i88o.] Natural Science and Morality. 445 
“ small and peaceable society, in which men, neither envied 
nor esteemed by their neighbours, should be contented to 
live upon the natural products of the spot they inhabit.”'* 
But now that we have to face the fa< 5 t that a savage who 
lives solely on the produce of the chase is tolerably reckless 
of the life which requires some 78 square miles for its sus- 
tenance, while a Belgian clings to that which is supported 
on 2 acres, t we are driven to the inference that there must 
be some flaw in Bernard de Mandeville’s conclusion. For 
the purpose of his argument De Mandeville, in analogy with 
Hobbs and others, took the wealth to be extracted from a 
given area as a constant quantity, left out of account man s 
labour, and estimated the happiness of the individual in any 
country by dividing the uncultivated (or natural) products 
of the country by the number of inhabitants. Political 
economists have reversed all this ; they recognise labour as 
a source of wealth whose value varies with the intelligence 
and sociability of the labourer ; so that the wealth of each 
individual may be greatly increased by co-operation of 
numbers. 
If De Mandeville had been right in assuming the total 
wealth to be constant and independent of man, he would, of 
course, have been corretf: in the deduction that through 
self-interest each individual would increase his own wealth 
at the expense of his neighbour ; but when the fa&s are 
known that in the most wealthy countries the proportion 
derived from natural or uncultivated produ( 5 ts is almost in- 
significant compared with that which can only be obtained 
by the co-operation of numbers of individuals, it is certainly 
remarkable that some Utilitarians of the nineteenth century 
should fall into the error that the pursuit by man of his own 
self-interest would be synonymous with selfishness, or would 
tend to make him isolate himself from his neighbours, and 
prey upon them ; whereas we may see, from the above con- 
siderations, that precisely the reverse of this may be true, 
or that sociability and co-operation may be in reality the 
highest forms of self-interest. 
Nor can that purely passive selfishness which stops short 
of adtual dishonesty (the ordinary selfishness of private life) 
be carried out in an intelligent society without great loss to 
the individuals who praise it. For it is an every-day oc- 
currence for A, by relinquishing a small pleasure, to be able 
to render a large service to B ; and when under such cir- 
cumstances A does so sacrifice his own immediate smaller 
* Bernard de Mandeville, Fable of the Bees. 
f Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, 4th ed., p. 607. 
