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.Those who deny any truly altruistic motive to man and seek toreduce apparent altruism to subtle and far-sighted egoism, must simplydeny the obvious facts, and must seek some far-fetched unreal explana-tions of such phenomena as the anti-slavery and Congo-reform move-ments, the anti-vivisection crusade, and the Society for the Preventionof Cruelty to Children.Let us examine briefly the way in which Bainsought to account for ostensibly disinterested emotion and action.Aswe have seen above, he regarded tender emotion as wholly self-seeking,and, like many other authors, he attributed such actions as we are con-sidering to sympathy.He wrote:  From a region of the mind quite apartfrom the tender emotion arises the principle of sympathy, or the prompt-ing to take on the pleasures and pains of other beings, and act on themas if they were our own.Instead of being a source of pleasure to us, theprimary operation of sympathy is to make us surrender pleasures and toincur pains.This is a paradox of our constitution to be again more fullyconsidered. 36Here he has clearly committed himself to a position that needs muchexplanation.But, when we seek his fuller consideration of this paradox,all we find is a passage of a few lines in his section on moral disappro-bation.This passage tells us that, when another s conduct inspires afeeling of disapprobation as violating the maxims recognised to be bind-ing. It is to be supposed that the same sense of duty that operates uponone s own self, and stings with remorse and fear in case of disobedience,should come into play when some other person is the guilty agent.Thefeeling that rises up towards that person is a strong feeling of displea-An Introduction to Social Psychology/61sure or dislike, proportioned to the strength of our regard to the violatedduty.There arises a moral resentment, or a disposition to inflict punish-ment upon the offender. 37 That is to say, according to Bain, the sourceof all disinterested moral indignation is the reflection,  If I had donethat, I should have been punished; therefore he must be punished. Now,this attitude is not uncommon, especially in the nursery, and it playssome small part, no doubt, in securing equal distribution of punish-ments; but it is surely wholly inadequate to account for that paradox ofour constitution previously recognised by Bain.In order to realise howfar from the truth this doctrine is, we have only to consider what kindsof conduct provoke our moral indignation most strongly.If we hear of aman robbing a bank, holding up a mail train, or killing another in fairfight, we may agree that he should be punished; for we recognise intel-lectually that the interests of society demand that such things shall notbe done too frequently, and we ourselves might shrink from similar con-duct; but our feeling towards the criminal may be one of pity, or perhapsmerely one of amusement dashed with admiration for his audacity andskill.But let the act be one inflicting pain on a helpless creature an actof cruelty to a horse, a dog, or, above all, to a child and our moralindignation blazes out, even though the act be one for which the lawprescribes no punishment.Bain s explanation of his  paradox of sym-pathy is then utterly inadequate, and a closer examination of his state-ment of the principle of sympathy shows that it is false, and that anyplausibility it may seem to possess depends upon the vague and rhetori-cal language in which it is made, His statement is that sympathy is theprompting to take on the pains and pleasures of another being, and toendeavour to abolish that other s pain and to prolong his pleasure.But,if we use more accurate language, we shall have to say that the sympa-thetic pain or pleasure we experience is immediately evoked in us by thespectacle of pain or of pleasure, and that we then act on it because it isour own pain or pleasure; and the action we take (so long as no otherprinciple is at work) is directed to cut short our own pain and to prolongour own pleasure, quite regardless of the feelings of the other person.Now, the easiest and quickest way of cutting short sympathetically in-duced pain is to turn our eyes and our thoughts away from the sufferingcreature; and this is the way invariably followed by all sensitive naturesin which the tender emotion and its protective impulse are weak.Theypass by the sick and suffering with averted gaze, and resolutely banishall thoughts of them, surrounding themselves as far as possible with gay62/William McDougalland cheerful faces.No doubt the spectacle of the poor man who fellamong thieves was just as distressing to the priest and the Levite, whopassed by on the other side, as to the good Samaritan who tenderlycared for him.They may well have been exquisitely sensitive souls, whowould have fainted away if they had been compelled to gaze upon hiswounds.The great difference between them and the Samaritan was thatin him the tender emotion and its impulse were evoked, and that thisimpulse overcame, or prevented, the aversion naturally induced by thepainful and, perhaps, disgusting spectacle.38Our susceptibility to sympathetically induced pain or pleasure, op-erating alone, simply inclines us, then, to avoid the neighbourhood ofthe distressed and to seek the company of the cheerful; but tender emo-tion draws us near to the suffering and the sad, seeking to alleviate theirdistress [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]