And since grief is king, what better primate can he have than sympathy? To the thinker who sees joy submerged by pain, and death rule uncontested, what higher sentiment can come than that of pity? Schopenhauer has, however, been very frequently blamed for giving this as the foundation of morality; to many it has seemed too narrow and incomplete, and an academy (that of Copenhagen) refused to crown his essay, for that very reason. But whatever objections may be brought against it, its originality at least is unattackable. In ancient philosophy, ethics was a treatise of happiness; in modern works, it is generally a doctrine of eternal salvation; to Schopenhauer, it is neither; for if happiness is unobtainable, the subject is necessarily untreatable from such a standpoint, and on the other hand, if morality is practiced in the hope of future reward, or from fear of future punishment, it can hardly be said to spring from any great purity of intention. With such incentives it is but a doctrine of expediency, and at best merely adapted to guide the more or less interested motives of human action; but as the detection of an interested motive behind an action admittedly suffices to destroy its moral value, it follows that the criterion of an act of moral value must be the absence of any egotistic or interested motive. Schopenhauer points out that acts of this description are discernible in the unostentatious works of charity, from which no possible reward can accrue, and in which no personal interest is at work. "So soon," he says, "as sympathy is awakened the dividing line which separates one being from another is effaced. The welfare and misfortunes of another are to the sympathizer as his own, his distress speaks to him and the suffering is shared in common." Meanwhile this phenomenon, which he sees to be of almost daily occurrence, is yet one which reason cannot explain. All, even the most hard-hearted, have experienced it, and they have done so very often intuitively and to their own great surprise. Men, for instance, risk their lives spontaneously, without possible hope of gain or applause, for a total stranger. England, some years ago, paid twenty millions sterling to free the slaves in her colonies, and the motive of that grandiose action can certainly not be attributed to religion, for the New Testament does not contain a word against slavery, though in the days to which it refers slavery was universal.