A NUMBER of the older philosophers of morality used to regard the concepts of “compassion” and “justice” as distinct from each other, and sometimes they were even taken as antithetical—and thus one of the numerous occasions for the so-called “conflicts of duties.” And in very fact, the moment the ethical life is not carried back to its fundamental principle and taken as a unit, the moment we posit a number of different ethical principles, a “conflict of duties” must inevitably arise as a logical consequence. This is not wholly without compensation, however; for the thinker who is given the desperate task of solving one of these insoluble problems is sooner or later led to doubt the claims of the various competing principles, or rather to question their assumed multiplicity. To bridge the apparent gap between “compassion” and “justice” it is helpful to observe that “compassion” is not the sympathetic attitude of mind for which it is sometimes mistaken.

“Sympathy,” interpreted in its deeper and stricter meaning, is seen to be only a necessary aspect of understanding, of intelligence; for unless we succeed in making a state of mind, an individual psychology, a spiritual development, our own—unless we have succeeded in reliving it, in making ourselves a part of it, it is impossible really to understand it; we have no experience of it, and without experience, there can be no intelligence, no understanding. Certainly we have no intention of denying the importance of intelligence for the moral life—an importance so great that it has given rise to the apothegm that “goodness is intelligence.” Rather we would amend this saying in the sense that intelligence, in its turn, is a necessary phase of goodness: without intelligence, goodness cannot be. The much praised kindness of women, for example, presupposes knowledge of many things which men ordinarily seem not to understand or to which they do not give enough attention.

But compassion, in its ethical bearings, is not just sympathy, the prerequisite of intelligence; it is something more. It is an active or practical attitude of mind, a will to act in a certain direction; and, since will and action are really one and the same, compassion is always an action, and only in real action does it demonstrate its real existence or at least its depth and sincerity.

This explains an illusion into which we often fall. There are certain sympathetic, discerning, delicately sensitive minds who seem to feel and almost to divine what other people are thinking and feeling, and to speak of others with amazing comprehension. And we make the mistake of concluding that they are compassionate souls. But facts then come to remind us that such people, who might well be called “artists,” are often as slow in acting as they were quick to sympathise; and that the extent of their emotion at some situation presented to them in imaginary form by poetry is balanced by their indifference to similar situations in real life, to remedy which would require some effort on their part, some sacrifice of comfort or convenience. People, on the other hand, who have true compassion, active compassion, are inclined to shrink from purely sentimental thrills; and instead of wasting their pity on unfortunates far removed from them in time and space, turn their attention to their neighbours near at hand, and provide for them.

Now if compassion, when it really amounts to something, is action, what sort of an action can it be? Is it ever an action apart from justice, or contrary to justice?

Even on this point everyday language speaks of true compassion and false compassion, of people who deserve compassion and people who do not. And the interesting thing about these dicta of common sense is that the two concepts which are separated by the thinkers are popularly identified as one through a more or less conscious subordination of compassion to justice. Compassion without regard to justice is in fact a common peculiarity of people who easily throw their own duties overboard: indulgent toward themselves, they are inclined to be equally irresponsible toward others in whom they see reflections of themselves. We are wont to criticise such sentimentality in women, because women, as a rule, are deficient in the sense of justice; so they frequently sin from misplaced, or—as Kant would have put it—from “pathonomical” compassion.

On the other hand, it is utterly impossible to act justly, unless we understand men—their feelings, that is, and the inner essence of what they do; and unless the compassion this understanding brings gives rise to an impulse which is an impulse toward the good, a will to cure or alleviate suffering by winning victory for the good. True justice is nothing but compassion.