posed to be his counsel.[1] It is a doctrine inciting "the overman ruthlessly to trample under foot the servile herd of the weak, degenerate, and poor in spirit," according to the Encyclopœdia Britannica.[2] The ironical remark is made that in his last days Nietzsche "had to be cared for by Christian charity—Christian charity, which in health had been the object of his bitterest attack." d The late Professor William Wallace was one of the few English-speaking writers of distinction to attend carefully enough to Nietzsche's thought to get his real meaning.[3]
The German word is "Mitleid." "Mitgefühl," fellow-feeling in general, is one of Nietzsche's "four virtues."[4] He also uses "Sympathie," where we should say "sympathy" (in the broad sense).[5] I remember no special criticism of fellow-feeling or sympathy. e It is pity that he dissects and estimates. Pity is, even more distinctly in the German word than in ours, suffering—suffering with, really suffering with suffering. It is, of course, a species of fellow-feeling or sympathy, but of this peculiar character.
There was a special occasion for Nietzsche's analysis of pity—an occasion that we in America and England do not easily appreciate. Perhaps in general we are less reflective peoples than the Germans, and some problems that occupy them we hardly feel. Pessimism, i.e., the ripe philosophical view, not mere spleen or fits of indigestion, has no hold among us. But it was pessimism, spreading like a contagion through Germany and becoming almost a religion with many, pessimism of the peculiarly seducing type which Schopenhauer represented, that awoke Nietzsche to the necessity of criticising pity. For what is pessimism? Without pretending to a formal definition, I may say that it is a sense so great and so keen of the suffering and wrong in the world—of suffering and wrong, too, as bound up with the individual existence which characterizes the world—that one is led to turn his back on life. And how is release from life secured? By pity itself—at least, this is the first
