alists leave my neighbor and me just where we were. If it is to our personal advantage to fight, we shall do so; otherwise we may by chance remain for a while in practical harmony; but, throughout, our moral aims will remain what they were, selfish and conflicting.
Forsaking these unsatisfactory attempts to found a moral doctrine concerning one’s duty to one’s neighbor, let us try to do what Schopenhauer so haltingly suggested, namely, to see what moral insight as moral insight, and not as pity or as far-sighted egoism, tells us about the moral relations of selfishness and unselfishness. If a man not merely pities but knows his neighbor’s will, what moral ideal does he get? We affirm that insight into the reality of the neighbor’s will, insight that considers his will as it is in itself, and that accordingly repeats it in us, gives us a position above the struggle of self and neighbor, and lets us see the higher ideal of Harmony, whose precept is: Act as a being would act who included thy will and thy neighbor’s will in the unity of one life, and who had therefore to suffer the consequences for the aims of both that will follow from the act of either. This insight is not the mere emotion of pity nor yet sympathy, but something different from these, namely, something that involves the realization, and therefore the reproduction in us, of the opposing will of the neighbor. This insight therefore deprives each will in its separateness of its absolute significance, and commands that we should act with an equal reference to both. It says not merely, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,”
