A. And what is that? I do not exactly comprehend.
B. Why, that self-love means, both in common and philosophical speech, the love of self.
A. To be sure, there needs no ghost to tell us that.
B. And yet, simple as it is, both you and many great philosophers seem to have overlooked it.
A. You are pleased to be obscure—unriddle for the sake of the vulgar.
B. Well then, Bishop Butler’s statement in the volume I have mentioned——
A. May I ask, is it the author of the Analogy you speak of?
B. The same, but an entirely different and much more valuable work. His position is, that the arguments of the opposite party go to prove that in all our motives and actions it is the individual indeed who loves or is interested in something, but not in the smallest degree (which yet seems necessary to make out the full import of the compound ‘sound significant,’ self-love) that that something is himself. By self-love is surely implied not only that it is I who feel a certain passion, desire, good-will, and so forth, but that I feel this good-will towards myself—in other words, that I am both the person feeling the attachment, and the object of it. In short, the controversy between self-love and benevolence relates not to the person who loves, but to the person beloved—otherwise, it is flat and puerile nonsense. There must always be some one to feel the love, that’s certain, or else there could be no love of one thing or another—so far there can be no question that it is a given individual who feels, thinks, and acts in all possible cases of feeling, thinking, and acting—‘there needs,’ according to your own allusion, ‘no ghost come from the grave to tell us that’—but whether the said individual in so doing always thinks of, feels for, and acts with a view to himself, that is a very important question, and the only real one at issue; and the very statement of which, in a distinct and intelligible form, gives at once the proper and inevitable answer to it. Self-love, to mean any thing, must have a double meaning, that is, must not merely signify love, but love defined and directed in a particular manner, having self for its object, reflecting and reacting upon self; but it is downright and intolerable trifling to persist that the love or concern which we feel for another still has self for its object, because it is we who feel it. The same sort of quibbling would lead to the conclusion that when I am thinking of any other person, I am notwithstanding thinking of myself, because it is I who have his image in my mind.
A. I cannot, I confess, see the connection.
B. I wish you would point out the distinction. Or let me ask you—Suppose you were to observe me looking frequently and earnestly at myself in the glass, would you not be inclined to laugh, and say that this was vanity?