to the good of our fellow-creatures, and delight from that affection being gratified, and uneasiness from things going contrary to it?[1]
- ↑ There being manifestly this appearance of men's substituting others
for themselves, and being carried out and affected towards them as
towards themselves; some persons, who have a system which excludes
every affection of this sort, have taken a pleasant method to solve it;
and tell you, it is not another you are at all concerned about, but your
self only, when you feel the affection called compassion: i.e., here is a
plain matter of fact which men cannot reconcile with the general account
they think fit to give of things; they, therefore, instead of that manifest
fact, substitute another which is reconcilable to their own scheme. For,
does not every body by compassion mean, an affection, the object of
which is another in distress? Instead of this, but designing to have it
mistaken for this, they speak of an affection, or passion, the object of
which is ourselves, or danger to ourselves. Hobbs defines pity, imagination, or fiction, of future calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense
(he means sight or knowledge) of another man's calamity. Thus, fear
and compassion would be the same idea, and a fearful and a compassionate
man the same character, which every one immediately sees are totally
different. Further, to those who give any scope to their affections,
there is no perception or inward feeling more universal than this: that
one who has been merciful and compassionate throughout the course of
his behaviour, should himself be treated with kindness, if he happens to
fall into circumstances of distress. Is fear, then, or cowardice, so great
a recommendation to the favour of the bulk of mankind? Or, is it not
plain, that mere fearlessness (and, therefore, not the contrary,) is one
of the most popular qualifications? This shows that mankind are not
affected towards compassion as fear, but as somewhat totally different.
Nothing would more expose such accounts as these of the affections which are favourable and friendly to our fellow-creatures, than to substitute the definitions which this author, and others who follow his steps, give of such affections, instead of the words by which they are commonly expressed. Hobbs, after having laid down that pity, or compassion, is only fear for ourselves, goes on to explain the reason why we pity our friends in distress more than others. Now, substitute the definition instead of the word pity in this place, and the inquiry will be, why we fear our friends? &c., which words (since he really does not mean why we are afraid of them) make no question or sentence at all. So that common language, the words to compassionate, to pity, cannot be accommodated to his account of compassion. The very joining of the words to pity our friends, is a direct contradiction to his definition of pity: because those words, so joined, necessarily express that our friends are the objects of the passion; whereas his definition of it asserts, that
