Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/130

Rh 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 resembled 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, however, 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 sympathy? 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 incompetent judge. And so your last foundation for the ideal is something whose worth is to be demonstrated solely by the fact that it exists.