But even could the militant _régime_ forthwith end, the hinderance to
development of sympathy would still be great. Though cessation of war
would imply increased adaptation of man to social life, and decrease
of sundry evils, yet there would remain much non-adaptation and
much consequent unhappiness. In the first place, that form of nature
which has generated and still generates wars, though by implication
raised to a higher form, would not at once be raised to so high a
form that there would cease all injustices and the pains they cause.
For a considerable period after predatory activities had ended, the
defects of the predatory nature would continue: entailing their slowly
diminishing evils. In the second place, the ill-adjustment of the human
constitution to the pursuits of industrial life, must long persist,
and may be expected to survive in a measure the cessation of wars: the
required modes of activity must remain for innumerable generations in
some degree displeasurable. And in the third place, deficiencies of
self-control such as the improvident show us, as well as those many
failures of conduct due to inadequate foresight of consequences, though
less marked than now, could not fail still to produce suffering.
Nor would even complete adaptation, if limited to disappearance of the
non-adaptations just indicated, remove all sources of those miseries
which, to the extent of their manifestation, check the growth of
sympathy. For while the rate of multiplication continues so to exceed
the rate of mortality as to cause pressure on the means of subsistence,
there must continue to result much unhappiness; either from balked
affections or from overwork and stinted means. Only as fast as
fertility diminishes, which we have seen it must do along with further
mental development (_Principles of Biology_, §§ 367-377), can there go
on such diminution of the labors required for efficiently supporting
self and family, that they will not constitute a displeasurable tax on
the energies.
Gradually then, and only gradually, as these various causes of
unhappiness become less can sympathy become greater. Life would be
intolerable if, while the causes of misery remained as they now are,
all men were not only in a high degree sensitive to the pains, bodily
and mental, felt by those around and expressed in the faces of those
they met, but were unceasingly conscious of the miseries everywhere
being suffered as consequences of war, crime, misconduct, misfortune,
improvidence, incapacity. But, as the molding and re-molding of man
and society into mutual fitness progresses, and as the pains caused by
unfitness decrease, sympathy can increase in presence of the pleasures
that come from fitness. The two changes are indeed so related that
each furthers the other. Such growth of sympathy as conditions permit,
itself aids in lessening pain and augmenting pleasure: and the greater
surplus of pleasure that results makes possible further growth of
sympathy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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