complete stranger to this instinct; but in his case
the painful strength of compassion carries the day over this instinct, or
it is kept under by the laws of decency. The man of nature, who is not
chained down by any feeling of human delicacy, abandons himself without
any sense of shame to this powerful instinct. This attraction must,
therefore, have its spring of action in an original disposition, and it
must be explained by a psychological law common to the whole species.

But if it seems to us that these brutal instincts of nature are
incompatible with the dignity of man, and if we hesitate, for this
reason, to establish on this fact a law common to the whole species, yet
no experiences are required to prove, with the completest evidence, that
the pleasure we take in painful emotions is real, and that it is general.
The painful struggle of a heart drawn asunder between its inclinations or
contrary duties, a struggle which is a cause of misery to him who
experiences it, delights the person who is a mere spectator. We follow
with always heightening pleasure the progress of a passion to the abyss
into which it hurries its unhappy victim. The same delicate feeling that
makes us turn our eyes aside from the sight of physical suffering, or
even from the physical expression of a purely moral pain, makes us
experience a pleasure heightened in sweetness, in the sympathy for a
purely moral pain. The interest with which we stop to look at the
painting of these kinds of objects is a general phenomenon.

Of course this can only be understood of sympathetic affections, or those
felt as a secondary effect after their first impression; for commonly
direct and personal affections immediately call into life in us the
instinct of our own happiness, they take up all our thoughts, and seize
hold of us too powerfully to allow any room for the feeling of pleasure
that accompanies them, when the affection is freed from all personal
relation. Thus, in the mind that is really a prey to painful passion,
the feeling of pain commands all others notwithstanding all the charm
that the painting of its moral state may offer to the hearers and the
spectators. And yet the painful affection is not deprived of all
pleasure, even for him who experiences it directly; only this pleasure
differs in degree according to the nature of each person's mind. The
sports of chance would not have half so much attraction for us were there
not a kind of enjoyment in a