"All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness"
About this Quote
Coleridge draws a hard line between compassion that costs something and compassion that merely performs. "Acknowledged virtue" is the litmus test: not private goodness, but virtue recognized as binding, the sort you can name, defend, and live by when it stops flattering you. Anything short of that, he implies, isn’t fellow-feeling at all - it’s self-love wearing a benevolent mask.
The subtext is a warning about sentimentality, a favorite vice of Coleridge’s era. Romantic culture prized feeling as proof of moral depth, and Coleridge knew how easily that currency gets counterfeited. Sympathy can become a way to enjoy one’s own sensitivity, to feel ethically elevated without doing the uncomfortable work that virtue demands: judgment, restraint, responsibility, consistency. If your sympathy shifts with fashion, personal convenience, or the need to be seen as kind, it’s not moral perception; it’s appetite.
The sentence is engineered to sting. "Disguised" suggests intent: we aren’t merely mistaken about our motives; we’re complicit in hiding them. And the phrase "not consistent" targets hypocrisy at the level of pattern, not isolated failure. Coleridge isn’t attacking compassion; he’s attacking compassion that refuses a moral backbone, the kind that cries for victims today and excuses cruelty tomorrow.
Read in context of the post-Revolutionary hangover - when grand humanitarian rhetoric had curdled into terror, reaction, and propaganda - the line lands as an insistence that feeling, unmoored from character, is just another technology of the self.
The subtext is a warning about sentimentality, a favorite vice of Coleridge’s era. Romantic culture prized feeling as proof of moral depth, and Coleridge knew how easily that currency gets counterfeited. Sympathy can become a way to enjoy one’s own sensitivity, to feel ethically elevated without doing the uncomfortable work that virtue demands: judgment, restraint, responsibility, consistency. If your sympathy shifts with fashion, personal convenience, or the need to be seen as kind, it’s not moral perception; it’s appetite.
The sentence is engineered to sting. "Disguised" suggests intent: we aren’t merely mistaken about our motives; we’re complicit in hiding them. And the phrase "not consistent" targets hypocrisy at the level of pattern, not isolated failure. Coleridge isn’t attacking compassion; he’s attacking compassion that refuses a moral backbone, the kind that cries for victims today and excuses cruelty tomorrow.
Read in context of the post-Revolutionary hangover - when grand humanitarian rhetoric had curdled into terror, reaction, and propaganda - the line lands as an insistence that feeling, unmoored from character, is just another technology of the self.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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