if in all cases we obey the dictates of sympathy? Sehopenhauer thinks that he has secured altruism for his sympathetic or pitiful man by remarking that, in true pity, one feels the pain, not as his own, but as the other’s pain. To follow the dictates of this sympathy would of necessity lead, one might say, to the effort unselfishly to relieve the other. But then does not this depend very much upon the way in which pity conies to be an object of reflection for the man that feels it? Pity is often of itself an in¬ determinate impulse, that may be capable of very various interpretation by the subsequent reflection of the pitiful mind. One may through pity come to reflect that this feeling stands for a real pain in the other man, and may act accordingly; or one may have very different reflections. One may fail to realize the other’s pain as such, and may be driven back upon himself. For most people the first re¬ flection that follows upon strong pity is no unselfish 96 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY one at all. It is very simply the precept: “ Get rid of the pain that your neighbor causes you to feel.” Sympathy with pain may make you tremble, grow faint, feel choked, weep; and all these sudden emo¬ tions are followed perhaps by long-enduring melan¬ choly. All this causes you to forget the reality of the other’s pain. This personal trouble of yours, felt in stronger cases in your body as a physical dis¬ turbance, as something unnerving, prostrating, over¬ whelming, turns your reflection upon yourself, and you are very apt to ask: What am I to do to be free from it? So to ask is already to begin to forget your neighbor. The pain that his pain caused has simply become your pain. You are, even through your pity, bound fast in an illusion. For there are three ways of removing this pain, and of satisfying for you the sympathy that caused it. One way, and often a very hard one, puzzling to follow, full of re¬ sponsibility and of blunders, would be taken if you did your best, perseveringly and calmly, to get your neighbor out of his trouble. That would doubtless take a long time, you would never be adequately thanked for your trouble, and you might very easily blunder and do harm instead of good to him, thus causing in the end yet more sympathetic pain for you, coupled this time with remorse. The second way is to get used to the sight of pain, so that you no longer feel any sympathetic suffering. The third way is generally the easiest of all. That is to go away from the place, and forget all about the sad business as soon as possible. That is the way that most sensitive people take in dealing with most of ALTRUISM AND EGOISM 97 the suffering that they meet. The first way gives you the most of hard work to do. The second way, by dulling your sensibilities, makes you less alive to the pleasures that are to be gained in the company of happy men. The stern man, who has seen so much suffering as to be indifferent to it, may be less alive to the bliss of sympathy that gentler natures come to know, in refined and peaceful society. By far the most inviting way is the third. It prevents you from growing callous, cold, and harsh. It leaves you sensitive, appreciative, tender-hearted, freshly sympathetic, an admirable and humane being. But it also saves you from the pangs that to refined nar tures must be the most atrocious, the pangs of con¬ templating a world of sorrow which your best efforts can but very imperfectly help. People with a deli¬ cate sense of the beautiful surely cannot endure to go about seeing all sorts of filthy and ugly miseries, and if they can endure it, will they not be much happier, as well as more refined, more delicate in taste, much higher in the scale of beautiful cultiva¬ tion, if they do not try to endure it, but keep them¬ selves well surrounded by happy and ennobling com¬ panions? For the sight of pain is apt to make you coarse; it might degrade you even to the level of the peevish sufferer himself. Does a refined soul desire that? No one is a duller, a less stimulating, a less ennobling companion, than the average man when he is suffering atrociously. Pain brings out his native brutishness. He is abject, he curses, he behaves perhaps like a wild beast. Or he lies mute and helpless, showing no interest in what you do for 98 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY him, hating you possibly, just because you are the nearest creature to him. His gratitude is apt to be a myth. So long as he yet suffers, he does not ap¬ preciate what you are doing for him, for why should he thank you while you make him no better? And if you can cure him, what then? Nobody can re¬ member very clearly a very sharp pain once over. Hence he will underrate your services. You can much better appreciate your moderate trouble in helping him than he can afterwards appreciate the very great and agonizing trouble from which you saved him. One forgets in part one’s greatest an¬ guish, one’s most dangerous diseases. The worst troubles are not favorable to clear memory. Above all, however, his memory will be weak for what you did in his case. He will shock you afterwards by having failed to notice that you took any serious trouble in his behalf at all. But, if he was sick and you nursed him, he will remember very well how you harassed him as you nursed him. He will re¬ member a creaking door or an ill-cooked steak, when he forgets your cups of cold water, your sleepless nights, your toil to secure silence when he needed it, your patience when he complained, your sacrifice of all other present aims in life on his account. All that he will forget, not because he is a bad man, but because he is an ordinary creature whom pain de¬ based and corrupted, so that he became hardly a fit companion for an elevated and refined soul like yours. He is only human. If you, were an average man yourself, you would treat your friends that aided you in your worst suffering after much the ALTRUISM AND EGOISM 99 same fashion. It is well if the sufferer and his helper do not begin a quarrel that will last a life¬ time, all because of the meddlesome self-sacrifice of the officious helper. For to the wretched any help is apt to seem officious, because no help is imme¬ diately and unconditionally successful.
So then, if you are tender-hearted, does tender¬ heartedness dictate all this waste of sympathy? Plainly not. Tender-heartedness need not say: My neighbor must be relieved. Tender-heartedness, as a personal affection of yours, says only: Satisfy me. And you can satisfy this affection if you forget about all those degraded wretches that are doomed to suf¬ fer, and associate with those blessed ones whose in¬ nocent joy shall make your tender heart glad of its own tenderness. Let us rejoice with those that do rejoice, and those that weep, let them take care of themselves in everlasting oblivion. Such is the dic¬ tate of tender-hearted selfishness; and our present point is the not at all novel thought, so often elab¬ orated in George Eliot’s novels, the thought that, the tenderer the heart, the more exclusively selfish becomes this dictate of tender-heartedness. Very sensitive people, who cannot overcome their sensi¬ tiveness, are perforce selfish in this world of pain. They must forget that there is suffering. Their pity makes them cruel. They cannot bear the sight of suffering; they must shut the door upon it. If he is a Dives, such a man must first of all insist that the police shall prevent people like Lazarus, covered with sores, from lying in plain sight at the gate.
Such men must treat pain as, in these days of 100 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY plumbing, we treat filth. We get the plumber and the carpenter to hide it so well that even our civ¬ ilized nostrils shall not be offended. That we call modern improvement in house-building. Even so we get the police to hide suffering from us; and, when that help fails, or is inapplicable, we appeal to the natural sense of decency in the sufferers, and demand, on the ground of common courtesy, that they shall not intrude their miseries upon us. Thus we cultivate a tender sympathy for the most delicate emotions of the human heart, as we never could do if we let suffering, as our forefathers used to let filth, lie about in plain sight. Ignore another’s suffering, and then it practically becomes non - existent. So says selfishness.
VIII.
If we ourselves are very happy, our lack of will¬ ingness to consider suffering may become greater and greater as we get happier. Nobody is colder in shutting out the thought of misery than a joyous man in a joyous company. u If there be anywhere any wretched people (which we doubt) let them keep well away from this place.” That is the voice of the spirit of overflowing sympathetic joy, as Schiller so finely expresses it in the hymn an die Freude: — “ He who, proving, hath discovered, What it is a friend to own, O’er whom woman’s love hath hovered. Let him here his bliss make known: Yea, if but one living being, On the earth is his to-day, — ALTRUISM AND EGOISM And who ne’er has known such, fleeing, Let him weep his grief away.” 1 “Joy,” says the enthusiastic young Schiller in this rhapsody, “ Joy was bestowed on the worm.” “ All beings drink joy at Mother Nature’s breast.” Delightful generosity of the happy man! But what do the crushed worms think about it? “ Whoso hath a friend,” — but what of the poor wretches in the slums of great cities, beaten, starved, imprisoned, cheated, and cheating, starved and imprisoned again, all through their lifetimes? How many souls do these poor Ishmaelites call their own? But of whom shall the joyful man think, of whom does he or can he think? Of these? No, it is the tendency of selfish joy to build up its own pretty world of fancy. Every¬ thing in that world, from cherub to worm, has joy’s sympathy, but only in so far as it is also joyous. Seid umschlungen Millionen! dieser Kuss der ganzen Welt! But in fact dieser Kuss is intended only for the happy world, which in the illusion, beau¬ tiful, but yet cruel, of the innocently joyous man, seems to be the whole world. Much good will such kisses do to the Millionen that groan and writhe! Joy ignores them, cannot believe them real.
Such then are some of the dictates of sympathy, 1 Worn der grosse Wurf gelungen Eines Freundes Freund zu sein, Wer ein boldes Weib errungen Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja, — wer auch nur eine Seele Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer ’s nie gekonnt, der steble, Weinend sich aus diesem Bund.
102 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY which often bear to our conduct such relation as, in a saying of Emerson’s, the desire to go to Boston bears to the possible ways of getting there. “ When I want to get to Boston,” says in substance Emerson, “ I do not swim the Charles River, but prefer cross¬ ing the bridge.” Emerson’s saying was intended to illustrate his own preference for reading translations of foreign authors rather than the originals. It does illustrate very well the preference that we all have for the shortest way out of our sympathetic troubles. To help your suffering neighbor is hard swimming, perhaps amid ice-blocks; to go on and find elsewhere merry company is to take the bridge direct to Boston. Sympathy leads therefore often to the ignoring of another man’s state as real. And this is the very Illusion of Selfishness itself.
Pity may then turn to selfish hatred of the sight of suffering. It is hardly necessary to dwell at length upon the disheartening reverse aspect of the picture, namely, on the fact that, when pity does not lead us to dread the suffering of others, it may lead us to take such credit for our very power to sympathize with pain, that we come to feel an actual delight in the existence of the events that mean suffering to others. Our hearts may so swell with pride at our own importance as pitiful persons, that we may even long to have somebody of our acquaintance in trou¬ ble, so that we can go and pose, in the presence of the sufferers, as humane commentators on the occur¬ rence, as heroic endurers of sorrows that we do not really share. This is the second stage of selfish pity. It is even more enduring and incurable than the ALTRUISM AND EGOISM first. The dread of the sight of pain may be made to pass away by enough of inevitable experience. But the selfish love of the office of comforter grows with the sense of our personal importance, and with the number of times when we are called upon to ex¬ ercise our powers. There are people who are always fretful and disconsolate unless they know of some¬ body who very badly needs consoling. Then they are calm and happy, for they are sure that they are admirable as comforters, they feel themselves the centre of an admiring neighborhood, they are plying their noble avocation in a graceful fashion. This type is surely no very uncommon one. Such people are apt to be intolerable companions for you unless you have a broken leg, or a fever, or a great bereave¬ ment. Then they find you interesting, because you are wretched. They nurse you like saints; they speak comfortably to you like angels. They hate to give the little comfort that can be given from day to day to those who are enduring the ordinary vex¬ ations of healthy and prosaic life. They rejoice to find some one overwhelmed with woe. The happy man is to them a worthless fellow. High tempera¬ ture is needed to soften their hearts. They would be miserable in Paradise, at the sight of so much tedious contentment; but they would leap for joy if they could but hear of a lost soul to whom a drop of water could be carried. To them the most blessed truth of Scripture is found in the passage: “For the poor ye have always with you.” Yea, blessed are the merciful, for they shall never lack work. They shall be like the sculptor, delighting in the 104 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY rough blocks of marble that contain his beloved statues. For them the world will doubtless have al¬ ways a plenty of blocks.
These are not the vulgarly malevolent. Yet they would be disconsolate altogether if evil were to cease. They regard misery as their special prop- erty; hence they would be very much disappointed to hear that Paradise had come again, and that mis¬ ery had been abolished. And we are speaking now, not of the professional enthusiasm that must make the physician interested in the diseases that he stud¬ ies, but of the pure delight in pity that distinguishes certain unprofessional people whose lives would be almost utterly empty of all joy were their neighbors not subject to serious calamities. Surely it is not this sort of pity that overcomes the illusion of self¬ ishness. Rather does such pity well illustrate that illusion.
IX.
IX.
Sympathy then, as an emotion, is not always altru¬ istic, but frequently very selfish. It does not always overthrow, but often strengthens, selfishness. And so deceitful an emotion cannot be trusted with the office of giving moral insight. In so far as pity ever does involve the detection of an illusion of selfishness, we may have occasion to speak of it hereafter. For on that side, Schopenhauer’s thought still looks at¬ tractive. But if we view pity with reference not to insight but to emotion, if we ask whether a given act was unselfish because it was pitiful, then we can already answer that, in so far as unselfishness consti- ALTRUISM AND EGOISM 105 tutes morality, the pitiful character of an act does not insure its unselfishness, and hence not its morality. Schopenhauer’s own typical example, quoted above, is indeed interesting, but not conclusive as to this question. “ I pitied him,” says the lover who has refrained from slaying his rival. “ Had he not re¬ sembled my father as he slept, I had done it,” says Lady Macbeth. Possibly Lady Macbeth’s pity was good in itself, but not quite sufficient in quantity. But her words remind us of what the lover might do, if only pity stood in the way of the murder that he desired to commit. He might get somebody else to take care of the whole business, preparations and all, and so save his own tender emotions. In fact, how¬ ever, Schopenhauer’s young lover has something more than a mere emotion of pity in him.
But so far as we have considered sympathy, we have had but another illustration of the difficulty with which we are dealing. Even if sympathy were always unselfish, never capricious, perfectly clear in its dictates, there would remain the other objection. Sympathy is a mere fact of a man’s emotional nature. To an unsympathetic man, how shall you demonstrate the ideals that you found upon the feeling of sympa¬ thy? And so one returns to the old difficulty. You have an ideal whereby you desire to judge the world. But this ideal you found in its turn on the fact that somebody has a certain sort of emotion. Any one who has not this emotion you declare to be an in¬ competent judge. And so your last foundation for the ideal is something whose worth is to be demon¬ strated solely by the fact that it exists.
106 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY Thus in this and in the last chapter, in general and in particular discussions, we have found the one problem recurring. The ideal is to have an ideal foundation, yet we seem always to give it a founda¬ tion in some reality. And if we then look about us, we always find some skeptic saying, either that he does not feel sure of the existence of any such reality, or that he doubts whether it means what we say that it means, or, again, that in any case there are other people, who have found other realities, and whose moral principles, founded on these other real¬ ities, are in deadly opposition to ours. The idealist of our preliminary discussion on the methods of eth¬ ical inquiry has so far met with numerous misfor¬ tunes. He has continually been enticed over to a sort of realistic position, and then just the same arguments that he used against the realist are used against him. If, however, true to himself, he as¬ saults the realism of the modern descendants of Hobbes with the argument that all their physical hypotheses are worthless without ideals, then he hears the challenge to show an ideal that is not his whim, and that is not founded on a physical doc¬ trine. There seems no refuge for him as yet but to turn skeptic himself.
CHAPTER V.
ETHICAL SKEPTICISM AND ETHICAL PESSIMISM Long is the night to him who is awake; long is a mile to him who is tired; long is life to the foolish who do not know the true law. — Dhammapada.
To turn skeptic himself, we said, seemed the only way open before our idealist. If only he had placed his standard a little lower! If only he had not insisted on getting his ideal by ideal methods! Then he might have remained safe in some one of the positions that he temporarily assumed. But al¬ ways he drove himself out of them. Some stupen¬ dous external reality, some beautiful mental state, would suggest itself to him, and he would say: “ Lo, here is the ideal that I seek.” But forthwith his own doubt would arise, accusing him of faithlessness. “ What hast thou found save that this or that hap¬ pens to exist? ” the doubt would say, and our ideal¬ ist would be constrained to answer, “ Not because it exists, but because I have freely chosen it for my guide, is it the Ideal.” And then would come the repeated accusation that caprice is the sole ground for the choice of this ideal. Skepticism, then, total skepticism as to the foundation of ethics, seems to be the result that threatens us. We must face this skepticism and consider its outcome.
108 the religious aspect of philosophy I.
It is in fact in such skepticism as this that one finds the real power and meaning of most genuine modern Pessimism. Not so much in the hopeless¬ ness of our efforts to reach our ideals once chosen as in our perpetual hesitation or unsteadiness in the choice of ideals, we most frequently find the deepest ground for pessimistic despair. Choose an ideal, and you have at least your part to play in the world. The game may seem worth the trouble; for far off as may be what you seek, there is the delight and the earnestness of free self-surrender to a great aim. But pessimism is almost inevitable if you have been long trying to find an ideal to which you can devote yourself, and if you have failed in your quest. Therefore those advocates of pessimism are most formidable who dwell less upon the ills of life, as bare facts, and more upon the aimlessness of life. Von Hartmann, therefore, to whom pessimism is more the supposed result of a process of summation, and thus is a belief that the sum of pains in life overbalances the sum of pleasures, produces little effect upon us by his balance-sheet. But Schopen¬ hauer, who dwelt not only upon the balance-sheet, but still more upon the fundamental fact that life is restless and aimless, — he is nearer to success in his pessimistic efforts. It is here that one finds also the true strength of Schopenhauer’s model, the Buddhistic despair of life. Choose- your aim in life, says in effect Buddhism, let it be wife or* child, wealth or fame or power, and still your aim is only ETHICAL SKEPTICISM AND ETHICAL PESSIMISM 109