self of the harmony of felt self and not-self. It is a state of the feeling self; and to make it a motive is to have present to consciousness the idea of my self feeling pleased by this or that means or generally, and to set before us such an idea as our practical end, to which all else conduces; and this once more is not our motive in every act, or in most acts, nor even (as we shall further see) in all our selfish acts.
You may say then that I desire only the pleasant, and that pleasure is my pleasure, and (for argument’s sake if you will) that my pleasure determines me to do in voluntary acts, and also to choose in volitional acts—yet, with all this, you have not made one step towards proving me selfish, by showing that it is the idea of my pleasure as such that I have before me. The difference is between my finding my pleasure in an end, and my finding means for the end of my pleasure; and the difference is enormous.
I hope that to the reader by this time it is no less obvious, and, if this is so, we shall consider the psychological argument for universal selfishness disposed of. The assertion that we are all selfish, not perhaps consciously but yet unconsciously, we shall better be able to consider when we know what selfishness is. For on this head we are no nearer a conclusion than when we set out. All that we have done has been to show the confusion which surrounds the word ‘motive,’[1] and to point out that a pleasant thought, or again the thought of something pleasant, is not the same thing with the thought of pleasure, the thinking of something merely as a means to more or less of pleasant feeling as such.
And now what is selfishness? We have just been hearing of the pursuit of pleasure simply as my pleasure, and it naturally
- ↑ ‘The Motives, or Ends of action, are our Pleasures and Pains.’—Bain, Mental and Moral Science, p. 346. And Emotions, p. 266, ‘The intellect can determine the fitness of means to secure an end; but the end itself must, in the last resort, be some feeling, something desirable or undesirable, some pleasure to be sought, some pain to be avoided, some impulse to be followed out.’ To carry confusion further than this, would not be easy. The identification of the final with the efficient cause is an object which more than one philosophy has striven to attain. But neither that nor any other problem is cleared up by the simple failure to distinguish between the two.
