The Religion of Nature Delineated William Wollaston (my reading book .TXT) 📖

There is something in human nature,377 resulting from our very make and constitution⁠—while it retains its genuine form, and is not altered by vicious habits, not perverted by transports of revenge or fury, by ambition, company, or false philosophy,378 nor oppressed by stupidity and neglecting to observe what happens to others⁠—I say, there is something which renders us obnoxious to the pains of others, causes us to sympathize with them, and almost comprehends us in their case. It is grievous to see or hear (and almost to hear of) any man, or even any animal whatever, in torment. This compassion appears eminently in them who, upon other accounts, are justly reckoned among the best of men:379 in some degree it appears in almost all⁠—nay, even sometimes, when they more coolly attend to things, in those hardened and execrable monsters of cruelty themselves, who seem just to retain only the least tincture of humanity that can be. The Pheræan tyrant, who had never wept over any of those murders he had caused among his own citizens, wept when he saw a tragedy but acted in the theatre:380 the reason was, his attention was caught here, and he more observed the sufferings of Hecuba and Andromache than ever he had those of the Pheræans, and more impartially, being no otherwise concerned in them but as a common spectator. Upon this occasion, the principle of compassion, implanted in human nature, appeared, overcame his habits of cruelty, broke through his petrifaction, and would show that it could not be totally eradicated. It is therefore according to nature to be affected with the sufferings of other people, and the contrary is inhuman and unnatural.

Such are the circumstances of mankind, that we cannot (or but very few of us, God knows) make our way through this world without encountering dangers and suffering many evils; and therefore, since it is for the good of such as are so exposed, or actually smarting under pain or trouble, to receive comfort and assistance from others, without which they must commonly continue to be miserable or perish, it is for the common good and welfare of the majority, at least, of mankind that they should compassionate and help each other.381 To do the contrary must therefore be contrary to nature and wrong by proposition III. And besides, it is by one’s behavior and actions to affirm that the circumstances of men in this world are not what they are, or that peace, and health, and happiness, and the like, are not what they are.

Let a man substitute himself into the room of some poor creature dejected with invincible poverty, distracted with difficulties, or groaning under the pangs of some disease or the anguish of some hurt or wound, and without help abandoned to want and pain. In this distress, what reflections can he imagine he should have, if he found that everybody neglected him, nobody so much as pitying him or vouchsafing to take notice of his calamitous and sad condition? It is certain that what it would be reasonable or unreasonable for others to do in respect of him, he must allow to be reasonable or unreasonable for him to do in respect of them, or deny a manifest truth in proposition IV.

If unmercifulness, as before defined, be wrong, no time need to be spent in proving that cruelty is so. For all that is culpable in unmercifulness is contained in cruelty, with additions and aggravations. Cruelty not only denies due regard to the sufferings of others, but causes them, or perhaps delights in them, and (which is the most insolent and cruel of all cruelties) makes them a jest and subject of raillery. If the one be a defect of humanity, the other is diametrically opposite to it.382 If the one does no good, the other does much evil. And no man, how cruel soever in reality he was, has ever liked to be reckoned a cruel man: such a confession of guilt does nature extort, so universally does it reject, condemn, abhor this character.

XVIII. The practice of justice and mercy is just as right, as injustice, unmercifulness, and cruelty are wrong. This follows from the nature of contraries. Besides, not to be just to a man is to be not just, or unjust, to him; and so not to be merciful is to be unmerciful, or perhaps cruel.

Here I might end this section, but perhaps it may not be improper to be a little more particular. Therefore,

XIX. From the foregoing propositions may be deduced the heinousness of all such crimes as murder, or even hurting the person of another anyhow, when our own necessary defense does not require it, (it being not possible that anything should be more his than his own person, life and limbs); robbing, stealing, cheating, betraying, defamation, detraction, defiling the bed of another man, etc. with all the approaches and tendencies to them. For these are not only comprised within the definition of injustice, and are therefore violations of those truths which are violated by that, but commonly (and some of them always) come within the description of cruelty too. All which is evident at first light with respect to murder, robbery, cheating, slandering, etc., especially if a man brings himself into the case, and views himself in his own imagination as rendered scandalous by calumniators and liars, stripped by thieves, ruined in his fortunes and undone by knaves, struggling to no purpose, convulsed and agonizing under the knife of some truculent ruffian, or the like.

The same is altogether as plain in the case of adultery,383 when anyone384 ensnares and corrupts the wife of another⁠—notwithstanding the protection it gains from false notions, great examples,385 and the commonness of the crime.386 For (the nature of matrimony being, for