human beings do feel immediate, selfless, unselfish love for their fellows; and, it was in order to strengthen this conviction that I translated Hume’s Ethics. Selfishness may be the stronger motive. If so, it is the more necessary to ennoble and deliberately to foster our inborn love of mankind; and, if selfish justification be needed, experience shows that, in the last resort, love of our fellow-men is worth while; for it, and the social order which it inspires among normal human beings, satisfy us most fully. What does not pay, in the last resort, is guile.
Nor does the injunction to love imply the total suppression of selfishness though, like love itself, self-love needs to be educated and trained. There is a wise and prudent, just as there is a foolish egoism, and selfish folly is more harmful than foolish humanity. Some people’s ideas of egoism, or selfishness, are vague. It is not always selfish for a man to care chiefly for those about him, his family, his own people. It is there that he can work best, and use his energy to good purpose most easily and constantly. A reasonable man will therefore work for those whom his influence can reach—love must be work for the beloved. Humanity does not consist of sentimental yearning for the weal of the whole world; nor is the energy that is born of talent, precise knowledge, devotion to an idea—Plato’s Eros—a form of selfishness.
It is wrong to assert that humane, human feeling ends by being swamped in morbid susceptibility. Rather the contrary—it calls for reason and practical sense. Precisely because I realize the significance and, in some degree, the priority of feeling, I insist upon reasonableness, education, enlightenment, science and learning. With Dante, I demand Luce intellettual piena d’amore. Some think that the real meaning of love of our neighbour lies in the command that we should love our enemies. Assuredly, we can love our enemies; but, until men have attained this moral height, they might do worse than observe the humane and practical injunction to be just to their enemies.
Who are our neighbours? The Jews had been bidden to love their neighbours, but they conceived them as their own people. Jesus and his followers included other peoples. We interpret the humanitary principle extensively, that is to say politically and juridically, not merely intensively or ethically. Much as we may love our own people, we condemn Chauvinism and cherish the ideal of finding some unitary organization for Europe and for mankind at large. We desire a world-policy.
