The social sentiment then takes on a new character, which varies with different persons. In the strong, it becomes the pleasure of generosity; among equals, frank and cordial friendship; in the weak, the pleasure of admiration and gratitude.
The man who is superior in strength, skill, or courage, knows that he owes all that he is to society, without which he could not exist. He knows that, in treating him precisely as it does the lowest of its members, society discharges its whole duty towards him. But he does not underrate his faculties; he is no less conscious of his power and greatness; and it is this voluntary reverence which he pays to humanity, this avowal that he is but an instrument of Nature,—who is alone worthy of glory and worship,—it is, I say, this simultaneous confession of the heart and the mind, this genuine adoration of the Great Being, that distinguishes and elevates man, and lifts him to a degree of social morality to which the beast is powerless to attain. Hercules destroying the monsters and punishing brigands for the safety of Greece, Orpheus teaching the rough and wild Pelasgians,—neither of them putting a price upon their services,—there we see the noblest creations of poetry, the loftiest expression of justice and virtue.
The joys of self-sacrifice are ineffable.
If I were to compare human society to the old Greek tragedies, I should say that the phalanx of noble minds and lofty souls dances the strophe, and the humble multitude the antistrophe. Burdened with painful and disagreeable tasks, but rendered omnipotent by their number and the harmonic arrangement of their functions, the latter execute what the others plan. Guided by them, they owe them nothing; they honor them, however, and lavish upon them praise and approbation.
Gratitude fills people with adoration and enthusiasm.
But equality delights my heart. Benevolence degenerates into tyranny, and admiration into servility. Friendship is the daughter of equality. O my friends! may I live in your midst without emulation, and without glory; let equality bring us together, and fate assign us our places. May I die without knowing to whom among you I owe the most esteem!
Friendship is precious to the hearts of the children of men.
Generosity, gratitude (I mean here only that gratitude which is born of admiration of a superior power), and friendship are three distinct shades of a single sentiment which I will call equite, or SOCIAL PROPORTIONALITY. [23] Equite does not change justice: but, always taking equite for the base, it superadds esteem, and thereby forms in man a third degree of sociability. Equite makes it at once our duty and our pleasure to aid the weak who have need of us, and to make them our equals; to pay to the strong a just tribute of gratitude and honor, without enslaving ourselves to them; to cherish our neighbors, friends, and equals, for that which we receive from them, even by right of exchange. Equite is sociability raised to its ideal by reason and justice; its commonest manifestation is URBANITY or POLITENESS, which, among certain nations, sums up in a single word nearly all the social duties.
It is the just distribution of social sympathy and universal love.
Now, this feeling is unknown among the beasts, who love and cling to each other, and show their preferences, but who cannot conceive of esteem, and who are incapable of generosity, admiration, or politeness.