esolved not
to separate himself from the great community of honourable people
who have the earth in possession, and whose laws are recognised
everywhere. He knows that a single dishonest act will ostracise and
proscribe him from that society for ever. No! a man will spend money
on any soil that yields him good fruit, and he will make sacrifices
for it.

With a good action,--that, every action in which a man's own advantage
is ostensibly subordinated to another's,--the motive is either (1)
self-interest, kept in the background; or (2) superstition, in other
words, self-interest in the form of reward in another life; or (3)
sympathy; or (4) the desire to lend a helping hand, in other words,
attachment to the maxim that we should assist one another in need, and
the wish to maintain this maxim, in view of the presumption that some
day we ourselves may find it serve our turn. For what Kant calls a
good action done from motives of duty and for the sake of duty, there
is, as will be seen, no room at all. Kant himself declares it to be
doubtful whether an action was ever determined by pure motives of duty
alone. I affirm most certainly that no action was ever so done; it is
mere babble; there is nothing in it that could really act as a motive
to any man. When he shelters himself behind verbiage of that sort, he
is always actuated by one of the four motives which I have described.
Among these it is obviously sympathy alone which is quite genuine and
sincere.

_Good_ and _bad_ apply to character only _a potiori_; that is to say,
we prefer the good to the bad; but, absolutely, there is no such
distinction. The difference arises at the point which lies between
subordinating one's own advantage to that of another, and not
subordinating it. If a man keeps to the exact middle, he is _just_.
But most men go an inch in their regard for others' welfare to twenty
yards in regard for their own.

The source of _good_ and of _bad character_, so far as we have any
real knowledge of it, lies in this, that with the bad character the
thought of the external world, and especially of the living creatures
in it, is accompanied--all the more, the greater the resemblance
between them and the individual self--by a constant feeling of _not I,
not I, not I_.

Contrarily, with the good character (both being assumed to exist in
a high degree) the same thought has for its accompaniment, like a
fundamental bass, a constant feeling of _I, I, I_. From t