“to sit opposite such a boy, hear him talk, share his labors, walk with him, nurse him in illness, go to sea with him, share darkness and chains with him if necessary?  Those who hated him should be my enemies, those who loved him my friends.  When he dies, I too should wish to die, and one grave should cover us.”

Yet even here there is no real sympathy, because there is no altruism.  Callicratides does not say he will die for the other, or that the other’s pleasures are to him more important than his own.[24]

SHAM ALTRUISM IN INDIA

India is generally credited with having known and practised altruism long before Christ came to preach it.  Kalidasa anticipates a modern idea when he remarks, in Sakuntala, that “Among persons who are very fond of each other, grief shared is grief halved.”  India, too, is famed for its monks or penitents, who were bidden to be compassionate to all living things, to treat strangers hospitably, to bless those that cursed them (Mann, VI., 48).  But in reality the penitents were actuated by the most selfish of motives; they believed that by obeying those precepts and undergoing various ascetic practices, they would get such power that even the gods would dread them; and the Sanscrit dramas are full of illustrations of the detestably selfish use they made of the power thus acquired.  In Sakuntala we read how a poor girl’s whole life was ruined by the curse hurled at her by one of these “saints,” for the trivial reason that, being absorbed in thoughts of love, she did not hear his voice and attend to his personal comforts at once; while Kausika’s Rage illustrates the diabolical cruelty with which another of these saints persecutes a king and queen because he had been disturbed in his incantations.  It is possible that some of these penitents, living in the forest and having no other companions, learned to love the animals that came to see them; but the much-vaunted kindness to animals of the Hindoos in general is merely a matter of superstition and not an outcome of sympathy.  He has not even a fellow-feeling for suffering human beings.  How far he was from realizing Christ’s “blessed are the merciful,” may be inferred from what the Abbe Dubois says: 

“The feelings of commiseration and pity, as far as respects the sufferings of others, never enter into his heart.  He will see an unhappy being perish on the road, or even at his own gate, if belonging to another caste; and will not stir to help him to a drop of water, though it were to save his life.”

“To kill a cow,” says the same writer (I., 176), “is a crime which the Hindoo laws punish with death;” and these same Hindoos treat women, especially widows, with fiendish cruelty.  It would be absurd to suppose that a people who are so pitiless to human beings could be actuated by sympathy in their devout attitude toward some animals.  Superstition is the spring of their actions.  In Dahomey any person who kills a sacred (non-poisonous) snake is condemned to be buried alive.  In Egypt it was a capital offence to kill an ibis, even accidentally.  What we call lynching seems to have arisen in connection with such superstitions: