4. The Human Soul and the Human Spirit

And by straying, as it were, to the other side, to that process which strengthens the will internally, which expands the circle of the internal experience of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain beyond that which is within oneself, it may be that this inner self-nature is still so strong that it does not let go of that which is strengthening itself. Then it may be that while the person is indeed living with the environment, his empathy, his co-experiencing with the environment strengthens his selfishness. And it may even be that the compassion, the shared experience, hides behind the mask of selfishness, that the looking at the pain and suffering actually only becomes a shared experience through what it does to oneself, while the real compassion consists in spreading one's own self over what the other is experiencing. Thus it may be, to put it in extreme terms, that the unpleasant, the uncomfortable that pain causes us, is then experienced in a completely selfish way when the inner self does not release the strengthened soul life.