which the human faculties are capable, and becomes the permanent stimulus to thousands of worthy lives. It is usually looked upon as the highest of all motives, and by some as the ultimate goal toward which all action should aspire. It should first be observed that the very act of doing good presupposes evil, i. e., pain. Doing good is necessarily either increasing pleasure or diminishing pain. Now if all devoted themselves to doing good it is maintained that the sufferings of the world would be chiefly abolished. Admitting that there are some evils that no human efforts could remove, and supposing that by united altruism all removable evils were done away, there would be nothing left for altruists to do. By their own acts they would have deprived themselves of a calling. They must be miserable, since the only enjoyment they deemed worthy of experiencing would be no longer possible, and this suffering from ennui would be among those which lie beyond human power to alleviate. An altruistic act would then alone consist in inflicting pain on one's self for the sole purpose of affording others an opportunity to derive pleasure from the act of relieving it. I do not put the matter in this light for the purpose of discouraging altruism, but simply to show how short-sighted most ethical reasoning is. In the second place it is to be noted that, however pure and exalted this class of pleasure may be, it is one that is somewhat difficult to obtain. Life for the average person is more or less of a humdrum routine, and opportunities for noble acts are rare. Any attempt to go beyond the normal course of uniform politeness, kindness, uprightness, and honesty, becomes dramatic or quixotic, and is readily detected as a sham. Only in hospital and asylum work is there room to devote a life to ministration, and even there it is found that scientific nursing is better than the mere display of sympathy and zeal.
For my own part I never have regarded the altruistic as the highest and purest of human motives. I place above them in this scale the pleasures of the intellect, and would make this the sixth and last class. The brain is not merely the organ of knowing. It is an emotional center also, and the feelings to which
