faculty, at the same time that it wounds
us in an inferior one.

The touching, in its proper sense, designates this mixed sensation, into
which enters at the same time suffering and the pleasure that we find in
suffering. Thus we can only feel this kind of emotion in the case of a
personal misfortune, only when the grief that we feel is sufficiently
tempered to leave some place for that impression of pleasure that would
be felt by a compassionate spectator. The loss of a great good
prostrates for the time, and the remembrance itself of the grief will
make us experience emotion after a year. The feeble man is always the
prey of his grief; the hero and the sage, whatever the misfortune that
strikes them, never experience more than emotion.

Emotion, like the sentiment of the sublime, is composed of two
affections--grief and pleasure. There is, then, at the bottom a
propriety, here as well as there, and under this propriety a
contradiction. Thus it seems that it is a contradiction in nature that
man, who is not born to suffer, is nevertheless a prey to suffering, and
this contradiction hurts us. But the evil which this contradiction does
us is a propriety with regard to our reasonable nature in general,
insomuch as this evil solicits us to act: it is a propriety also with
regard to human society; consequently, even displeasure, which excites in
us this contradiction, ought necessarily to make us experience a
sentiment of pleasure, because this displeasure is a propriety. To
determine in an emotion if it is pleasure or displeasure which triumphs,
we must ask ourselves if it is the idea of impropriety or that of
propriety which affects us the more deeply. That can depend either on
the number of the aims reached or abortive, or on their connection with
the final aim of all.

The suffering of the virtuous man moves us more painfully than that of
the perverse man, because in the first case there is contradiction not
only to the general destiny of man, which is happiness, but also to this
other particular principle, viz., that virtue renders happy; whilst in
the second case there is contradiction only with regard to the end of man
in general. Reciprocally, the happiness of the wicked also offends us
much more than the misfortune of the good man, because we find in it a
double contradiction: in the first place vice itself, and, in the second
place, the recompense of vice.

There is also this other consideration, that virtue i