own sakes, while, by a counter process, what is disobedient and bad becomes undesirable, and is thought of as such. For this cause alone the good would please; but, in addition, the nature of what the child is taught to think good is, in the main, what is on the whole pleasant, while indulgence in the bad brings on the whole contradiction and pain. The good accords with itself, the bad does not, and the child soon finds this out. Other furthering incentives we need not consider; the fact remains, that the child finds pleasure in the approval of the superior and in that which the superior approves of, and pain in the contrary; and further, that he does so directly and unreflectingly. To will what the superior wills is an end in itself.
In all this what is there selfish? Of course, if the child were habitually to say to itself, ‘Will doing this be a means to my pleasure or pain?’ and were to act accordingly, that question might be awkward. And I do not say that children, more especially when they get older, never do argue in this way; nor can I deny that I have heard ‘morality’ being taught them so,—a lesson, it seems to me, which, if not perilous, can fail to be so only because understood in a sense other than its simple meaning. But, roughly speaking, the process of learning to be good is as I have described it, and such calculating reflections are abnormal, and in infancy impossible; and the developement being in the main what has been sketched above, I repeat the question, Is there anything selfish?
‘Oh yes,’ we shall hear, ‘what moves is the idea of pleasure’—but of that fiction I think we must really have had enough. A child, when it tries to please its mother, is as unselfish as the hen who faces death for her chickens, as unselfish as the dog who gives his life for his master. The point is once more, what is before the mind in the act? Are there any ideas of my pleasure, as my pleasure, there or not? If any one maintains that my dog follows me about, and frets when I leave him, because of ideas of his own private pleasure as such which are ‘associated’ with me, I can not argue with such a man: we split upon a question of fact, and have no common ground. If any one tells me (and I have heard people say it) that a dog loves his master for what he has got from him or expects to get from him, I say
