Through sympathy both these forms of feeling are excited. Now a
pleasurable consciousness is aroused on witnessing pleasure; now a
painful consciousness is aroused on witnessing pain. Hence, if beings
around him habitually manifest pleasure and but rarely pain, sympathy
yields to its possessor a surplus of pleasure; while, contrariwise,
if little pleasure is ordinarily witnessed and much pain, sympathy
yields a surplus of pain to its possessor. The average development of
sympathy must, therefore, be regulated by the average manifestations of
pleasure and pain in others. If the life usually led under given social
conditions is such that suffering is daily inflicted, or is daily
displayed by associates, sympathy cannot grow: to assume growth of it
is to assume that the constitution will modify itself in such way as to
increase its pains and therefore depress its energies; and is to ignore
the truth that bearing any kind of pain gradually produces insensibilty
to that pain, or callousness. On the other hand, if the social state
is such that manifestations of pleasure predominate, sympathy will
increase; since sympathetic pleasures, adding to the totality of
pleasures enhancing vitality, conduce to the physical prosperity of the
most sympathetic, and since the pleasures of sympathy exceeding its
pains in all, lead to an exercise of it which strengthens it.
The first implication is one already more than once indicated. We have
seen that along with habitual militancy and under the adapted type
of social organization, sympathy cannot develop to any considerable
height. The destructive activities carried on against external
enemies sear it; the state of feeling maintained causes within the
society itself frequent acts of aggression or cruelty; and further,
the compulsory co-operation characterizing the militant _régime_
necessarily represses sympathy--exists only on condition of an
unsympathetic treatment of some by others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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