uence of a new desire of
pleasure, distinct from the desires of particular objects, are essential
to egoism. The idea of an _alter-ego_, _i.e._, of a community with
others which makes their interests our own, and hence the rise of a love
for them,--which is not merely disinterested as the animal appetites are
disinterested, because they tend directly to their objects without any
thought of self, but disinterested in the sense that the thought of self
is conquered or absorbed, is essential to altruism. Each of these
tendencies may in its matter, or rather in its first matter, coincide
with the appetites; viewed from the outside, they may seem to be nothing
higher than hunger or thirst, or sexual or parental impulse, but their
form is different. They are changed as by a chemical solvent, which
dissolves and renews them; nay, as by a new principle of life, whose
first transformation of them is nothing but the beginning of a series of
transformations both of their matter and their form; so that, in the
end, the simple direct tendency to an object--the uneasiness which
sought its cure without reflection either upon itself or upon anything
else--becomes changed, on the one side, into a gigantic ambition and
greed, which would make the whole world tributary to the lust of the
individual, and, on the other, into a love of humanity in which
self-love is altogether transcended or absorbed. Neither of these,
however, nor any lower form of either, is in such wise _external_ to
reason, that we can talk of them as determining it to an end which is
not its own. Both are simply the expression in feeling of that essential
opposition of the self to the not self, and at the same time that
essential unity of the self with the not self, which are the two
opposite, but complementary, aspects of the life of reason. And the
progressive triumph of altruism over egoism, which constitutes the moral
significance of history, is only the result of the fact that an
individual, who is also a conscious self, cannot find his happiness in
his own individual life, but only in the life of the whole to which he
belongs. A selfish life is for him a contradiction. It is a life in
which he is at war with himself as well as with others, for it is the
life of a being who, though essentially social, tries to find
satisfaction in a personal or individual good. The "intelligence" and
the "heart" equally condemn such a life; it is not only a crime but a
blunder. For