Wealth & Money Quote by F. H. Bradley

Bradley’s line has the chill clarity of someone willing to anatomize compassion rather than celebrate it. Calling the phenomenon a “wise economy of nature” is the key move: it reframes what looks like moral failure (our boredom with unrelieved suffering) as a kind of emotional triage. Attention is finite; sympathy is a resource with a budget. When pain “without change” offers no narrative arc, no improvement, no leverage for action, the mind quietly stops investing. Not because we are monsters, Bradley implies, but because a world that demanded constant, equal responsiveness would grind us down.

The subtext is harsher: sympathy is not purely ethical; it is aesthetic and pragmatic. We are drawn to suffering that can be edited into a story - the recoverable patient, the improvable situation, the “before and after.” Stasis defeats us. “Whom no one can help” isn’t just a description of the sufferer’s condition; it’s a confession about the helper’s motives. The desire to comfort is tangled up with the desire to matter. When our intervention cannot register, empathy starts to feel like wasted motion, and the sufferer becomes, in Bradley’s brutally clinical word, “uninteresting.”

Bradley wrote in an era thick with Victorian moral sentiment and the early stirrings of scientific psychology, and he presses against both: against cheap pity, and against the idea that moral feeling is endlessly elastic. The sting of the last sentence is its indictment of systems - social, medical, economic - that trap people in unchanging distress. If suffering is structurally unresolved, it doesn’t only harm the sufferer; it corrodes the public’s capacity to keep looking.