Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/119

94 We are still not concerned for Schopenhauer’s metaphysic, which, God knows, was a rotten enough tub for a wise man to go down to the sea in. But in his character as keeper of beautiful curiosities, Schopenhauer shows us in his literary museum, that is built on the dry land, many very useful thoughts; and we need not follow him out onto the great deep at present. But we note with interest this suggestion that he adds to his theory of pity. Is that suggestion worth anything? Is pity in fact a detection of an illusion? And does this illusion constitute the basis of selfishness? Perhaps that suggestion will be needed in a future chapter. Meanwhile, however, we have at present to do only with pity as a mere emotion. Surely if pity does discover for us any illusion in selfishness, then it must be a particular form of pity to which this function belongs. For much of pity simply illustrates this illusion. We cannot then do better than first to distinguish the selfish from the altruistic forms of what we popularly include under the one name Pity, or, to use the more general word, Sympathy. We shall have to go over old and commonplace ground, but we need to; for the illusion of selfishness, to be detected, needs also to be illustrated.

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,