224 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 
sympathy, and treat altruism and egoism simply by their results, that 
is, treat conduct or individual acts simply by their results, we may say 
that egoism corresponds to the credit side of the account and altruism 
to the debit side. The circulation of money is here the reality: the 
income and expenditure are, relatively, the abstractions. As a financial 
being a man is real when his income and expenditure are equal; only in 
this case has he the richest financial experience. Debt means or tends 
to mean bankruptcy, hoarding means or tends to mean loss of experience. 
In the same way a man or a race is really living when its moral expen- 
diture and income are equal. The race must be regarded as a living 
race, a going concern. It is not reasonable to say that there was a time 
when man must have been chiefly, if not wholly, selfish, unless it is 
meant that there was at that time a great depression of life, a genuine 
danger of extinction. It does not suffice either to prove that primitive 
man had few interests and narrow horizons: lions have these and yet 
they seem to have great intensity of life and circulation. 
Some of those who consider conduct genetically, point out that new- 
born infants are wholly egoistic. If this were true it would carry weight. 
But is it true? Here surely egoistic is a purely scientific word because 
infants have absolutely no conscious motives, or ‘‘ideas” of purpose 
and sympathy. Then their acts must be judged by results. Do they 
not show the altruistic aspect as strongly marked as the egoistic ? Each 
infant is the Trager of the family, even, in a sense, of the race. Any 
failure to take nourishment, an act producing pleasure in the mother, 
would be a failure toward posterity. 
Others appeal to the fierce isolation of the beasts of prey and other 
animals. It is true that animals have narrow horizons of life. But 
within these what reason is there for believing that altruism and egoism 
are not equal? Trees and shrubs and flowers have narrow lives, but 
do they not give out to the air and the earth and to animals and man 
as much as they receive? Action and reaction may be equal in this 
pair of terms as others. I spent two hours watching a cage of hyenas 
in the Berlin zodlogical gardens, and the father spent nearly every minute 
of that time licking and fondling his ugly, vicious-looking offspring. 
The male lion spends his time in toil and fight and great danger largely 
in order to carry his prey to the whelps. 
