To prevent pity degenerating into weakness we must generalise it and extend it to mankind.  Then we only yield to it when it is in accordance with justice, since justice is of all the virtues that which contributes most to the common good.  Reason and self-love compel us to love mankind even more than our neighbour, and to pity the wicked is to be very cruel to other men.

Moreover, you must bear in mind that all these means employed to project my pupil beyond himself have also a distinct relation to himself; since they not only cause him inward delight, but I am also endeavouring to instruct him, while I am making him kindly disposed towards others.

First I showed the means employed, now I will show the result.  What wide prospects do I perceive unfolding themselves before his mind!  What noble feelings stifle the lesser passions in his heart!  What clearness of judgment, what accuracy in reasoning, do I see developing from the inclinations we have cultivated, from the experience which concentrates the desires of a great heart within the narrow bounds of possibility, so that a man superior to others can come down to their level if he cannot raise them to his own!  True principles of justice, true types of beauty, all moral relations between man and man, all ideas of order, these are engraved on his understanding; he sees the right place for everything and the causes which drive it from that place; he sees what may do good, and what hinders it.  Without having felt the passions of mankind, he knows the illusions they produce and their mode of action.

I proceed along the path which the force of circumstances compels me to tread, but I do not insist that my readers shall follow me.  Long ago they have made up their minds that I am wandering in the land of chimeras, while for my part I think they are dwelling in the country of prejudice.  When I wander so far from popular beliefs I do not cease to bear them in mind; I examine them, I consider them, not that I may follow them or shun them, but that I may weigh them in the balance of reason.  Whenever reason compels me to abandon these popular beliefs, I know by experience that my readers will not follow my example; I know that they will persist in refusing to go beyond what they can see, and that they will take the youth I am describing for the creation of my fanciful imagination, merely because he is unlike the youths with whom they compare him; they forget that he must needs be different, because he has been brought up in a totally different fashion; he has been influenced by wholly different feelings, instructed in a wholly different manner, so that it would be far stranger if he were like your pupils than if he were what I have supposed.  He is a man of nature’s making, not man’s.  No wonder men find him strange.