SELF AND UNSELF.
WE are indebted to an intimate friend of the late James Hinton, for an interesting letter, published in another column, wherein she defends Mr. Hinton's conception of dis- interestedness from the charge of in any way favouring that sort of devotion to the good of others, which checks the growth of a man's own individuality, and dries up the fountain of impulse. Various striking passages are quoted from Mr. Hinton's writings, to allow how strenuously he deprecated any- thing of the kind,—how heartily he approved of trusting freely to impulse, when once the mind ha a been raised to the level of a 'predominant regard for the good of all. He did not, we are told, deprecate passion, he only asked for more and higher passion than we ordinarily see. "Instead of employing their moral force in restraining their passions, men should aim at having a passion that needs no restraint. Turn the energy which you devote to putting flames out, to kindling flames. The flames are all very well, and do not want putting out—we only want more of them." Nay, Miss Haddon thinks that Mr. Hinton went so far in this direction as to anticipate a time when devo- tion to the good of all should have so interpenetrated all indivi- dual purposes and aims, as to render it safe to follow the law of impulse alone, as distinguished even from the conscious pursuit of the welfare of others. He thought men should more and more emulate the life of Nature. "In Nature," he taught, "everything is a means, nothing is an end ;" "and what is Altruism," says Miss Haddon, "but this, to regard oneself truly as a means, and not falsely as an end ? It is to be true to the fact of being, nothing more." "Through the liberating touch of other's needs upon his sympathies, man's heart was to be set free from the bondage of self-regard ; but this work done, it was conceivable that there should not be any longer a conscious reference to others in his actions. Impulse was clearly meant to be his guide; even now it is in many cases the only possible one, and the question is how to make it safe to follow it. That question having been solved in the education of the race through obedience to the law of service, there would be no hindrance to the fullest exercise of liberty." And another able admirer of Mr. Hinton writes to us that his hope was to see man, as he gradually discovered his own relative insignificance in the universe, and adapted his life to the conviction that he formed but an infinitesimal part of it, gradually losing that need of restraint which Mr. Hinton believed to be due, :in great measure at least, to the over-importance which, on their fleet appearance in the world, human beings naturally attach to that which concerns themselves. "While we are on the level of , choice between mine and thine, we have, of course, to restrain our undue bias towards mine ; but if our minds and affections ' can be set on something altogether above personal interest, there will still, indeed, be sacrifice, in the sense of willing en- durance of pain believed to tend towards the ultimate blessing of all, but there can no longer be any rivalry, or grudging, or sense of personal injury, or indeed giving up by one to another, for one who truly cares for the universal good can scarcely be said to care for anything else, and can certainly not presume to have a choice about the means by which it is to be accomplished."
From all which it appears that Mr. Hinton's conception of Altruism, so far from restraining individuality, or personal genius, or the authority of impulse, contemplated, eventually at least, a condition of things in which good men would attach a far higher authority to individual tendencies and impulses than they do now, when man would be so completely welded by disinterested sympathies into the system of Nature, that no impulse hurtful to the good of the whole could gain any real strength within him, so that it might be quite safe,—which now it is not,—for a man to take his individual desire as the needle by which he could most safely and most wisely steer his course. In other words, the Altruism of which there is now so much need, is only a temporary leaven, which must spread through human nature till the desire of anything injurious to mankind at large becomes impossible ; and, that stage once reached, the guidance of Nature will once more be safe, and human beings at liberty to follow their im- pulses as the tree follows its impulse in putting out its leaves, or the river in flowing towards the ocean. When human nature is thus freed from the temporary passion of selfishness, man will be again a free child of Nature, and all his doings will be the unique fruits or blossoms of wholesome, though varied stocks. Hence it appears that living for others is rather a temporary means to the purification of a temper which at present renders it unsafe to live simply by impulse, than the final ideal of life. It is an inoculation or graft, needful to make the life of Nature safe for us, but the inoculation once successful, the ease and simplicity of the purely natural life become again the truer ideal.
We do not know how far this notion, attributed to Mr. Hinton, of the intrinsically temporary character of the life of Altruism, would be accepted by the ether apostles of the Altruistic Creed, but to our minds, instead of removing the objection which has been stated in these columns to the principle of endeavouring to live solely for others, it increases it. For we hold that to maintain and improve the true character of every moral and rational creature is an end in itself, and not merely a means ; and though an end which must, if it is worth anything, imply the faithful service of many other ends, yet one also which should be kept consciously in view during the pursuit of all these other ends, and which should never be sacrificed to them. We object to that ideal of life which makes one man live solely for others, and not also for himself as one amongst those others ; but we object still more to that ideal of life which looks upon man as a mere part of Nature, to be ruled by Nature's spon- taneous principles of growth ; and this for the obvious reason that it ignores the very highest part of man's life ; that you can- not be really disinterested to any purpose unless there is a " you," and a " you" of some import, to take interest in others ; and that the only effect of driving you to lose yourself absolutely, whether in others or in the great whole of Nature, is to make the best elements of human life quite worthless. It is the free, conscious, and separate life and aims of each personality which alone give real value to service. Imagine, if you can, a universe in which every one was so disinterested that his interests were solely these of others, and you imagine a world in which there are no interests at all. The very warmth and colour of disinterestedness spring from the diffraction of the various interests, as they break and blend into each other. If you have no life of your own to sacrifice, you have nothing to give. If you go aside from nothing of your own to serve another, the service is vapid and colourless. It is the breaking of the ray of light which creates colour. It is the breaking of one interest against another in life, which gives the moral colour to true service and the affections which that service fosters. With- out the self, there is no not-self. Without the vivid sphere of your own personal tendencies, there is no possibility of subor- dinating those tendencies to the tendencies of others. The
radical blunder in the idea of Altruism is that it tries to extin- guish the primary term without which the word ' alter ' is un- meaning. A vacuum may be altruistic in kindly consenting to be occupied by matter, but it is certainly not disinterested ; for it has no interests of its own to resign. All the beauty of love springs from the distinction between the ends and aims and thoughts and feelings and tastes and gifts, of those whom love unites. Abolish what is positive in self, and you abolish with it what is elevating in ceasing (in part) to be yourself, and becoming (in part) another. That which is in itself nothing real and essential, cannot become anything real and essential to another. It takes a life to lose a life, or lay down a life. If you have no richness of life to begin with, you cannot gain it by giving it away.
"Well, but," our correspondents of this week will say, "this is precisely our position. Mr. Hinton was the apostle of indi- vidual life and impulse, not its assailant. To him, Altruism meant not any insipid merging of yourself in others, but that needful extinction of all that is covetous and greedy, and selfish and hostile to the well-being of others in oneself, which will alone render it safe to trust implicitly to the guidance of individual impulse and feeling." That is true, no doubt, but Mr. Hinton, if truly represented, fell into precisely the same error from the other side. Altruism is the attempt to substitute the nature of others for your own. Mr. Hinton's teaching was an attempt to persuade us that the nature of man could be so transformed that no such substitution would be needful, because all Nature would be united in a natural and involuntary harmony. Both conceptions alike rest on a false ignoring of the real self, a false idea that you ought to be able to get rid of the anxious personal duty of weighing your own duties and aims against those of other people, and deciding by the aid of reason and conscience when you are to be yourself, and when you are to cease to be your- self, and more orless to merge yourself in another. We aay there is no receipt, and never ought to be any receipt, for dispensing with this duty. The better men become, the more real it will be, not the less real. Unselfish persons,—the most unselfish persons,—have to dis- charge it, no less than the most selfish,—unselfishness not consisting in having no -self to sacrifice, but in being always willing and ready to give it up, to whatever seems a worthier end of some one else's. It is not unselfish to 'sacrifice your soul,' as the theologians would say,—or to sin advisedly,—in order to gain a benefit for another, however great. The only sphere in which you really can be answerable for the triumph of what is good, is your own soul ; and if you surrender the good cause there, for the sake of any end whatever, you surrender it in the only world in which you can ever hope to secure it. Un- selfishness consists in sacrificing your own wishes to the wishes of other people, where there is no moral surrender of the right. But even that does not imply that your wishes should not be there, and should not assert themselves. If they were not there, the meaning of the sacrifice would cease. And Mr. Hinton, in looking forward to a life in which all con- straint of the impulses should cease, and men might become again a part of the free and spontaneous life of Nature, really looked forward to a life in which the highest encl. of life should have ceased to be. The 'liberty' of Nature is no liberty at all ; it is not liberty, but involuntariness. To all true liberty, will, and conscious will, is essential ; so that the life of for- tunately-regulated impulses is not really a human life. Indeed, the doctrine,—even if so noble-minded a man as Mr. Hinton really held it,—that man ought to be a mere part of Nature,—not an end, but a means,—that he should think of himself simply as a means to other ends, seems to us an unfortunate and misleading kind of pantheism. It is closely allied with the doctrine that everything is ever becoming something else, that there is no such thing as real being,—that there is no steady purpose possible in life, but only impulses, them- selves always on the change, which dispose of us without our own conscious participation in that disposal. But as truly as we believe that God is not Change, that He is a perfectly righteous and powerful Being, to whom all our life should be gradually drawn closer and assimilated, so truly we believe that in order toattain to that end, every man must be himself, must become himself—his true self—more and more as life goes on ; and that he can only become his tree self by constantly resigning that which he, if he were not the member of a society, would rightly and naturally covet, in order to contribute to the life of that society, at the expense of his own. But in order that this may be possible, he must regard himself as an end, and not simply as a. means,—as an end which is indeed only one amongst many ends, which is an organic part of a great whole, which cannot be fulfilled without those other ends being fulfilled also, but which, again, cannot be lost without many of those other ends being more or less lost too. Every attempt to merge man in the involuntary order of Nature seems to us an attempt to miss the real meaning and beauty of self-sacrifice, in missing the self without which sacrifice is impossible.
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