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CHAPTER 6:

Sympathy

“When thy gaze
Turns it on thine own soul, be most severe:
But when it falls upon a fellow-man
Let kindliness control it; and refrain
From that belittling censure that springs forth
From common lips like weeds from marshy soil.”
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels,
I myself become the wounded person.”
— Walt Whitman.

We can only sympathise with others in so far as we have conquered ourselves. We cannot think
and feel for others while we are engaged in condoling with and pitying ourselves; cannot deal
tenderly and lovingly with others while we are anxious for our own pre-eminence or for the

exclusive preservation of ourselves, our opinions, and our own generally. What is sympathy but
thoughtfulness for others in the forgetfulness of self?
To sympathise with others we must first understand them, and to understand them we must
put away all personal preconceptions concerning them, and must see them as they are. We must
enter into their inner state and become one with them, looking through their mental eyes and
comprehending the range of their experience. You cannot, of course, do this with a being whose
wisdom and experience are greater than your own; nor can you do it with any if you regard
yourself as being on a higher plane than others (for egotism and sympathy cannot dwell together),
but you can practise it with all those who are involved in sins and sufferings from which you have
successfully extricated yourself, and, though your sympathy cannot embrace and overshadow the
man whose greatness is beyond you, yet you can place yourself in such an attitude towards him as
to receive the protection of his larger sympathy and so make for yourself an easier way out of the
sins and sufferings by which you are still enchained.
Prejudice and ill-will are complete barriers to the giving of sympathy, while pride and vanity
are total barriers to its reception. You cannot sympathise with a person for whom you have
conceived a hatred; you cannot enjoy the sympathy of one whom you envy. You cannot
understand the person whom you dislike, or he for whom, through animal impulse, you have
framed an ill-formed affection. You do not, cannot, see him as he is, but see only your own
imperfect notions of him; see only a distorted image of him through the exaggerating medium of
your ill-grounded opinions.