Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/321

Rh of pity is overcome. For here pity is taken as feeling simply—and feeling of a sad and depressing sort. If we become the echo of others' miseries, he questions whether we can be really helpful or quickening to them. One day, as Zarathustra is walking along, he comes on a repulsive object which he at last makes out to be a human being; at first pity overcomes him and he is described as sinking down like a falling tree, heavily; and then he arises, and, his face becoming hard, he speaks the truth to him. Pity of itself weakens, unnerves—such is the idea. We know that the Greeks, viewing it in this light, classed it along with fear, and, according to Aristotle, the purpose of tragedy was to give, as it were, a vent to these emotions, and so effect a purgation of the soul. So Nietzsche says that if any one should go about seeking for occasions for pity and holding ever before his mind all the misery he could lay hold of in his neighborhood, he would inevitably become sick and melancholy. He who wishes to be a physician—a physician in any sense—must accordingly be on his guard, otherwise the depressing feeling may lame him and keep his fine hand from doing its proper work. A reviewer of one of Mr. Galsworthy's recent books says: "The spectator in these vignettes … is always pensive, always passive, prone to lose himself in what might not unfairly be called an intoxication of pity." Here is the point of view of a part of Nietzsche's criticism. Pity of this kind tends to leave things as they are—is a kind of sinking and melting before them; one who gives up to it is really taking his first step in the downward Schopenhauerian path.

And yet when pity is active, undefined it may do harm unless it is guided. Much mind, Nietzsche urges, is needed in exercising it. With the sense of the danger connected with it, he once puts the problem thus: "To create circumstances in which