Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/121

96 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 emotions are followed perhaps by long-enduring melancholy. 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 disturbance, as something unnerving, prostrating, overwhelming, 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 responsibility 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