Some paradox of our natures

Lionel Trilling in Manners, Morals, and the Novel.

Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on and make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the free play of the moral imagination.