II. EGOISM AND ALTRUISM.
Everything has been evolved—everything—from daffodils to states and from ticks to religion. Every organic thing is the result of long and incessant survival of the advantageous—advantageous from the standpoint of the organism itself or from the standpoint of its kind, not necessarily so from the standpoint of the universe. That which is true of everything is true also of egoism and altruism. Egoism and altruism exist as facts in the natures of human and other beings for the same reason that the various physical facts exist in the structures of human and other beings, because they have been advantageous in the struggle for life. There is just as definite an explanation for the existence of egoism and altruism in this world, and for their existence in the particular form and ratio in which they do exist, as there is for the fact that the human hand has five fingers, the rose odour, and the eggs of the kildeer the mottled markings of the clods among which they lie.
Egoism is preference for self, partiality toward that part of the universe bounded by one’s own skin. It may consist simply of regard for self, but with regard for self is usually associated enmity toward others. Egoism manifests itself in such qualities of mind as selfishness, cruelty, intolerance, hate, hardheartedness, savagery, rudeness, injustice, narrowness, and the like. It is the primal impulse of the living heart. Enmity is older and more universal than love. Enmity constituted the very loins from which long ago came the original miscreants of this world.
‘I saw the fishes playing there;
I saw all that was in the whole world round;
In wood, and bower, and marsh, and mead, and field,
All things which creep and fly, And put a foot to earth.
All these I saw, and say to you,
That nothing lives among them without hate.’
Life has been developed through selection. This selection has been brought about largely through war—war between individuals and between groups of individuals. War and competition are struggle between living beings, and the soul of competition is selfishness. Egoism is the primal and most powerful of terrestrial impulses, because beings hated and exterminated each other before they tolerated and loved, and because struggle has far overshadowed cooperation as a factor in life evolution.
There are those who believe that mutual aid has been a more dynamic factor in the development of terrestrial life than competition. Cooperation has been an important element in the evolution of animal life, and it has operated among nearly all animals, from the humblest to the highest. Far down near the beginning of organic existence we find the one-celled forms huddling together in colonies, giving rise in the course of time to the many-celled animals. But to conclude that cooperation is the chief factor in animal development is to shut one’s eyes to one of the most obvious and overwhelming facts of organic evolution. Individualism antedates mutualism, both among the one-celled forms and among the many-celled metazoa. Cooperation everywhere is the sequence of a long preliminary of individual contention. And cooperation does not mean cessation of struggle, either among those co-operating or among the groups themselves, as Kropotkin and other exaggerators of the mutual aid factor seem to assume. It usually does little more than transfer the struggle from individuals to groups. When a lot of pelicans or wolves get together and work together in order that they may thereby the better defend themselves or slay others it is hard to see how such facts can be placed to the credit of cooperation any more than to that of competition. Then, too, excepting in a few societies of insects, cooperation has not gone so far as to do more than slightly alleviate the competition even among the members of a co-operating group. Competition is a much more common and influential fact in the phenomena of life than cooperation, for it involves a large part of the activity of individual life, and is also prominent in all social activities.
The preponderance of egoism in the natures of living beings is the most mournful and immense fact in the phenomena of conscious life. It has made the world the kind of world it would have been had the gods actually emptied their wrath vials upon it. Brotherhood is anomalous, and, even in its highest manifestations, is but the expression of a veiled and calculating egoism. Inhumanity is everywhere. The whole planet is steeped in it. Every creature faces an inhospitable universeful, and every life is a campaign. It has all come about as a result of the mindless and inhuman manner in which life has been developed on the earth. It has been said that an individual of unlimited faculties and infinite goodness and power made this world and endowed it with ways of acting, and that this individual, as the world’s executive, continues to determine its phenomena by inspiring the order of its events. But one cannot help thinking sometimes, when, in his more daring and vivid moments, he comes to comprehend the real character and condition of the world, what a discrepancy exists between the reputation of this builder and his works, and cannot help wondering whether an ordinary human being with only common-sense and insight and an average concern for the welfare of the world would not make a great improvement in terrestrial affairs if he only had the opportunity for a while.
Altruism is the recognition of, and regard for, others. It shows itself in feelings of justice, goodwill, tenderness, charity, pity, public spirit, sympathy, fraternity and love, and in acts of kindness, humanity, mercy, generosity, politeness, philanthropy and the like. Altruism is a graft. The stock is selfishness and brutality. Altruism (the form of altruism to which I here refer: there are several distinct species of altruism) has come into the world as a result of cooperation and consanguinity. It has grown out of the cooperation of individuals in families and tribes against their cooperating enemies. Altruism—at least, in its initial stages—is a sort of tribal egoism. Men and other animals have learned to stand by each other and help each other against their common foes because it was the only way in which they were able to stand. Those aggregates that have had strongest this feeling of fraternity have prospered and prevailed, while the less fraternal have gone down.
The altruism manifested by men in their relations with each other is not different in kind from the altruism and cooperation displayed by other social animals. Human gregariousness—the gathering together of human beings into tribes and communities for purposes of companionship and defence—is a part of the phenomena of animal gregariousness in general. The inhabitants of a human town, however much they may think so, are not impelled to associate with each other and to cooperate with each other in the affairs of life by causes or considerations different from those which actuate a society of ants or apes, of wasps or wolves, who do the same things. The antecedents of human ethics and society are, therefore, to be looked for in the ant-hill and the jungle.
The fact that altruism has been evolved by the cooperation of individuals with each other and against others is a significant fact in the analysis and understanding of the ethical phenomena of the earth. To this fact is due the restricted and illogical character of all altruism. The ethical systems of all peoples are, and have always been, to a greater or less extent, provincial and contradictory. Ethical feeling and practice are not extended universally—that is, to all beings—but are maintained only among those associating more or less closely as a group, and having interests that are more or less nearly the same. Among men of primitive mind, morality is a thing to be practised toward only a few thousand or even a few hundred individuals, and then in a very half-awake and half-hearted manner. But as the perceptions sharpen and vivify and the horizon of knowledge widens—as commerce and imagination cause the mind to overflow the narrow bounds of the community into larger dimensions of time and space—as the myriad influences operating as race experience and race selection enable men to realise the wider and wider oneness of their origin, natures, interests, and destiny—an increasing consistency characterises the conduct among the members of the group, and an increasingly larger number of individuals are admitted to ethical consideration and kinship.