acts, the harmony of mankind. Not alone that he may by and by go away and enjoy himself do I help him now, but because by so doing I hope through him to increase among men moral insight.” Therefore, notwithstanding Schopenhauer’s ridicule, Fichte was right in saying that we ought to treat the individual man not chiefly as an individual, but as an instrument for extending and serving the moral law. Because a certain kind of happiness means efficiency, and efficiency morality, therefore and therefore alone have we the right and duty, in this present generation, to labor for this kind of happiness.
Equally, therefore, it becomes our duty to labor to increase pain, whenever pain is the best means of fostering the moral insight. Therefore, in this present day, it cannot be our duty to labor to diminish pain in the world, simply as pain. Again we must appeal to psychology to guide us aright. The pains that foster moral insight, although limited in number and intensity, are numerous, and still imperfectly defined. It would be a useful task to study more in detail than psychologists have yet done, the moralizing power of pain. This is a task for the psychology of the future. In general, of course, we can say that the range of such pains has been much exaggerated by ascetics. Bodily pain, if severe, is generally brutalizing, at least for most people, and the moral insight is in it only in so far as the past experience of bodily pain helps us to know the significance of the suffering of others, not by giving us that blind emotion of sympathy before criticised, but by giving us the means to form a cool abstract
