to avoid such people when we can approach them as powerful and helpful ones, when we can safely reckon upon their applause, or wish to feel the contrast of our own happiness, or, again, when we hope to get rid of our own boredom. It is misleading to call the suffering that we experience at such a sight, and which may be of a very different kind, commiseration. For in all cases it is a suffering from which the suffering person before us is free: it is our own suffering, just as his suffering is his own. It is thus only this personal feeling of misery that we get rid of by acts of compassion. Nevertheless, we never act thus from one single motive: as it is certain that we wish to free ourselves from suffering thereby, it is also certain that by the same action we yield to an impulse of pleasure. Pleasure arises at the sight of a contrast to our own condition, at the knowledge that we should be able to help if only we wished to do so, at the thought of the praise and gratitude which we should gain if we did help, at the very act of helping, in so far as this might prove successful (and because something which is gradually seen to be successful gives pleasure to the doer); but even more particularly at the feeling that our intervention brings to an end some deplorable injustice,—even the outburst of one’s indignation is invigorating. All this, including even things still more subtle, comprises “pity.” How clumsily with this one word does language fall foul of such a complex and polyphonous organism! That pity, on the other hand, is identical with the suffering the sight of which brings it about, or that it has a particularly subtle and penetrating comprehension of it: this is in contradiction to experience, and he who has glorified pity under these two heads lacked sufficient experience in the domain of morals. That is why I am seized with some doubts when reading of the incredible things attributed by Schopenhauer to pity. It is obvious that he thereby wished to make us believe in the great novelty he brought forward, viz., that pity—the pity which he observed so superficially and described so badly—was the source of all and every past and future moral action,—and all this precisely because of those faculties which he had begun by attributing to it.