That fact, in itself a quite undoubted one, is the possession by man of a certain special and important feeling, which, viewed from its passive side, we call sympathy, and from its active side, benevolence.  It exists in various degrees in different people, but to some degree or other it probably exists in all.  Most people, for instance, if they hear an amusing story, at once itch to tell it to an appreciative friend; for they find that the amusement, if shared, is doubled.  Two epicures together, for the same reason, will enjoy a dinner better than if they each dined singly.  In such cases the enjoyment of another plays the part of a reflector, which throws one’s own enjoyment back on one.  Nor is this all.  It is not only true that we often desire others to be pleased with us; we often desire others to be pleased instead of us.  For instance, if there be but one easy chair in a room, one man will often give it up to another, and prefer himself to stand, or perhaps sit on the table.  To contemplate discomfort is often more annoying than to suffer it.

This is the fact in human nature on which the positive school rely for their practical motive power.  It is this sympathy and benevolence that is the secret of the social union; and it is by these that the rules of social morality are to be absorbed and attracted into ourselves, and made the directors of all our other impulses.

The feelings, however, that are thus relied on will be found, on consideration, to be altogether inadequate.  They are undoubted facts, it is true, and are ours by the very constitution of our nature; but they do not possess the importance that is assigned to them, and their limits are soon reached.  They are unequal in their distribution; they are partial and capricious in their action; and they are disturbed and counterbalanced by the opposite impulse of selfishness, which is just as much a part of our nature, and which is just as generally distributed.  It must be a very one-sided view of the case that will lead us to deny this; and by such eclectic methods of observation we can support any theory we please.  Thus there are many stories of unselfish heroism displayed by rough men on occasions such as shipwrecks, and displayed quite spontaneously.  And did we confine our attention to this single set of examples, we might naturally conclude that we had here the real nature of man bursting forth in all its intense entirety—­a constant but suppressed force, which we shall learn by-and-by to utilise generally.  But if we extend our observations a little farther, we shall find another set of examples, in which selfishness is just as predominant as unselfishness was in the first set.  The sailor, for instance, who might struggle to save a woman on a sinking ship, will trample her to death to escape from a burning theatre.  And if we will but honestly estimate the composite nature of man, we shall find that the sailor, in this latter case, embodies a tendency far commoner, and far more to be counted on, than he does in the former.  No fair student of life or history will, I think, be able to deny this.  The lives of the world’s greatest men, be they Goethes or Napoleons, will be the first to show us that it is so.  Whilst the world’s best men, who have been most successful in conquering their selfish nature, will be the first to bear witness to the persistent strength of it.