Man yearns to be loved, or, what is the same thing, to be pitied.  Man wishes others to feel and share his hardships and his sorrows.  The roadside beggar’s exhibition of his sores and gangrened mutilations is something more than a device to extort alms from the passer-by.  True alms is pity rather than the pittance that alleviates the material hardships of life.  The beggar shows little gratitude for alms thrown to him by one who hurries past with averted face; he is more grateful to him who pities him but does not help than to him who helps but does not pity, although from another point of view he may prefer the latter.  Observe with what satisfaction he relates his woes to one who is moved by the story of them.  He desires to be pitied, to be loved.

Woman’s love, above all, as I have remarked, is always compassionate in its essence—­maternal.  Woman yields herself to the lover because she feels that his desire makes him suffer.  Isabel had compassion upon Lorenzo, Juliet upon Romeo, Francesca upon Paolo.  Woman seems to say:  “Come, poor one, thou shalt not suffer so for my sake!” And therefore is her love more loving and purer than that of man, braver and more enduring.

Pity, then, is the essence of human spiritual love, of the love that is conscious of being love, of the love that is not purely animal, of the love, in a word, of a rational person.  Love pities, and pities most when it loves most.

Reversing the terms of the adage nihil volitum quin praecognitum, I have told you that nihil cognitum quin praevolitum, that we know nothing save what we have first, in one way or another, desired; and it may even be added that we can know nothing well save what we love, save what we pity.

As love grows, this restless yearning to pierce to the uttermost and to the innermost, so it continually embraces all that it sees, and pities all that it embraces.  According as you turn inwards and penetrate more deeply into yourself, you will discover more and more your own emptiness, that you are not all that you are not, that you are not what you would wish to be, that you are, in a word, only a nonentity.  And in touching your own nothingness, in not feeling your permanent base, in not reaching your own infinity, still less your own eternity, you will have a whole-hearted pity for yourself, and you will burn with a sorrowful love for yourself—­a love that will consume your so-called self-love, which is merely a species of sensual self-delectation, the self-enjoyment, as it were, of the flesh of your soul.

Spiritual self-love, the pity that one feels for oneself, may perhaps be called egotism; but nothing could be more opposed to ordinary egoism.  For this love or pity for yourself, this intense despair, bred of the consciousness that just as before you were born you were not, so after your death you will cease to be, will lead you to pity—­that is, to love—­all your fellows and brothers in this world of appearance,