sympathy; but this situation must
be actually attained in part, before it can be conceived or judged to
be an authoritative ideal. The tigers cannot regard it as such, for it
would suppress the tragic good called ferocity, which makes, in their
eyes, the chief glory of the universe. Therefore the inertia of
nature, the ferocity of beasts, the optimism of mystics, and the
selfishness of men and nations must all be accepted as conditions for
the peculiar goods, essentially incommensurable, which they can
generate severally. It is misplaced vehemence to call them
intrinsically detestable, because they do not (as they cannot)
generate or recognise the goods we prize.

In the real world, persons are not abstract egos, like _A_ and _B_, so
that to benefit one is clearly as good as to benefit another. Indeed,
abstract egos could not be benefited, for they could not be modified
at all, even if somehow they could be distinguished. It would be the
qualities or objects distributed among them that would carry, wherever
they went, each its inalienable cargo of value, like ships sailing
from sea to sea. But it is quite vain and artificial to imagine
different goods charged with such absolute and comparable weights; and
actual egoism is not the thin and refutable thing that Mr. Russell
makes of it. What it really holds is that a given man, oneself, and
those akin to him, are qualitatively better than other beings; that
the things they prize are intrinsically better than the things prized
by others; and that therefore there is no injustice in treating these
chosen interests as supreme. The injustice, it is felt, would lie
rather in not treating things so unequal unequally. This feeling may,
in many cases, amuse the impartial observer, or make him indignant;
yet it may, in every case, according to Mr. Russell, be absolutely
just. The refutation he gives of egoism would not dissuade any fanatic
from exterminating all his enemies with a good conscience; it would
merely encourage him to assert that what he was ruthlessly
establishing was the absolute good. Doubtless such conscientious
tyrants would be wretched themselves, and compelled to make sacrifices
which would cost them dear; but that would only extend, as it were,
the pernicious egoism of that part of their being which they had
allowed to usurp a universal empire. The twang of intolerance and of
self-mutilation is not absent from the ethics of Mr. Russell and Mr.
Moore, even as it