Suffering From The Unrealised Ideal

Jean-Marie Guyau, A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction, tr. Gertrude Kapteyn (London, 1898), 190-1:

Although the elements of remorse and of inward joy thus springing from the sensibility are generally variable, there is, however, one which presents a certain fixity, and which may exist in all elevated minds; we mean that satisfaction which an individual always feels in being classed with superior beings—beings conformable with the normal type of his species, and adapted, so to speak, to his own ideal. This satisfaction corresponds to the intellectual pain of feeling himself fallen from his rank and his species, sunk to the level of inferior beings. Unfortunately, this kind of satisfaction and this kind of intellectual remorse only clearly manifest themselves m philosophic minds. Moreover, this sanction, limited to a small number of moral beings, admits of a certain provisional antinomy. In fact, the pain caused by the contrast between our ideal and our real state must be all the greater to us, as we are more fully conscious of the ideal; for in that case we get a clearer perception of the distance separating us from it. Susceptibility of conscience, therefore, increases in proportion to the development of conscience, and the vividness of remorse is a measure of our very efforts towards morality. In the same way, as superior organisms are always more sensitive to all kinds of pain coming from outside . . . so is the more highly organized beings are morally more exposed than others to that suffering arising from inward causes, whose cause is always in action—the suffering from the unrealized ideal. True remorse, with its subtlety, its painful scruples, its inward tortures, may strike men, not in inverse, but in direct, ratio to their perfection.