i8 9 6. THE ENDEAVOUR AFTER WELL-BEING. 25 



egoism in Nature. " If we define altruism as being all action which, 

 in the normal course of things, benefits others instead of benefiting 

 self, then from the dawn of life, altruism has been no less essential 

 than egoism. Though primarily it is dependent on egoism, yet 

 secondarily egoism is dependent on it." " Self-sacrifice is no less 

 primordial than self-preservation.' 1 '' (See " Principles of Ethics " and 

 " Principles of Psychology.") 



15. As to the propriety of using the word altruism in the wide 

 Spencerian sense, there may be difference of opinion (see " Data of 

 Ethics ") ; and truly it is ' mere poetry ' to have no scruple in 

 reading the man into the beast or even into the plant and the cell. 

 But so long as we do not attach unwarranted ethical content to 

 altruistic action, there seems no confusion in asserting that motives 

 comparable to ' altruism ' and ' love ' have their place beside 

 ' egoism ' and ' hunger ' in the process of evolution. 



16. As to the origin of egoism and altruism, we are equally in 

 the dark in regard to both. We suppose that both are primary 

 qualities, springing from the very heart of things ; we only know that 

 they rise from grade to grade with complex interactions (see diagram 

 in " Evolution of Sex "). In the development of both there has 

 probably been much elimination, some lines of which Spencer has 

 suggested; both the ultra-egoistic and the ultra-altruistic are doomed. 

 But elimination is directive, not originative. In regard to origin, 

 Darwin suggested that the social sensations " were first developed in 

 order that those animals which would profit by living in society 

 should be induced to live together, in the same manner as the sense 

 of hunger and the pleasure of eating were no doubt first acquired in 

 order to induce animals to eat"; or was the master ironical in this 

 return to die alte Teleologie ? 



17. Evolutionists who insist that the ordinary formula — the 

 natural selection of variations in the struggle for existence— is adequate 

 to express nature's method, or is, as our foremost zoologist says, 

 " the one medium whereby all the phenomena of life, whether of 

 form or function, are rendered capable of explanation by the laws of 

 physics and chemistry," may be reminded (1) that their theory has 

 not as yet been eminently successful in explaining many of the ' big 

 lifts ' in evolution, such as the acquisition of a body, the evolution 

 of sex, the origin of mammals, the origin of the family, the ascent of 

 man, and a score of others ; (2) that the often-repeated psychological 

 attempt to explain the higher aspects of human nature on this basis 

 has hitherto failed, while even the Nestor of modern aetiology falls 

 back on "spiritual influxes"; (3) that a denial of the importance of 

 altruism among the beasts leaves the evolutionist who will account 

 for the gentleman in the position of him who sawed at his own 

 supporting branch, and leads to Huxley's strangely paradoxical 

 conclusion, with which the moralists have sufficiently dealt, that 

 ethical progress depends on combating the cosmic process — a con- 



