“Oh! then you admit that they are sufferings?”
“To an extent—much exaggerated.”
“Very well! You have not yet, I perceive, grasped my points: First, what gives you the right to say these sufferings are necessary to society, and to interfere with our attempts to reduce them so far as we can? Secondly, what makes you an authority at all on the nature and degree of suffering?”
“I refuse to answer your first question, which I consider insolent. As to the second, which is also insolent, of what use is one’s imagination, if not to gauge the experiences of others without experiencing them oneself?”
“My dear sir, imagination is not, believe me, a mere capacity for failing to grasp what you have not yourself experienced. It is an active quality, and even when stretched to the utmost is a little liable to fall short of the poignancy of experience. Let me remind you of Poe’s tale about the man on whom the walls of a room gradually closed in. That tale, I am sure, made even you feel that his sufferings might not be nil—though I honestly believe it only roused you because it was so obviously romance. But do you think your imagination when you read the story really provided you with the intensity of the sensations of that man, especially at the moment when the walls were grinding his bones?”
“That was, as you say, romance. But you humanitarians are always magnifying and distorting into the dreadful what is very ordinary experience; your imaginations are your masters, not your servants. What you want is to be familiarized with the ordinary sights of Nature, and the look of blood; we shouldn’t then have all this namby-pambyism to put up with.”
“You recommend that we should be familiarized with the sight of blood? Might I suggest that no blood could be so educative as that of one who propounds the doctrine: Suffering is nil! Let your own blood flow for our enlightenment. Believe me, we shall pay a much more rapt attention to it than we should to that of any other creature.”
“That, as you well know, is an absurd suggestion.”
“Yes! Quite. But what I want you to appreciate is, how tiny the difference between us is. We think, that a man should make light of his own suffering, but make light the suffering of others. Now, transposing that first ‘of’ would make our philosophy identical with yours.”
“And how do you know that I have not sufferings, made light of—hidden from every one?”