32 SFLF-CONSCIOUSNESS. 



utterly selfish. Selfishness is a real vice — or, to 

 / speak more correctly, it is all the vices rolled into 

 one. The purely selfish man is incapable of almost 

 any form of active virtue, except, perhaps, truth- 

 fulness ; he is the meanest and smallest and most 

 despicable of created beings. Egotism, again, is 

 a far less serious though a more ridiculous failing 

 than selfishness ; the egotist, though not perhaps 

 unkindly or ungenerous, thinks perpetually of 

 himself as the centre and focus of all other peo- 

 ple's thoughts, the happy cynosure of neighboring 

 eyes. He makes himself absurd by the over- 

 strained importance he attaches to his own dignity 

 and position ; he considers himself the handsomest 

 man in the whole room ; he admires the cleverness 

 of his own conversation ; he laughs the loudest at 

 his own poor jokes. His complacency, however, 

 ridiculous as it really is, gives immense pleasure 

 to himself, and is, after all, only a source of inno- 

 cent amusement to other people. If he gets 

 laughed at, it is behind his back; and the light 

 shafts of other men's ridicule never pierce the thick 

 hide of his pachydermatous personality. So far as 

 his own feelings alone are concerned, the egotist 

 is a man rather to be envied than to be pitied, 

 a subject for laughing congratulation rather than 

 for sympathetic condolence and brotherly regret. 



It is far otherwise with the miserable victim of 

 the self-conscious torturing-rack. He or she has 



