Omniana/Volume 2/Sensibility
171. Sensibility.
In an obscure and short-lived periodical publication, which has long since been used off as "winding sheets for herrings and pilchards," I met with one paragraph, which deserves preservation, as connected with public evils in general, as well as more particularly with a subject noticed in the former volume[1]. "There is observable among the many, a false and bastard sensibility, prompting them to remove those evils and those alone, which disturb their enjoyments by being present to their senses. Other miseries, though equally certain and far more terrible, they not only do not endeavour to remedy; they support them, they fatten on them. Provided the dunghill be not before their parlour-window, they are well content to know that it exists, and that it is the hot bed of their luxuries.
"To this grievous failing we must attribute the frequency of war, and the long continuance of the slave-trade. The merchant found no argument against it in his ledger; the citizen at the crowded feast was not nauseated by the filth of the slave vessel; the fine lady's nerves were not shattered by the shrieks. She could sip a beverage sweetened with the product of human blood, and worse than that, of human guilt, and weep the while over the refined sorrows of Werter or of Clementina. But sensibility is not benevolence. Nay,by making us tremblingly alive to trifling misfortunes, it frequently precludes it, and induces effeminate and cowardly selfishness. Our own sorrows, like the princes of Hell in Milton's Pandaemonium, sit enthroned "bulky and vast:" while the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are crowded, an innumerable multitude! into some dark corner of the heart. There is one criterion, by which we may always distinguish benevolence from mere sensibility. Benevolence impels to action, and is accompanied by self-denial."
- ↑ No, 160, page 317.