FROM SELFISHNESS TO

BENEVOLENCE.

ALL

I.

EGOTISM AND ALTRUISM.

LL the sins of man against man, be they sins of omission or commission, all envy, hatred, calumny, malevolence, fraud, violence, persecution, spring from selfishness. Egotism, unrestrained and unqualified, is the root of all unrighteousness in feeling, thought, and action. Moral evil does not come from without; it is not produced like physical evil by the constitution of external nature. Its source is in the unregenerated heart of man, such as is shut up within itself and is wholly absorbed in the love of self. We call this selfishness.

Selfishness is self-love perverted, or rather it is self-love in its primitive force. It is self-love still swayed by blind instincts. It is self-love not yet enlightened and guided by reason, not yet controlled by the moral ideas and transformed by tender fellow-feeling into love for others. That selfishness is so very common, so intense and persistent and so hard to conquer, is due to the fact that it is selflove in its untamed, original form of manifestation. For self-love is a tremendous inborn power. It is the primary and all-dominating element of our consciousness. It is a sleepless energy which is actively present in nearly every movement of our mind. We naturally refer all things, all events, and even all ideas, to ourselves, and their value is in the last resort determined by us in accordance with the beneficial or injurious or indifferent relations which they

bear to our own well-being. Every man is after all the center of the universe to himself.

But there is a vast difference between self-love purified and ennobled by wisdom, changed by moral and religious and social forces into love of God and man, and self-love in its natural state. If left entirely to its own low, instinctive promptings, self-love tends to make our own welfare, real or imaginary, the sole object of every imagination and thought of our heart. It will assert itself with ruthless selfishness. It will have no thought for the happiness of others. It will pursue its purely egotistical aims without any regard for the feelings and interests of other human beings. Selfishness or self-love not yet taken in hand and disciplined by the moral ideas, will isolate the individual so that he will live in a narrow, miserable little world of his own, without contact with the noble, vast world of humanity around him. If such self-love were given full sway, if it ever became general, it would break up human society into mutually-repelling, mutuallydevouring units. There would be a perennial war of all against all. Man would be a mere animal amongst animals, a fierce beast of prey, more cunning than the fox, more cruel than the tiger, more venomous than the serpent. In fact, the few men who came as near being absolutely selfish as is possible for human nature to be, proved themselves monsters of cruelty, veritable fiends incarnate, who filled the earth with violence of every kind. If all human beings were like them, if all were creatures exclusively determined by motives of pitiless egotism, the human race would have no right and reason to live. Its existence would be a blot upon creation. Its complete destruction by some fearful cataclysm, such as a universal deluge, would be a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But perfect egotism or absolute selfishness is impossible to the children of men, save perhaps a few monstrous criminals such as Richard III and Iago. Those human

monsters known to history who belong to the category of Richard and Iago were as a rule descended from a long line of degraded ancestors and had passed through a long apprenticeship in wickedness. Indestructible and ever present as is self-love, it yet contains within itself the vital germ of altruism, or the love of others. The human race has at no period of its secular life suffered itself to be wholly governed by motives of selfishness. Everywhere altruism has been a mighty factor in developing the distinctive marks of humanity, in molding thought, in shaping conduct. The chiefest and noblest process of human history consists in bringing altruism, or love of others, to birth, in investing it with power to regulate the relations of man to man.

It has ever been the office of religion and ethics to combat the evils of selfishness, to wrench the scepter of sovereign power from the hands of egotism. Relentless war upon loveless selfishness, determined effort to make justice and love prevail in the hearts and actions of men, is common to all advanced religions and codes of ethics. But there is a radical difference in their methods, in the view they take of the relation of self-love to altruism, or the love of others. All systems of morality fall apart into two broad classes. One class, of which Buddhism is the most extreme development, assumes that altruism, or the love for others with the duties and sacrifices it implies, is hopelessly opposed to self-love and its claims. It holds that there is an irreconcilable conflict between the selfregarding and the other-regarding tendencies of man, ascribing the former to what it calls our lower nature and the latter to what it designates as our higher nature. The systems of ethics, religious or philosophical, which belong to this class, regard altruism alone as distinctly moral, and consider self-love as morally indifferent or even essentially immoral. According to their view, we have duties towards others, but none towards ourselves. The only duty we owe

ourselves is to practice justice and benevolence towards our fellow-men. The other class, of which Yahvism, or the moral monotheism of the Bible, is the highest representative, brings altruism into closest organic connection with self-love. Love for others is conceived as the flower of self-love. Benevolence is the perfect fruit of our unfolding self-love. The duties of justice and mercy bloom forth from the primary duty of self-development and selfexpansion which we owe to our own humanity. The more genuine and spiritual a man's love for himself, the nobler and deeper will his love for his fellow-men be. Those systems of ethics which we call Vahvistic, foster and vitalize love for others by appealing to the highest aspirations of self-love. The opposite system, to which we may give the generic name of Buddhistic, attack and vilify self-love, in order to magnify altruism and cause all our moral energies to be exclusively devoted to it. In giving a succinct exposition of the Buddhistic theory of moral conduct, we are at the same time giving the general characteristics of all kindred systems of morality which are less developed and consistent.

The clearly-conceived and ultimate aim of Buddhism is utterly to destroy the love of self and to substitute for it the love of others, boundless love for all human beings as well as for all dumb creatures. The love of self is declared to be the cause not only of all moral obliquity, of all sins and vices, all hatred and violence, but also of all the physical ills which flesh is heir to. In order to deliver yourself from the curse of moral and physical evil, your love for your own self must become absolutely extinct in you. You must be dead to pleasure and pain, to the pangs of hunger and thirst, of heat and cold. You must grow utterly indifferent to sickness, old age, and death, indifferent to the world's esteem and contempt. You must cut off in yourself every root of desire and hope. The only hope you mortals should cherish is that of being one day wholly

rid of the consciousness of self, the hope of extinguishing in yourself the desire of distinct personality. When you have succeeded in reaching this stage of self-extinguishment, you have entered Nirvana. You have forever broken to pieces the tabernacle of sense-life and have escaped from the miserable prison of selfhood. Then you have attained to Buddhahood and are greater than any god. With the destruction of all your self-love you have voluntarily destroyed your personality together with all evils inseparable from it. You have ceased to be an individual being and become immersed in the universal, dreamless, wishless ground of all appearances.

In order to become thus impersonal, universal, in order to lose his own self and blend with all, a man must put forth tremendous efforts of self-denial and self-forgetfulness. He must live for all but himself, in order to become at one with all. He must lead a life of perpetual self-sacrifice for the good of others. His whole life, all his labors and thoughts must be entirely given to his fellow-creatures, both human and animal. He must cast himself away for them and consume himself for their benefit. He should treat all creatures with infinite pity, carry their life's burden, soothe their pain, feed them, if need be, upon his own heart's blood. He should commiserate them for the very fact that they are in the toils of existence, from which none but a few elect have the power to escape by virtue of their heroic self-extinguishment. For, according to Buddhism, to live is to suffer. Life is a disease, of which all evils are necessary symptoms or concomitants. Although but a small number of men, the wisest of mortals, can be completely cured of this disease called life, yet our love should offer to our hapless fellow-men whatever partial remedies it can find. But the best remedy one can give them, is to teach them the Buddhistic way of salvation, to indicate to them the path to Nirvana, though a few men only have the wisdom and moral courage to tread it to the end.