The Spread of Feelings

⁶ Sometimes, sympathy arises merely from seeing another person’s emotions.

The feelings are transfused from one man to another instantaneously without knowing what excited them.

For example, when some expresses grief, the other people are also instantly affected with grief.

⁷ However, this is not universal with every feeling.

There are some feelings which excite no sympathy. We are disgusted at them even before we know what caused them.

The angry man’s fury makes us more angry at him than at his enemies.*

This is because we do not immediately know the cause of his anger.

⁸ Seeing:

• grief in a man gives us grief because it suggests his suffering to us
• joy in a man gives us joy because it suggests his joy to us

The effects of grief and joy terminate in the person who feels them.

Unlike resentment, they do not give us emotions that target another person.

The general idea of good or bad fortune, therefore, creates some concern for the person with that good or bad fortune.

But the general idea of provocation creates no sympathy with the receiver of that anger. Nature teaches us:

• to be more averse to anger and resentment until we know its cause
• to fight anger.

⁹ Even our sympathy with another person’s grief or joy is always extremely imperfect before we know its cause.

General lamentations express only the sufferer’s anguish. These make us curious about his situation. It makes us sympathize with him slightly.

Our first question is: What happened?

Until this is answered, our fellow-feeling is not very considerable, although we are uneasy from his misfortune.

¹⁰ Therefore, sympathy arises more from the situation which excites it.

We sometimes feel something for another person which he himself does not feel, because such feeling arises in our breast from our imagination [our samskara] when we put ourselves in his case.

We blush for the rudeness of another because we feel ashamed if we had behaved in the same way, even if he did not even know the impropriety of his own behaviour.

¹¹ The loss of reason is the most dreadful of all conditions.

People have deeper sorrow for a person’s loss of reason than any other.

But the poor wretch who has no sense of reason, laughs and sings, insensible of his own misery.

Our anguish for him, therefore, cannot be the same anguish that he feels.

The observer’s compassion must all arise from his consideration of what he himself would feel if he had the same situation.

¹² A mother feels pangs when she hears her baby crying.

In her own mind, she joins:

• the idea of her baby’s helplessness to the baby’s actual helplessness
• that helplessness with her own experience of helplessness

From of all these, she creates an image of misery and distress.

The infant, however, feels only some uneasiness.

• Its innocence is an antidote against fear and anxiety.
• When it grows up to be a man, its innocence will be replaced by reason and philosophy which will defend it from fear and anxiety

The Dread of Death Arises from Our Sympathy with the Dead

¹³ We even sympathize with the dead.

We do not feel what has happened to the deceased person.

We instead are affected by what we see. We think that it is miserable to be:

• laid in the cold grave
• not be thought of in this world
• removed from the memory of their friends and relations

Our fellow-feeling gives double tribute to the dead when they are in danger of being forgotten by everybody.

• We pay vain honours to their memory.
• We try to artificially keep alive our sad remembrance of their misfortune, for our own misery.
• We think that:
  • our sympathy cannot console them and that this adds to their calamity
  • all we can do is unavailing
  • even the alleviation of their friends’ distress can give them no comfort.

All these increase our sense of their misery.

However, the happiness of the dead, most assuredly, is not affected by these.

• The thought of these things can never disturb their repose.

Our imagination naturally ascribes the idea of endless sadness to the dead.

• This idea arises from us putting ourselves in the dead person’s situation

• This gives us the idea that our death is so terrible to us, which then makes us dread death.

The dread of death is one of the most important principles in human nature.

• It is the great poison to one’s happiness.
• But it is also the great restraint which protects society from mankind’s injustice.