make thy interests into the interests of society, and by so doing be true to thyself.” But now such altruism, as one at once sees, has no right to parade itself as genuine altruism at all, and if it be the end of conduct, there is no moral conduct distinct from cleverness. But if this be true, it is at least incumbent upon the moralist to explain why the popular ideal of unselfishness is thus so very far wrong.
More or less disguised, the doctrine here generally stated appears in modern discussion since Hobbes. Let us follow it into some of its hiding-places, and to that end let us distinguish selfishness and unselfishness as ideals or ends of conduct, from selfishness and unselfishness as means, accidentally useful to get an end.
III.
Altruism is the name of a tendency. Of what tendency? Is it the result or the intent that makes a deed altruistic? Was our hero an altruist when he gave to his adopted daughter the name and the enjoyment of a possessor of wealth? Or would he have needed in addition to all this a particular disposition of mind ere he could be called an altruist?
We need not dispute about mere names as such. Let everybody apply the name Altruism as he will; but possibly we shall do well to recall to the reader’s mind what ought nowadays to be the merest commonplace of ethics, namely, that we cannot regard any quality as moral or the reverse, in so far as the expression of it is an external accident, with which the man himself and his deliberate aim have nothing
