George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings and PhilosophyCooke, George Willis
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George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings and Philosophy
Cooke, George Willis
Eliot, George, 1819-1880; Novelists, English -- 19th century -- Biography
She returns to the same subject when considering the intellectual theories
of happiness and the proportion of crime there is likely to occur in the
world. She shows her entire dissent from such a method of dealing with
human woe, and she pleads for that sympathy and love which will enable us
to feel the pain of others as our own. This fellow-feeling gives us the
most adequate knowledge we can have.
It was probably a hard saying to the Pharisees, that "there is more joy
in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine just
persons that need no repentance." And certain ingenious philosophers
of our own day must surely take offence at a joy so entirely out of
correspondence with arithmetical proportion. But a heart that has
been taught by its own sore struggles to bleed for the woes of
another--that has "learned pity through suffering"--is likely to find
very imperfect satisfaction in the "balance of happiness," "doctrine of
compensations," and other short and easy methods of obtaining thorough
complacency in the presence of pain; and for such a heart that saying
will not be altogether dark. The emotions I have observed are but
slightly influenced by arithmetical considerations: the mother, when
her sweet lisping little ones have all been taken from her one after
another, and she is hanging over her last dead babe, finds small
consolation in the fact that the tiny dimpled corpse is but one of a
necessary average, and that a thousand other babes brought into the
world at the same time are doing well, and are likely to live; and if
you stood beside that mother--if you knew her pang and shared it--it is
probable you would be equally unable to see a ground of complacency in
statistics. Doubtless a complacency resting on that basis is highly
rational; but emotion, I fear, is obstinately irrational; it insists on
caring for individuals; it absolutely refuses to adopt the quantitative
view of human anguish, and to admit that thirteen happy lives are a
set-off against twelve miserable lives, which leaves a clear balance on
the side of satisfaction. This is the inherent imbecility of feeling,
and one must be a great philosopher to have got quite clear of all
that, and to have emerged into the serene air of pure intellect, in
which it is evident that individuals really exist for no other purpose
than that abstractions maybe drawn from them--abstractions that may
rise from heaps of ruined lives like the sweet savor of a sacrifice in
the nostrils of philosophers, and of a philosophic Deity. And so it
comes to pass that for the man who knows sympathy because he has known
sorrow, that old, old saying about the joy of angels over the repentant
sinner outweighing their joy over the ninety-nine just, has a meaning
which does not jar with the language of his own heart. It only tells
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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