riences 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 anxiety, in doubt, and in fear; danger would
not be encountered from mere foolhardiness; and the very sympathy which
interests us in the trouble of another would not be to us that pleasure
which is never more lively than at the very moment when the illusion is
strongest, and when we substitute ourselves most entirely in the place of
the person who suffers. But this does not imply that disagreeable
affections cause pleasure of themselves, nor do I think any one will
uphold this view; it suffices that these states of the mind are the
conditions that alone make possible for its certain kinds of pleasure.
Thus the hearts particularly sensitive to this kind of pleasure, and most
greedy of them, will be more easily led to share these disagreeable
affections, which are the condition of the former; and even in the most
violent storms of passion they will always preserve some remains of their
freedom.

The displeasure we feel in disagreeable affections comes from the
rel