is only an
indirect kind of self-love, or a shadow cast by self-love, still it is
self-love so transformed as to imply a wholly different set of
convictions, and to require a different name.

_L'Esprit_ is one of the most striking instances in literature of the
importance of care in choosing the right way of presenting a theory to
the world. It seems as if Helvetius had taken pains to surround his
doctrine with everything that was most likely to warn men away from it.
For example, he begins a chapter of cardinal importance with the
proposition that personal interest is the only motive that could impel a
man to generous actions. "It is as impossible for him to love good for
good's sake as evil for the sake of evil." The rest of the chapter
consists of illustrations of this; and what does the reader suppose that
they are? The first is Brutus, of all the people in the world. He
sacrificed his son for the salvation of Rome, because his passion for
his country was stronger than his passion as a father; and this passion
for his country, "enlightening him as to the public interest," made him
see what a service his rigorous example would be to the state. The other
instances of the chapter point the same moral, that true virtue consists
in suppressing inducements to gratify domestic or friendly feeling, when
that gratification is hostile to the common weal.[122]

[122] _Disc._ ii. 5.

It may be true that the ultimate step in a strictly logical analysis
reduces the devotion of the hero or the martyr to a deliberate
preference for the course least painful to himself, because religion or
patriotism or inborn magnanimity have made self-sacrifice the least
painful course to him. But to call this heroic mood by the name of
self-love, is to single out what is absolutely the most unimportant
element in the transaction, and to insist on thrusting it under the
onlooker's eye as the vital part of the matter. And it involves the most
perverse kind of distortion. For the whole issue and difference between
the virtuous man and the vicious man turns, not at all upon the fact
that each behaves in the way that habit has made least painful to him,
but upon the fact that habit has made selfishness painful to the first,
and self-sacrifice painful to the second; that self-love has become in
the first case transformed into an overwhelming interest in the good of
others, and in the second not so. Was there ever a greater perversity
than to talk