which seem to convey the correct meaning, but in fact fail to do so. An average human being is indifferent to the good or evil fortune: of most other human beings, but has an emotional interest in a certain number of his fellow-creatures. This interest may involve pleasure in their good fortune and pain in their evil fortune; or it may involve pain in their good fortune and pleasure in their evil fortune; or it may involve one of these attitudes in certain respects and the other in certain other respects. I shall call these three attitudes, friendly, hostile, and mixed, respectively. Broadly speaking, the second of the four goods which we wished to see realized in a community is the friendly attitude combined with as little as possible of the hostile attitude. But this is only a rough preliminary characterization of what I mean.
Biologically speaking, the purpose of life is to leave a large number of descendants. Our instincts, in the main, are such as would be likely to achieve this result in a rather uncivilized community. Biological success, in such a community, is achieved partly by co-operation, partly by competition. The former is promoted by friendly feeling, the latter by hostile feeling. Thus on the whole, we feel friendly towards those with whom it would be biologically advantageous to co-operate if we lived in uncivilized conditions, and hostile towards those with whom, in like conditions, it would pay us to compete. In all genuine friendship and hostility there is an instinctive basis connected with biological egoism (which includes the survival of descendants). Some religious teachers and moralists preach friendly feeling as a duty, but this only leads to hypocrisy. A great deal of morality is a cloak for hostility posing as "true kindness," and enabling the virtuous to think that in persecuting others out of their "vices" they are conferring a benefit. When I speak of friendly feeling I do not mean the sort that can be produced by preaching; I mean the sort which is instinctive and spontaneous. There are two methods of increasing the amount of this kind of feeling. One is physiological, by regulating the action of the glands and the liver; everyone knows that regular exercise makes one think better of other people. The other is economic and political, by producing a community in which the interests of different people harmonize as much as possible and as obviously as possible. Moral and religious teaching is supposed to be a third method, but this view seems to rest on a faulty psychology.
