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CHAPTER XXVI
SORROW
All living things suffer on earth – animals and men. Nevertheless, love is the law of the universe, and
by love God formed beings. A formidable contradiction in appearance, an agonizing problem which has
troubled many thinkers and carried them to doubt and pessimism.
The animal is subjected to an ardent battle for life. Among the herbs of the prairie, under the leaves in
the woods, in the air, in the bosom of the waters, everywhere unknown dramas are enacted. In our cities,
inoffensive beasts are continually sacrificed to human needs, or delivered to laboratories for the torture of
vivisection. As for humanity, its history is one long martyrdom. Through time, and over the centuries, rises the
sad miserere of human suffering. The plaint of the unhappy mounts with the regularity of an ocean wave, and
with a heart-breaking intensity. Sorrow follows in the path of each of us and watches all our detours, and
before the sphinx who fixes upon him her strange look, man asks the eternal question, ‘Why is sorrow?’ Is it a
punishment – an expiation? Is it a reparation for the past – a ransom for faults committed? At the foundation,
sorrow is only a law of education and equilibrium. Without doubt the faults of the past fall upon us with all
their burdens, and determine the conditions of our destiny. Suffering is often only the counterstroke of
violations of eternal order: but shared by all, it should be considered as an agent of development – a condition
of progress. All beings must submit to it in their turn; its action is beneficial to those who understand it, but
only those can understand it who has felt its powerful effects. It is, above all, to those I address these pages –
those who suffer, who have suffered, or are worthy to suffer.
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Sorrow and pleasure are the two extreme forms of sensation. To suppress one or the other, we must
suppress sensibility; they are inseparable in principle, and both are necessary to the education of the being,
who in his evolution must drain all the illimitable forms of pleasure and of sorrow.
Physical pain produces sensations: moral suffering, sentiments. But as we have seen in chapter XXI,
sensation and sentiment become one in the inner sensorium. Pleasure and sorrow reside, then, less in exterior
things than within us. Epictetus said: ‘Things are only what we figure them to be.’ Genius is not only the result
of long labor, it is also the crown of suffering. Homer, Dante, Tass, Milton, and all great men suffered. Sorrow
caused vibrations in their souls, and it inspired the nobility of sentiment and the intensity of emotion which
they expressed in accents of immortal genius. The soul never sings better than when in sorrow. When pain
touches the depths of being, it brings forth eloquent and powerful appeals which move the world.
It is the same with heroes and all great characters. Their elevation is measured by the amount of
suffering endured. Before sorrow and death, the soul of the hero and martyr reveals itself in touching beauty,
or in tragic grandeur, and is aureoled by an inextinguishable light. Suppress sorrow, and you suppress at the
same time that which is most worthy of the admiration of the world, that is to say, the courage which supports
it. Is not the memory of those who have died for truth and justice the noblest teaching we can offer to
humanity? Is there anything more august than their tombs? The centuries seem to render such souls more and
more imposing. They are like sources of force and beauty, where the generations come to refresh themselves.
Through time and space their light, like the rays of the stars, reaches to earth. Their death brings forth life, and
their memory, like a subtle aroma, reaches into the far future.
These souls have taught us that it is by duty and by suffering borne worthily, that we blaze the trail to
heaven. The history of the world is but the story of the coronation of the soul by sorrow. Without it, virtue
could not be complete, or glory imperishable.
We must suffer, to grow and to conquer; acts of sacrifice increase spiritual radiations. There is a
luminous train which follows spirits of heroes and martyrs in space. Those who have not suffered cannot
comprehend these things, for they see only the surface of life; their feelings have not been amplified, and their
thoughts embrace only narrow horizons. So, by the will, we can vanquish sorrow, or at least turn it to our
profit, and make it an instrument of elevation. The idea that we make for ourselves of joy and pain varies
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