We all know that Spock is always vaunting his logic. He is the logical man, bar none. In fact, he is a logical half-human; but it’s logic that his Vulcan ancestors have cultivated above all, and it’s the Vulcan championing of logic that Spock especially cherishes.

Yet Spock is a man of great generosity, from a human perspective. He exhibits the old-fashioned virtue of ‘pity’, that capacity to take kindly to someone in worse straits than you. If we look down on someone worse off, we might say they are ‘pitiful’, with a sense of disdain. But someone ‘pitiable’ is just someone that you pity, for bad outcomes they shouldn’t be blamed for. Pity is a very old term in English, and it’s an older concept, I think, than the modern one of ‘compassion’. But Spock has compassion, too. Compassion has two aspects, roughly: sympathy on the one hand, and empathy on the other. Sympathy is about understanding in a general way what someone might be going through, and feeling sorry about it. Empathy is more deeply rooted: it’s about a sharing in what others suffer, whether in the moment, through imagination, or by remembering a similar pain that happened to you in the past. Sympathy looks across the bridge of pain and says ‘I’m sorry for your pain’. Empathy crosses the bridge and says ‘I feel the pain with you, because I was there myself, at one time.’ Spock feels pity, sympathy, and empathy throughout the original series. And nowhere is this better expressed than in Devil in the Dark (Season 1, Episode 26. Airdate: March 9, 1967).

Spock at first pities the creature he cannot see, for the hurt that he begins to realize it must be suffering. He moves on from this detached pity, once he has learned something about it, to something more like sympathy. And then, when he is able to make contact with the creature, and learns the truth of its condition via the Vulcan mind-meld, he feels empathy. He feels what the creature feels.

It is interesting that Doctor McCoy often accuses Spock of being unfeeling. Given what we have just observed, why does McCoy do this? We’ll begin to explore that question in the next installment of Star Trek On My Mind.