“is a colossal thing; it overtops the world.  For, if every individual had the choice between his own destruction and that of every other person in the world, I need not say what the decision would be in the vast majority of cases.”

“Many a man,” he declares on another page,[22] “would be capable of killing another merely to get some fat to smear on his boots.”  The grim old pessimist confesses that at first he advanced this opinion as a hyperbole; but on second thought he doubts if it is an exaggeration after all.  Had he been more familiar with the habits of savages, he would have been fully justified in this doubt.  An Australian has been known to bait his fish-hook with his own child when no other meat was at hand; and murders committed for equally trivial and selfish reasons are every-day affairs among wild tribes.

EGOTISM, NAKED OK MASKED

Egoism manifests itself in a thousand different ways, often in subtle disguise.  Its greatest triumph lies in its having succeeded up to the present day in masquerading as love.  Not only many modern egotists, but ancient Egyptians, Persians, and Hindoos, Greeks, and Romans, barbarians and savages, have been credited with love when in reality they manifested nothing but sexual self-love, the woman in the case being valued only as an object without which the beloved Ego could not have its selfish indulgence.  By way of example let us take what Pallas says in his work on Russia (III., 70) of the Samoyedes: 

“The wretched women of this nomadic people are obliged not only to do all the house-work, but to take down and erect the huts, pack and unpack the sleigh, and at the same time perform slavish duties for their husbands, who, except on a few amorous evenings, hardly bestow on them a look or a pleasant word, while expecting them to anticipate all their desires.”

The typical shallow observer, whose testimony has done so much to prevent anthropology from being a science, would conclude, if he happened to see a Samoyede on one of these “amorous evenings,” that he “loved” his wife, whereas it ought to be clear to the most obtuse that he loves only himself, caring for his wife merely as a means of gratifying his selfish appetites.  In the preceding pages I endeavored to show that such a man may exhibit, in his relations to a woman, individual preference, monopolism, jealousy, hope and despair and hyperbolic expression of feeling, yet without giving the slightest indication of love—­that is, of affection—­for her.  It is all egoism, and egoism is the antipode of love, which is a phase of altruism.  Not that these selfish ingredients are absent in genuine love.  Romantic love embraces both selfish and altruistic elements, but the former are subdued and overpowered by the latter, and sexual passion is not love unless the altruistic ingredients are present.  It is these altruistic ingredients that we must now consider, beginning with sympathy, which is the entering wedge of altruism.