THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY. 567 



counterbalanced by the other force or tendency; but now the one 

 greatly predominates, and presently by reaction there comes a pre- 

 dominance of the other. That which we are shown by variations in 

 the prices of stocks, shares, or commodities, occurring daily, weekly, 

 and in longer intervals that which we observe in the alternation of 

 manias and panics, caused by irrational hopes and absurd fears 

 that which diagrams of these variations express by the ascents and 

 descents of a line, now to a great height and now to an equivalent 

 depth, we discover in all social phenomena, moral and religious in- 

 cluded. It is exhibited on a large scale and on a small scale by 

 rhythms extending over centuries and by rhythms of short periods. 

 And we see it, not only in waves of conflicting feelings and opinions 

 pervading societies as wholes, but also in the opposite excesses gone 

 to by individuals and sects in the same society at the same time. 

 There is never a balanced judgment and a balanced action, but always 

 a cancelling of one another by contrary errors : " Men pair off in insane 

 parties," as Emerson puts it. Something like rationality is finally ob- 

 tained as a product of mutually-destructive irrationalities. As, for ex- 

 ample, in the treatment of our criminals, there alternates or coexists an 

 unreasoning severity with an unreasoning lenity : now we punish in a 

 spirit of vengeance, now we pamper with a maudlin sympathy. At 

 no time is there a due adjustment of penalty to transgression such as 

 the course of Nature shows us an inflicting of neither more nor less 

 evil than the reaction which the action causes. 



The religion of unqualified altruism, coming as it did to correct by 

 an opposite excess the religion of unqualified egoism, exhibits to us 

 this general law on a great scale. Against the doctrine of entire self- 

 ishness it sets the doctrine of entire self-sacrifice. In place of the 

 aboriginal creed not requiring you to love your fellow-man at all, but 

 insisting only that certain of your fellow-men you shall hate even to 

 the death, there comes a creed directing that you shall in no case do 

 any thing prompted by hate of your fellow-man, but shall love him as 

 yourself. Nineteen centuries have since wrought some compromise 

 between these opposite creeds. It has never been rational, however, 

 but only empirical mainly, indeed, unconscious compromise. There 

 is not yet a distinct recognition of what truth each extreme stands for, 

 and a perception that the two truths must be coordinated ; but there 

 is little more than a partial rectifying of excesses one way by excesses 

 the other way. By these persons purely-egoistic lives are led. By 

 those, altruism is carried to the extent of bringing on ill health and 

 premature death. Even on comparing the acts of the same individual, 

 Wo find, not an habitual balance between the two tendencies, but now 

 an effort to inflict great evil on some foreign aggressor or some male- 

 factor at home, and now a disproportioned sacrifice on behalf of one 

 often quite unworthy of it. That altruism is right, but that egoism is 

 also right, and that there requires a continual compromise between 



