horribly selfish if it wanted all the other flowers in the garden to be
both red and roses. Under Individualism people will be quite natural and
absolutely unselfish, and will know the meanings of the words, and
realise them in their free, beautiful lives. Nor will men be egotistic
as they are now. For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and
the Individualist will not desire to do that. It will not give him
pleasure. When man has realised Individualism, he will also realise
sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously. Up to the present man
has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain,
and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy
is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is
tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a
certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we
ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would
have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise
with the entirety of life, not with life’s sores and maladies merely, but
with life’s joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom. The wider
sympathy is, of course, the more difficult. It requires more
unselfishness. Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend,
but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a
true Individualist—to sympathise with a friend’s success.
In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such sympathy
is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the immoral ideal of
uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is so prevalent
everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.
Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be. It is one of the
first instincts of man. The animals which are individual, the higher
animals, that is to say, share it with us. But it must be remembered
that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy in the world,
sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain. It may
make man better able to endure evil, but the evil remains. Sympathy with
consumption does not cure consumption; that is what Science does. And
when Socialism has solved the problem of poverty, and Science solved the
problem of disease, the area of the sentimentalists will be lessened, and
the sympathy of man will be large, healthy, and spontaneous. Man will
have joy in the contemplation of the joyous life of others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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