Note 59 — Chapter XII · APPLIED MORAL SCIENCE.

The question then naturally arises, how these two opposites may be reconciled—how stern justice may be harmonised with forgiveness and mercy. Seneca, who investigated the question fully, replies: Not severity, but only cruelty, is opposed to mercy; for no one virtue is opposed to another: a wise man will always help another in distress, but without sharing his emotion, without feeling misery or compassion; he will not indulge, but he will spare, advise, and improve; he will not remit punishments in cases in which he knows them to be deserved, but, from a sense of justice, he will take human weakness into consideration in allotting punishments, and make every possible allowance for circumstances.59 Every difficulty is not, indeed, removed by these statements; still, those which remain apply more to the Stoic demand for apathy than to the reconciliation of the two virtues which regulate our relations to our fellow-men.60