Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/114

 In short, let him say what he will. But Titus, whose account of himself I reserve for my choice, let him say: ‘When I began to prepare, and so for the moment was busy no longer with my passion, but with my rival, then it became for the first time quite clear to me what now was really to be his fate. But just here pity and compassion overcame me. I grieved for him; my heart would not be put down; I could not do it.’ I ask now every honest and unprejudiced reader, which of the two is the better man? To which of the two would he rather intrust his fate? Which of them was restrained by the purer motive? Where, therefore, lies the principle of moral action?”

What shall we say of this foundation for altruism? Are pity and unselfishness thus shown to be, for the purposes of ethics, identical? Schopenhauer’s suggestion seems attractive, but from the outset doubtful. Let us examine it more carefully.

VI. This Pity is, at all events, for the first just an impulse, no more; so at least, as we learn, it appears in the unreflective man. “Nature,” Schopenhauer tells us, has “planted in the human heart that wondrous disposition through which the sorrows of one are felt by the other, and from which comes the voice that, according to the emergency, calls to one ‘Spare,’ to another, ‘Help,’ and calls urgently and with authority. Surely there was to be expected from the aid thus originating more for the prosperity of all