instinctive feeling that it demands compensation. I feel an animal delight in being in friendly company. My gratitude is here no moral emotion at all.
The emotion of sympathy does indeed often tend to make me realize the other and more completely internal aspect of my neighbor’s reality; but sympathy does this in the halting and uncertain way described in a previous chapter. And at all events, whatever sympathy leads to, it is not by itself the insight. And so, to sum up our present way of studying the illusions of selfishness, we find by these examples that by nature our neighbor’s conscious life is realized for us rather as an active agency that affects our fortunes, than as an inner experience, or as it is in itself, namely, as a Will; and hence it is that we are disposed to treat it with coldness, rather than to respect its true nature. Resistance, conquest, employment of this agency, seem to us axiomatic aims of prudence; unselfish respect for its inner accompanying experiences seems to us a hard if not a meaningless task. Such is the nature and ground of the illusion of selfishness.
If now our activity of realization were confined to the range of common-sense emotions, there would be no escape from all this. It is our critical reflection that appears on the scene, saying: “O common sense, what thou hast realized cannot be all. We must resolve to recognize more, else will our resolutions never lose their inconsistency and darkness. Be honest, O common sense. Is not thy neighbor after all just a dead fact of nature, an automaton with certain peculiar energies?” And common
