The attempt made by King Philip to convert the Netherlands into a Spanish dependency and to govern it by Spanish ministers excited the resentment of Egmont and other leading members of the Netherlands aristocracy. Between him and Cardinal Granvella, the all-powerful minister of the regent Margaret of Parma, there was no love lost. As a member of the council of state Egmont joined the prince of Orange in a vigorous protest addressed to Philip (1561) against the autocratic proceedings of the minister; and two years later he again protested in conjunction with the prince of Orange and Count Horn. In the spring of 1564 Granvella left the Netherlands, and the malcontent nobles once more took their places in the council of state. The resolve, however, of Philip to enforce the decrees of the council of Trent throughout the Netherlands once more aroused their resentment. Although himself a good Catholic, Egmont had no wish to see the Spanish Inquisition established in his native country. Orange, Egmont and others were convinced that the enforcement of the decrees in the Netherlands was impossible, and, in January 1665, Egmont accepted a special mission to Spain to make known to Philip the state of affairs and the disposition of the people. At Madrid the king gave him an ostentatiously cordial reception, and all the courtiers vied with one another in lavishing professions of respect upon him. They knew his vain and somewhat unstable character, and hoped to win him over without conceding anything to the wishes of the Netherlanders. The king gave him plenty of flatteries and promises, but steadily evaded any serious discussion of the object of his mission, and Egmont finally returned home without having accomplished anything. At the same time Philip sent further instructions to the regent to abate nothing of the severity of the persecution.
Egmont was naturally indignant at the treatment he had received, while the terrors of the Inquisition were steadily rousing the people to a state of frenzied excitement. In 1566 a confederacy of the lesser nobility was formed (Les Gueux) whose principles were set out in a document known as the Compromise. From this league Egmont held aloof; he declined to take any step savouring of actual disloyalty to his sovereign. He withdrew to his government of Flanders, and as stadtholder took active measures for the persecution of heretics. But in the eyes of Philip he had long been a marked man. The Spanish king had temporized only until the moment arrived when he could crush opposition by force. In the summer of 1567 the duke of Alva was despatched to the Netherlands at the head of an army of veterans to supersede the regent Margaret and restore order in the discontented provinces. Orange fled to Germany after having vainly warned Egmont and Horn of the dangers that threatened them. Alva was at pains to lull their suspicions, and then suddenly seized them both and threw them in the castle of Ghent. Their trial was a farce, for their fate had already been determined before Alva left Spain. After some months of imprisonment they were removed to Brussels, where sentence was pronounced upon them (June 4) by the infamous Council of Blood erected by Alva. They were condemned to death for high treason. It was in vain that the most earnest intercessions were made in behalf of Egmont by the emperor Maximilian, by the knights of the order of the Golden Fleece, by the states of Brabant, and by several of the German princes. Vain, too, was the pathetic pleading of his wife, who with her eleven children was reduced to want, and had taken refuge in a convent. Egmont was beheaded at Brussels in the square before the town hall on the day after his sentence had been publicly pronounced (June 5, 1568). He met his fate with calm resignation; and in the storm of terror and exasperation to which this tragedy gave rise Egmont’s failings were forgotten, and he and his fellow-victim to Spanish tyranny were glorified in the popular imagination as martyrs of Flemish freedom. From this memorable event, which Goethe made the theme of his play Egmont (1788), is usually dated the beginning of the famous revolt of the Netherlands. In 1865 a monument to Counts Egmont and Horn, by Fraiken, was erected on the spot where they were beheaded.
Bibliography.—T. Juste, Le Comte d’Egmont et le comte de Hornes (Brussels, 1862), Les Pays-Bas sous Philippe II, 1555–1565 (2 vols., Brussels, 1855); J. L. Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555–1584 (3 vols., London, 1856); J. P. Blok, History of the People of the Netherlands (tr. from Dutch), vol. iii. (New York, 1900); R. Fruin, Het voorspel van den tastigjarigen oorlag (Amsterdam, 1866); E. Marx, Studien zur Geschichte des niederländischen Aufstandes (Leipzig, 1902). (G. E.)
EGOISM (from Gr. and Lat. ego, I, the 1st personal pronoun),
a modern philosophical term used generally, in opposition to
“Altruism,” for any ethical system in which the happiness or
the good of the individual is the main criterion of moral action.
Another form of the word, “Egotism,” is really interchangeable,
though in ordinary language it is often used specially (and
similarly “egoism,” as in George Meredith’s Egoist) to describe
the habit of magnifying one’s self and one’s achievements, or
regarding all things from a selfish point of view. Both these
ideas derive from the original meaning of ego, myself, as opposed
to everything which is outside myself. This antithesis of ego
and non-ego, self and not-self, may be understood in several
senses according to the connexion in which it is used. Thus the
self may be held to include one’s family, property, business, and
an indefinitely wider range of persons or objects in which the
individual’s interest is for the moment centred, i.e. everything
which I can call “mine.” In this, its widest, sense “a man’s Self
is the sum total of all that he can call his” (Wm. James, Principles
of Psychology, chap x.). This self may be divided up in many
ways according to the various forms in which it may be expressed.
Thus James (ibid.) classifies the various “selves” as the material,
the spiritual, the social and the “pure.” Or again the self may
be narrowed down to a man’s own person, consisting of an
individual mind and body. In the true philosophical sense,
however, the conception of the ego is still further narrowed down
to the individual consciousness as opposed to all that is outside
it, i.e. can be its object. This conception of the self belongs
mainly to metaphysics and involves the whole problem of the
relation between subject and object, the nature of reality, and
the possibility of knowledge of self and of object. The ordinary
idea of the self as a physical entity, obviously separate from
others, takes no account of the problem as to how and in what
sense the individual is conscious of himself; what is the relation
between subject and object in the phenomenon of self-consciousness,
in which the mind reflects upon itself both past and present?
The mind is in this case both subject and object, or, as William
James puts it, both “I” and “me.” The phenomenon has been
described in various ways by different thinkers. Thus Kant
distinguished the two selves as rational and empirical, just as
he distinguished the two egos as the noumenal or real and the
phenomenal from the metaphysical standpoint. A similar
distinction is made by Herbart. Others have held that the self
has a complex content, the subject self being, as it were, a fuller
expression of the object-self (so Bradley); or again the subject
self is the active content of the mind, and the object self the
passive content which for the moment is exciting the attention.
The most satisfactory and also the most general view is that
consciousness is complex and unanalysable.
The relation of the self to the not-self need not to be treated here (see Metaphysics). It may, however, be pointed out that in so far as an object is cognized by the mind, it becomes in a sense part of the complex self-content. In this sense the individual is in himself his own universe, his whole existence being, in other words, the sum total of his psychic relations, and nothing else being for him in existence at all. A similar idea is prominent in many philosophico-religious systems wherein the idea of God or the Infinite is, as it were, the union of the ego and the non-ego, of subject and object. The self of man is regarded as having limitations, whereas the Godhead is infinite and all-inclusive. In many mystical Oriental religions the perfection of the human self is absorption in the infinite, as a ripple dies away on the surface of water. The problems of the self may be summed up as follows. The psychologist investigates the ideal construction of the self, i.e. the way in which the conception of the self arises, the different aspects or contents of the self and the relation of
