Something of the same sort may be said regarding the emphasis of eighteenth century moralists upon benevolence as the inclusive moral spring to action, an emphasis represented in the nineteenth century by Comte’s exaltation of altruism. The load was excessive. But it testifies to the growth of a new philanthropic spirit. With the breaking down of feudal barriers and a consequent mingling of persons previously divided, a sense of responsibility for the happiness of others, for the mitigation of misery, grew up. Conditions were not ripe for its translation into political action. Hence the importance attached to the private disposition of voluntary benevolence.
If we venture into more ancient history, Plato’s threefold division of the human soul into a rational element, a spirited active one, and an appetitive one, aiming at increase or gain, is immensely illuminating. As is well known, Plato said that society is the human soul writ large. In society he found three classes: the philosophic and scientific, the soldier-citizenry, and the traders and artisans. Hence the generalization as to the three dominating forces in human nature. Read the other way around, we perceive that trade in his days appealed especially to concupiscence, citizenship to a generous élan of self-forgetting loyalty, and scientific study to a disinterested love of wisdom that seemed to be monopolized by a small isolated group. The distinctions were not in truth projected from the breast of the natural individual into society, but they were cultivated in classes of individuals by force of social custom and expectation.
Now the prestige that once attached to the “instinct” of self-love has not wholly vanished. The case is still worth examination. In its “scientific” form, start was taken from an alleged instinct of self-preservation, characteristic of man as well as of other animals. From this seemingly innocuous assumption, a mythological psychology burgeoned. Animals, including man, certainly perform many acts whose consequence is to protect and preserve life. If their acts did not upon the whole have this tendency, neither the individual or the species would long endure. The acts that spring from life also in the main conserve life. Such is the undoubted fact. What does the statement amount to? Simply the truism that life is life, that life is a continuing activity as long as it is life at all. But the self-love school converted the fact that life tends to maintain life into a separate and special force which somehow lies back of life and accounts for its various acts. An animal exhibits in its life-activity a multitude of acts of breathing, digesting, secreting, excreting, attack, defense, search for food, etc., a multitude of specific responses to specific stimulations of the environment. But mythology comes in and attributes them all to a nisus for self-preservation. Thence it is but a step to the idea that all conscious acts are prompted by self-love. This premise is then elaborated in ingenious schemes, often amusing when animated by a cynical knowledge of the “world,” tedious when of a would-be logical nature, to prove that every act of man including his apparent generosities is a variation played on the theme of self-interest.
The fallacy is obvious. Because an animal cannot live except as it is alive, except that is as its acts have the result of sustaining life, it is concluded that all its acts are instigated by an impulse to self-preservation. Since all acts affect the well-being of their agent in one way or another, and since when a person becomes reflective he prefers consequences in the way of weal to those of woe, therefore all his acts are due to self-love. In actual substance, one statement says that life is life; and the other says that a self is a self. One says that special acts are acts of a living creature and the other that they are acts of a self. In the biological statement the concrete diversity between the acts of say a clam and of a dog are covered up by pointing out that the acts of each tend to self-preservation, ignoring the somewhat important fact that in one case it is the life of a clam and in the other the life of a dog which is continued. In morals, the concrete differences between a Jesus, a Peter, a John and a Judas are covered up by the wise remark that after all they are all selves and all act as selves. In every case, a result or “end” is treated as an actuating cause.
The fallacy consists in transforming the (truistic) fact of acting as a self into the fiction of acting always for self. Every act, truistically again, tends to a certain fulfilment or satisfaction of some habit which is an undoubted element in the structure of character. Each satisfaction is qualitatively what it is because of the disposition fulfilled in the object attained, treachery or loyalty, mercy or cruelty. But theory comes in and blankets the tremendous diversity in the quality of the satisfactions which are experienced by pointing out that they are all satisfactions. The harm done is then completed by transforming this artificial unity of result into an original love of satisfaction as the force that generates all acts alike. Because a Nero and a Peabody both get satisfaction in acting as they do it is inferred
