Altruism: Its Nature and Varieties

by George Herbert Palmer

Of course such a poem can have only two stanzas, and these must closely parallel each other in every part. The resulting definition of love, making it the completed form of mutuality, would run as follows: love is the joint service of a common life.

(2) Is the lover, then, an unselfish person and does altruism, here reaching its highest pitch, exclude all egoistic regard? On the contrary, it includes and magnifies it. I have said that love always involves liking, the knowledge that an object has brought me gain and is capable of bringing more. In his loved one the lover knows a source of incomparable joy. Were his lady once his, it would matter little what else might happen. Never before has he conceived a good so great, and he knows that hardships shared with her would be better than the most favorable fortune alone. He is therefore an eager seeker. Such a passion to possess is seen in no one else. Yet the opposite may be said with equal truth. He has lost all selfishness. No one is so generous as he, so ready for self-sacrifice. To please and benefit the loved one is all his care. Let what he gives have cost him little, and he is dissatisfied. He longs to suffer for her sake. These are not marks of self-seeking. But they do indicate that the lover has reached a new conception of self, for which he is even more ardent than ever he was for the old. That old separate self he now despises, and knows that only as he loses it in the loved one will he have any worth. Until he has thoroughly cut himself off from his own detached interests he will be unworthy of her. A scrap of Persian verse, translated by Bronson Alcott, states the matter well: “One knocked at the beloved’s door, and a voice asked from within, ‘Who is there?’ And he answered, ‘It is I.’ Then the voice said, ‘This room will not hold me and thee’; and the door was not opened. Then went the lover into the desert, and fasted and prayed in solitude. And after a year he returned and knocked again at the door. And again the voice asked, ‘Who is there?’ And he said, ‘It is thyself.’ And the door was opened to him.” In the mutuality of love egoism and altruism are reconciled. Each of the lovers acquires a new apprehension of self, which conjunct being bears in the mind of each the name of the beloved.

(3) Is the lover in his own estimate rich or poor? Incredibly rich in what he has received, but in comparison with his lady how poor! She is immeasurably his superior. How she stooped so low is his daily wonder. But his own inferiority does not disturb him. “Love envieth not. Is not easily puffed up.” On the contrary, he rejoices in emptying himself and seeing how all that is worth while in him proceeds from her. Yet the lover is a paradoxical fellow, full of contradictions and scorning consistency. He prizes himself as he never did before and daily takes on a new importance. Never till he loved was he so watchful of his looks, speech, clothes, manners. What he brings to her must be of the finest, and he is pleased to discover in himself excellences hitherto unsuspected which she may well accept. Tennyson well paints the aspiring lover in “Maud”:

“So dark a mind within me dwells,
And I make myself such evil cheer
That if I be dear to some one else
Then some one else may have much to fear.
But if I be dear to some one else,
Then I should be to myself more dear.
Shall I not care for all that I think,
Yea, even for wretched meat and drink,
If I be dear, if I be dear, to some one else?”

(4) When once established, is love permanent? Certainly not. Being a personal affair it has no routine fixity, but must continually be created afresh. Effort is in it, intention, readiness to put aside temporary fancies and to practise a loyal patience. It is true that in the wise these practices themselves become habitual and love therefore a matter of happy course. No action is excellent which ceases when not consciously pressed. From the quiet of assured love old lovers look back on the anxious fervors of early days and acknowledge them meagre and immature. Yet still within call they keep the resolute will and guard against decay. For just as my readers find it difficult to hold the thought of the conjunct self steadily in mind and are obliged to resist its tendency to disintegrate into separate selves, so do lovers also. By degrees the sense of mutuality may decline, independent interests arise, and then one of the lower altruistic forms may take the place of this its highest. A pair may feel themselves drawing apart and, finding less and less in common, may gradually content themselves with a kind of partnership in place of love. Or one, disturbed over the breach of affection, may seek to repair it by acts of generosity. He may be liberal in granting his company, his friendly cheer, to the slightly distant loved one. But that, too, is a slipping down. The two are then no longer in equality. Perfect love knows no giving. What is there to give? All mine is thine, all thine is mine. Together we share, not give. But as we detach ourselves little by little, the old separate self comes back and we hand something across the chasm. How sad when exuberant love thus declines into intentional giving, altering “because it alteration finds and bending with the remover to remove”! But sadder still is it when to formerly abundant love the guarded altruism of manners succeeds and each is satisfied to treat the other with watchful politeness. This is the last stopping-place before confessed bankruptcy.

(5) But is not love always open to repair through duty? Being the highest embodiment of morality it would naturally seem peculiarly alive to duty. But the very opposite is the case. It has, in fact, a strange aversion to duty. Any suspicion that we are expected to love a certain person alienates us from him. We cannot force ourselves to love even when we see it to be desirable; nor can we expel love when we find it unreturned or unworthy. Love insists on freedom, a certain absence of constraint, either from a person, from circumstance, from collateral advantages, or even from our own volition. Like giving, it recognizes no claim. “Love is a present to a mighty king,” says Herbert. It cannot be bought or sold. But though so little submissive to obligation, it is highly sensitive to suggestion and unclamorous appeal. Indeed, it soon perishes when fresh suggestion is withheld. Indirectly, therefore, and accepting time for an ally, we can control love. I have repeatedly spoken of intention, rational guidance, resourceful care, as necessities if we would have a wise and lasting love. Those who complain of its decay have generally themselves to blame. They have imagined it constituted once for all and, while they would be glad to have it continue, have taken little pains for that fresh renewal on which its life is staked. “Keep on courting,” said a sagacious mother to a young bridegroom on his wedding-day. And what has here been said of marital love applies also, with adaptations, to the love of God and the love of our fellow men. Nowhere will love submit to the direct command of duty. But indirectly, gradually, through suggestion and considerate modes of approach, it is well within our control. The Golden Rule, bidding us love God and our neighbor, is not a psychological blunder.

(6) How does friendship differ from love? Like love, it differs from partnership through having an entirely personal basis. Within its limits partnership is as genuinely mutual as love itself, but its mutuality refers to ends outside the personal lives. These remain detached and individual, merely co-operating for a time to accomplish an external purpose. In both love and friendship the personalities merge. Their interests become identified, so that one of the parties without the other is but a fragmentary being.

But friendship differs from love in the degree of intensity of its emotion and in the extent of the tract of life covered. In these respects it more nearly resembles liking. We all know how slight a friendly feeling may be, even when entirely genuine. This is because of the well-recognized limits of friendship, limits sometimes narrow, sometimes broad. I take John for my friend on account of his wit, James for his scholarship, Henry for discussion of art, Charles for theology. Outside these matters we have little in common. If I try to introduce these friends to other sides of me, I know that our friendship would be strained. Love knows no such limits. In it there is no holding back. There the more we give the more we have. Not that in friendship we set up such limits by our own volition, as is done in partnership. The limits are ingrained in the persons, and beyond them we know it is futile to press. When two natures have certain sides that fit, to the advantage of each, a friendship springs up. But how embarrassing when some friend whom we greatly value has limitations which oblige us to pause and he, not perceiving them, attributes to our adverse will the failure in full mutual accord! Because of its narrow bounds and because it is sought for individual gain, friendship is of far wider currency than love. We make and drop our friendships with comparative ease, hardly from the first expecting them to be lasting. But a love to which we contemplated an end, either in extent or duration, would be already ended. The Greeks justly eulogized friendship as our best security in an uncertain world. And, obviously, he is imprudent who does not surround himself with a protecting band of friends.

Let me, in closing this section, call attention to these varieties of personal contact, all of which are desirable. We all need a multitude of acquaintances, can, indeed, hardly have too many. These are persons whose faces and names we know, with something of their occupations and history. While we know them only on the outside our impressions of them are favorable, and their nod, smile, or passing greeting brightens the moment and makes us feel at one with our species. These do not attain the rank of friends, to whom we expose sections of our lives, in whose characters we see admirable traits which are less developed in ourselves, and on whom we lean in times of doubt, trouble, and ignorance. Such steadying friends will not be a large company and should be chosen deliberately, not through juxtaposition, but on grounds of merit and adaptation to our needs. Closer than these, however, should come our intimates, one or two, those to whom we give whole-hearted love. From such an intimate we hide nothing, not even our faults. To him we express our half-thoughts, make up our minds in company with his, find excellence easy in his presence and yet, to our daily astonishment, see that he obtains as much from us as we from him. Him we love. He is another self, and all that is ours is his also.

Such, then, is love and such its varieties and shadings. Parted from mutuality, altruism has little worth. Only where love is, where the conjunct self has taken the place of the separate self, is altruism completely realized. In such love morality attains its goal. Accordingly, in every age those most impassioned for the formation of character have exalted love as its central principle. The first to perceive its importance and to begin an exploitation of its labyrinths was Plato. To love he has dedicated three of his Dialogues. In the first of them, the delightful little piece called Lysis, he busies himself with the contradictions of love. He does not seek to establish a positive doctrine. No conclusion is reached, but the enigmatic character of love is brought out with extraordinary vividness. The greatest of his love dialogues, and one which has profoundly influenced all subsequent ages, is the Symposium, beautifully translated by the poet Shelley under the name of The Banquet. Socrates and his friends assembling one evening, it is proposed that instead of general conversation they shall talk on some specific subject, and love is selected. One speaker after another reports what he has seen in love—its dignity, its heavenly and earthly types, its universality as an underlying principle of physical nature, the supposed origin of the separate self and its subsequent desire for completion, love as the organizer of human life. Then Socrates points out how the true significance of love lies in its passion for perfection and how it continually supersedes its lower forms in the interest of what is larger. The most obscuring of these lower forms, the least regardful of anything beyond itself, is that instinctive passion between the sexes which tries to monopolize the name of love. Friendship is more intelligent. Unities of a still wider and firmer kind are disclosed in the social, artistic, and scientific impulses. These are all prompted by love and follow increasing grades of beauty. Religion, however, alone reveals the full significance of these struggles toward conjunction; for God is the only complete wholeness, and every endeavor to unite with other things or persons is but a blind seeking after him. Love appears once more in the Phædrus, where its deeper implications are traced in connection with rhetoric and general philosophy.