they are now. For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others,
and the Individualist will not desire to do that. It will not give
him pleasure. When man has realised Individualism, he will also
realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously. Up to
the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has
merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the
highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with
suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It
is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of
terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves
might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have
care of us. It is curiously limiting, too. One should sympathise
with the entirety of life, not with life's sores and maladies
merely, but with life's joy and beauty and energy and health and
freedom. The wider sympathy is, of course, the more difficult. It
requires more unselfishness. Anybody can sympathise with the
sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature--it
requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist--to
sympathise with a friend's success.

In the modern stress of competition and struggle for place, such
sympathy is naturally rare, and is also very much stifled by the
immoral ideal of uniformity of type and conformity to rule which is
so prevalent everywhere, and is perhaps most obnoxious in England.

Sympathy with pain there will, of course, always be. It is one of
the first instincts of man. The animals which are individual, the
higher animals, that is to say, share it with us. But it must be
remembered that while sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of joy
in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the