rown
without overthrowing at the same time the feelings of pleasure and
displeasure which we find in the emotions, or even without changing them
into their opposites. In the same ratio that the senses are vividly
roused in us, the influence of morality will be proportionately
diminished; and reciprocally, as the sensuous loses, morality gains
ground. Therefore that which in our hearts gives a preponderance to the
sensuous faculty, must of necessity, by placing restrictions on the moral
faculty, diminish the pleasure that we take in tragic emotions, a
pleasure which emanates exclusively from this moral faculty. In
like manner, all that in our heart impresses an impetus on this
latter faculty, must blunt the stimulus of pain even in direct and
personal affections. Now our sensuous nature actually acquires this
preponderance, when the ideas of suffering rise to a degree of vividness
that no longer allows us to distinguish a sympathetic affection from
a personal affection, or our own proper Ego from the subject that
suffers,--reality, in short, from poetry. The sensuous also gains the
upper hand when it finds an aliment in the great number of its objects,
and in that dazzling light which an over-excited imagination diffuses
over it. On the contrary, nothing is more fit to reduce the sensuous to
its proper bounds than to place alongside it super-sensuous ideas, moral
ideas, to which reason, oppressed just before, clings as to a kind of
spiritual props, to right and raise itself above the fogs of the sensuous
to a serener atmosphere. Hence the great charm which general truths or
moral sentences, scattered opportunely over dramatic dialogue, have for
all cultivated nations, and the almost excessive use that the Greeks made
of them. Nothing is more agreeable to a moral soul than to have the
power, after a purely passive state that has lasted too long, of escaping
from the subjection of the senses, and of being recalled to its
spontaneous activity, and restored to the possession of its liberty.

These are the remarks I had to make respecting the causes that restrict
our pity and place an obstacle to our pleasure in tragic emotions. I
have next to show on what conditions pity is solicited and the pleasure
of the emotion excited in the most infallible and energetic manner.

Every feeling of pity implies the idea of suffering, and the degree of
pity is regulated according to the degree more or less of vividness, of
truth, of inten