Chapter 68

EGOISM

95. WHAT IS EGOISM?--Egoism has been defined as "any ethical system in which the happiness or good of the individual is made the main criterion of moral action," [Footnote: _Encyclopedia Britannica_, 11th edition.] or as "the doing or seeking of that which affords pleasure or advantage to oneself, in distinction to that which affords pleasure or advantage to others." [Footnote: _Century Dictionary_.]

It may strike the average reader as odd to be told that such definitions bristle with ambiguities, and that it is by no means easy to draw a sharp line between doctrines which everyone would admit to be egoistic, and others which seem more doubtfully to fall under that head. "Happiness," "good," "advantage," "self," all are terms which call for scrutiny, and which set pitfalls for the unwary.

96. CRASS EGOISMS.--We may best approach the subject of what may properly be regarded as constituting egoism, by turning first to one or two "terrible examples."

No one would hesitate to call egoistic the doctrine of Aristippus, the Cyrenaic, the errant disciple of Socrates. He made pleasure the end of life, and taught that it might be sought without a greater regard to customary morality than was made prudent by the penalties to be feared as a consequence of its violation. Where the centre of gravity of the system of the Cyrenaics falls is evident from their holding that "corporeal pleasures are superior to mental ones," and that "a friend is desirable for the use which we can make of him." [Footnote: Diogenes Laertius, _Lives of the Philosophers,_ "Aristippus," viii.]

The doctrine of the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, is as unequivocally egoistic.

"Of the voluntary acts of every man," he writes, [Footnote: _Leviathan,_ Part I, xiv.] "the object is some good to himself;" and again, [Footnote _Ibid_. xv.] "no man giveth, but with intention of good to himself; because gift is voluntary; and of all voluntary acts the object is to every man his own good."

He leaves us in no doubt as to the sort of good which he conceives men to seek when they practice what has the appearance of generosity. Contract he calls a mutual transference of rights, and he distinguishes gift from contract as follows:

"When the transferring of right is not mutual, but one of the parties transferreth, in hope to gain thereby friendship, or service from another, or from his friends, or in hope to gain the reputation of charity or magnanimity, _or to deliver his mind from the pain of compassion_, or in hope of reward in heaven, this is not contract but gift, free gift, grace, which words signify the same thing." [Footnote: _Ibid_. I, xiv. The italics are mine. It was thus that Hobbes accounted for his giving a sixpence to a beggar: "I was in pain to consider the miserable condition of the old man; and now my alms, giving him some relief, doth also ease me." _Hobbes_, by G. C. ROBERTSON, Edinburgh, 1886, p. 206.]

There is a passage from the pen of the British divine, Paley, which appears to merit a place alongside of the citations from Hobbes, widely as the men differ in many of their views. It reads:

"We can be obliged to nothing but what we ourselves are to gain or lose something by; for nothing else can be a 'violent motion' to us. As we should not be obliged to obey the laws, or the magistrate, unless rewards or punishments, pleasure or pain, somehow or other, depended upon our obedience; so neither should we, without the same reason, be obliged to do what is right, to practice virtue, or to obey the commandments of God." [Footnote: _Moral Philosophy,_ Book II, chapter ii.]

97. EQUIVOCAL EGOISM?--The above is unquestionably egoism. The man who accepts such a doctrine and consistently walks in the light must be set down as self-seeking. But self-seeking, as understood by different men, appears to take on different aspects. Shall we class all those who frankly accept it as man's only ultimate motive with Aristippus and Epicurus and Hobbes?

Thomas Hill Green writes: "Anything conceived as good in such a way that the agent acts for the sake of it, must be conceived as his own good." [Footnote: _Prolegomena to Ethics,_ Sec 92.] The motive to action is, he maintains, always "some idea of the man's personal good." [Footnote: Sec Sec 95, 97.] He does not hesitate to say that a man necessarily lives for himself; [Footnote: Sec 138.] and he calls "the human self or the man" [Footnote: Sec 99.] a self-seeking ego, a self-seeking subject, and a self- seeking person. [Footnote: Sec Sec 98, 100, 145.]

Were Green's book a lost work, only preserved to the memories of men by such citations as the above, the author would certainly be relegated to a class of moralists with which he had, in fact, little sympathy.

But the book is not lost, and by turning to it we find Green continuing the first of the above citations with the words: "Though he may conceive it as his own good only on account of his interest in others, and in spite of any amount of suffering on his own part incidental to its attainment." He is willing to grant the self-seeking ego an eye single to its own interests, but he is careful to explain that: "These are not merely interests dependent on other persons for the means to their gratification, but interests in the good of those other persons, interests which cannot be satisfied without the consciousness that those other persons are satisfied." [Footnote: Sec 199.]

When Hobbes gave an account of "the passions that incline men to peace," [Footnote: _Leviathan,_ I, xiii.] he made no mention of the social nature of man. That nature Green conceives to be so essentially social that the individual cannot disentangle his own good from the good of his fellows. To live "for himself," since that self is a social self, means to live for others. May this fairly be called egoistic doctrine?

98. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE SELF?--It is sufficiently clear that the happiness, or good, or advantage, or interests of the individual or self may mean many things. It is equally clear that in our interpretation of all such terms our notions of the nature of the self will play no inconsiderable role. What is the self?

In his famous chapter on the Consciousness of Self, [Footnote: _Psychology,_ New York, 1890, I, chapter x.] William James enumerates four senses of the word. With three of these we may profitably occupy ourselves here. He calls them the Material Self, the Social Self and the Spiritual Self.

The innermost part of the material self he makes our body, and next to it, in their order, he places our clothes, our family, our home, and our property. They contribute to our being what we are in our own eyes, we identify ourselves with them, and we experience "a sense of the shrinkage of our personality" when even the more outlying elements, such as our possessions, are lost. "Our immediate family," he writes, "is a part of ourselves. Our father and mother, our wife and babes, are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. When they die, a part of our very selves is gone. If they do anything wrong, it is our shame. If they are insulted, our anger flashes forth as readily as if we stood in their place."

It is obvious that the limits of the material self, as above understood, may be indefinitely extended. There are men who feel about their country as the average normal man feels about his home; and doubtless the suffering of a stray beggar tugged at the heart of St. Francis as the misfortune of wife or child does in the case of other men. How far abroad our "interests" are to be found, and just what "interests" we shall regard as intimately and peculiarly our own, depends upon what we are.

The Social Self James describes as the recognition a man gets from his mates: "We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in the sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind." Men certainly regard their fame or honor as to be included among their interests, and they may value and seek to obtain the good opinion of a very little clique or of a much wider circle.

By the Spiritual Self is meant our qualities of mind and character--"the most enduring and intimate part of the Self, that which we most verily seem to be." Our interest in these it is impossible to overlook, and their cultivation and development may become a ruling passion.

James's illuminating pages make clear that he who speaks of the advantage or interest of the individual may have in mind predominantly any one of these aspects of the Self, or all of them conjointly. The Self as he conceives it may be a narrow one, or it may be a very broad one.

99. EGOISM AND THE BROADER SELF.--It may with some plausibility be maintained that he who lives for himself may not properly be regarded as an egoist and called selfish, if his Self is sufficiently expanded. May it not, theoretically, include as much of the universe as is known to man? And where can a man seek ends of any sort beyond this broad field? On this view, all men are, in a sense, self-seeking, but only those are reprehensibly self-seeking who have narrow and scanty selves.

But common sense and the common usage of speech do not sanction such statements as that a man necessarily lives for himself and that all men are self-seeking. It is justly recognized that some men with broad interests--of a sort--are self-seeking, and that some others with great limitations are not.

He who has property scattered over four continents and watches with absorbing interest all movements upon the political and economic stage may nevertheless be a thorough-going egoist. The breadth of his horizon will not redeem him. One may look far afield and live laborious days in the pursuit of fame, and be egoistic to the back-bone, although one's interests, in this case, include even the contents of the minds of generations yet unborn. One may forego many pleasures and concentrate all one's efforts upon the attainment of intellectual eminence or of a virtuous character, and yet seem to have a claim to the name of egoist.

That even the pursuit of virtue may take an egoistic turn has frequently been recognized: "Woe betides that man," writes Dewey, "who having entered upon a course of reflection which leads to a clearer conception of his own moral capacities and weaknesses, maintains that thought as a distinct mental end, and thereby makes his subsequent acts simply means to improving or perfecting his moral nature." [Footnote: _Ethics_,