Pity is a sympathetic sorrow evoked by the suffering of others, and is used in a comparable sense to compassion, condolence or empathy – the word deriving from the Latin pietas (etymon also of piety). Self-pity is pity directed towards oneself. Two different kinds of pity can be distinguished, "benevolent pity" and "contemptuous pity" (see Kimball), where, through insincere, pejorative usage, pity is used to connote feelings of superiority, condescension, or contempt. Psychological opinions Psychologists see pity arising in early childhood out of the infant's ability to identify with others. Psychoanalysis sees a more convoluted route to (at least some forms of) adult pity by way of the sublimation of aggression – pity serving as a kind of magic gesture intended to show how leniently one should oneself be treated by one's own conscience. Religious views In the West, the religious concept of pity was reinforced after acceptance of Judeo-Christian concepts of God pitying all humanity, as found initially in the Jewish tradition: "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him". The Hebrew word "Hesed" translated in the LXX by "Eleos" carries the meaning roughly equivalent to pity in the sense of compassion, mercy and loving-kindness. (See The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, 698a.) In Mahayana Buddhism, Bodhisattvas are described by the Lotus Sutra as those who "hope to win final Nirvana for all beings – for the sake of the many, for their weal and happiness, out of pity for the world". Philosophical assessments Aristotle in his Rhetoric argued (Rhetoric 2.8) that before a person can feel pity for another human, the person must first have experienced suffering of a similar type, and the person must also be somewhat distanced or removed from the sufferer. He defines pity as follows: "Let pity, then, be a kind of pain in the case of an apparent destructive or painful harm of one not deserving to encounter it, which one might expect oneself, or one of one's own, to suffer, and this when it seems near". Aristotle also pointed out that "people pity their acquaintances, provided that they are not exceedingly close in kinship; for concerning these they are disposed as they are concerning themselves", arguing further that in order to feel pity, a person must believe that the person who is suffering does not deserve their fate. Developing a traditional Greek view in