120 Self-regarding and Other-regarding 



Was it not the same poet who asked : "Why do the 

 people so strive and cry?" and gave as answer : "They 

 will have food and they will have children ; and they 

 will bring them up as well as they can." Here we get 

 down to bedrock — the two fundamental impulses of 

 hunger and of love, the pivots on which life swings. 

 From first to last — if one can talk of last — is not the 

 business of life twofold — caring for self and caring 

 for others? As Herbert Spencer said: "From the 

 dawn of life altruism has been no less essential than 

 egoism." "Self-sacrifice is no less primordial than 

 self-preservation." Deep down in the abysses of evo- 

 lutionary emergence, hunger and love may be hardly 

 distinguishable; and on occasions all through the 

 history of living creatures the egoistic and altruistic 

 currents seem to merge and flow apart again; but 

 cases of female spiders devouring their suitors cannot 

 be regarded as typical ! On the whole the two funda- 

 mental trends are clearly defined. 



Hunger and love are the warp and woof of the web 

 of life, with its evolving pattern; but it would be a 

 terrible literalism to take this statement as meaning 

 that the gastric "urge" and the reproductive "urge" 

 persist throughout in their original simplicity. 

 Hunger is a primary appetite, with which there have 

 become associated, even among animals, many other 

 impulses or inborn reaction-tendencies, such as self- 

 preservation, self-defence, self-assertiveness, and self- 

 interest. These are shoots of which hunger is the 

 common root, and there are flowers, too, such as ad- 



