Pity Before Reason
Philosophers who derive morality from reason make a systematic error: they assume the conclusion. Natural man is not a philosopher; he does not calculate duties or derive rights from principles. But he does feel. When he encounters the suffering of another creature, something in him resists. This pre-rational aversion to the suffering of others is what Rousseau calls natural pity or compassion — and it does more moral work than all the philosophy in the world.
Such is the pure emotion of nature, prior to all kinds of reflection! Such is the force of natural compassion, which the greatest depravity of morals has as yet hardly been able to destroy!
Against Hobbes Again
Hobbes claimed that without law and government, man's natural selfishness would make social life impossible. Rousseau replies: natural man does not need law to restrain him from cruelty, because he has compassion. His duties to others are not derived from reason but felt in the pulse. Mandeville was closer to the truth than Hobbes — he recognised the necessity of natural feeling — but failed to see that from compassion alone flow all the social virtues.
Mandeville well knew that, in spite of all their morality, men would have never been better than monsters, had not nature bestowed on them a sense of compassion, to aid their reason: but he did not see that from this quality alone flow all those social virtues, of which he denied man the possession.
What Civilisation Does to Compassion
The progress of society does not strengthen compassion — it weakens it. As human beings develop vanity, comparison, and competition, they learn to see others' suffering as irrelevant or even pleasing when it confirms their own superiority. The theatre provides a substitute for real compassion: we weep at staged misfortunes while remaining indifferent to the suffering outside the door. Civilised morality, elaborate as it is, is less reliable than the simple natural pity it replaced.
Natural compassion is discussed in Part I of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). G.D.H. Cole translation, 1913.
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