56 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



for others, it should be with a good motive. The act was declared to 

 be of no subjective value unless the motive was lofty, thus: "Do 

 not your alms before men to be seen of them, otherwise you have 

 no reward of your Father which is in heaven." Calling attention 

 thus to motives was doubtless a great advance upon the preceding 

 times. This improved form of altruism was, however, indiscrimi- 

 nate. Nothing was said or implied, in the above precept, as to 

 the character of the persons to whom alms were to be given. 

 Nothing was hinted or thought of the ultimate effect upon the 

 recipient of giving alms, much less of taking steps to prevent any 

 from needing alms. Elsewhere the intimation was that all who 

 were poor should receive, as indicated by the direction " Go and 

 sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor, and come and follow 

 me, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven." " He that giveth to 

 the poor lendeth to the Lord." "It is easier for a camel to go 

 through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the 

 kingdom of God." Here the extreme of altruism was proposed, 

 but utterly without discrimination as to the objective effect. 



Just as all people assume the moral character of benevolence 

 and charity, so there is a disposition to assume that all altruism is 

 good — in other words, to use it as a synonym. Some writers of 

 much prominence have not properly treated the subject of altru- 

 ism, and religious writers especially fail to measure its true char- 

 acter — that is, we see forms of altruism held up as the summum 

 honum ; its teachings are said to be almost or quite divine. A pro- 

 fessor in Johns Hopkins University has recently, in " The Congre- 

 gationalist" spoken of altruism as the opposite of selfishness, 

 which latter term he also confounds with egoism (and spells it 

 " egotism ")• This is very unfortunate. We shall never work out 

 social problems with such confusion of ideas. Seeing men in such 

 positions treat altruism as always a good thing, and seeing them 

 urge its practice without consideration or without limitation, have 

 prompted this attempt to distinguish between justifiable altruism 

 and unjustifiable altruism as carefully as moralists distinguish 

 between justifiable egoism (self-love or self-interest) and unjusti- 

 fiable egoism (selfishness). And right here the moral philoso- 

 phers must be alluded to. They have been so zealous to destroy 

 selfishness that they have urged the doing of good to others with- 

 out sufiiciently distinguishing between seeming good and the evil 

 effects thereof. They have too much determined the quality of 

 acts by an examination of the motives under which the acts were 

 performed, and too little by an examination of the effects pro- 

 duced. They ought long since to have studied the character of 

 altruism. 



For eighteen hundred years the world has had an altruism 

 which failed to discriminate as to the object, and, as will appear 



