force or by trickery, the burdens and sorrows of life, which circumstances bring to everyone; they prefer to bear themselves the portions alotted to them, so as not to double those of their neighbours."[1] Injustice and wrong consist in working harm on another, or allowing by our conduct that such harm be done, in failure to keep one's explicit or implicit obligations and agreements. It is doubly hideous in treachery, where the source of trusted help turns into a spring of venomous malice. In lovingkindness, however, the appeal is to all mankind; and it is the sympathetic, moral man, who hears the cry of distress and responds to it. In cases like that of the relations of parents and children, there is involved no 'contract,' hence no obligation, strictly speaking. But, owing to the peculiar helplessness of the young off-spring, and the circumstances of the case, the claim is here made especially on the parent, and this also accounts for filial gratitude. Such 'duties' lie on the borderland between justice and lovingkindness proper.
In order to clinch his argument that sympathy is the only truly moral incentive, Schopenhauer appeals to concrete human experience for proof. And he finds no lack of confirmation. With keen sarcasm he points the meaninglessness of other ethical criteria when applied to concrete cases of conduct.[2] In great moral conflicts, in the storm and stress of real life, it is the potent power of sympathy that saves us; the absence of it, that drags us down. Unselfish compassion, pity, and lovingkindness for all beings, coupled with true integrity of conduct these are the springs actuating the sort of conduct which has always been recognized as noble and praiseworthy by all those not "completely chloroformed by the foetor Judaicus."[3] The Hindu Vedas, Panca-Tantra, and all Asiatic thought, are permeated with this spirit of universal compassion; Pausanius, Stobaeus, and Lucian show indications of it; Lessing and Jean Jacques are imbued with its power.[4]
- ↑ G., III. pp. 595-596; B., p. 179.
- ↑ Cf. G., III. pp. 612-614; B., pp. 206-208.
- ↑ G., III. p. 622; B., p. 221.
- ↑ Cf. G., III. pp. 627 ff.; B., pp. 230 ff. Johannes Volkelt, Arthur Schopenhauer, Stuttgart, 1900, p. 300, refers to the Schopenhauerian tendencies, in this respect, of Wagner, Tolstoi, and Jean Paul.
