crificed, so that reproduction is no response to his original hopes
and aspirations; yet in a double way he is enticed and persuaded to be
almost satisfied: first, in that so like a counterfeit of himself
actually survives, a creature to which all his ideal interests may be
transmitted; and secondly, because a new and as it were a rival aim is
now insinuated into his spirit. For the impulse toward reproduction has
now become no less powerful, even if less constant, than the impulse
toward nutrition; in other words, the will to live finds itself in the
uncongenial yet inevitable company of the will to have an heir.
Reproduction thus partly entertains the desire to be immortal by giving
it a vicarious fulfilment, and partly cancels it by adding an impulse
and joy which, when you think of it, accepts mortality. For love,
whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and
prompts a man to give his life for his friends. In thus losing his life
gladly he in a sense finds it anew, since it has now become a part of
his function and ideal to yield his place to others and to live
afterwards only in them. While the primitive and animal side of him may
continue to cling to existence at all hazards and to find the thought of
extinction intolerable, his reason and finer imagination will build a
new ideal on reality better understood, and be content that the future
he looks to should be enjoyed by others. When we consider such a natural
transformation and discipline of the will, when we catch even a slight
glimpse of nature's resources and mysteries, how thin and verbal those
belated hopes must seem which would elude death and abolish sacrifice!
Such puerile dreams not only miss the whole pathos of human life, but
ignore those specifically mortal virtues which might console us for not
being so radiantly divine as we may at first have thought ourselves.
Nature, in denying us perennial youth, has at least invited us to become
unselfish and noble.

A first shift in aspiration, a capacity for radical altruism, thus
supervenes upon the lust to live and accompanies parental and social
interests. The new ideal, however, can never entirely obliterate the old
and primary one, because the initial functions which the old Adam
exclusively represented remain imbedded in the new life, and are its
physical basis. If the nutritive soul ceased to operate, the
reproductive soul could never arise; to be altruistic we must first be,