so much in the loss of personal pleasures as in the lack of appreciation and return; to do our part when others are not doing theirs takes, indeed, a touch of saintliness.  Socrates drinking the hemlock, Jesus dying in agony on the cross, Regulus returning to be tortured at Carthage, were deliberately sacrificing their personal welfare for the good of other men.  And in numberless ways a host of heroic men and women have practiced and are daily practicing unrewarded self-denial in the name of love and service, self-denial which by no means always brings a joy commensurate with the pain.  These are the abnormal cases; but the abnormal is, after all, not so very uncommon.  And for these men and women we must grieve, while we honor and admire them and hold them up for imitation.  Society must insist on just such sacrifices when they are necessary for the good of the whole, and must so train its youth that they will be willing to make them when needful.

What is the exact meaning of selfishness and unselfishness?

Selfishness is the pursuance of one’s own good at the expense of others.  A mistaken idea, which it is necessary to guard against, is that selfishness must be conscious, deliberate.  It is not uncommon for a person accused of selfishness to say, or think, “This is an unjust accusation; I have not had a selfish thought!” But unconscious selfishness is by far the commoner sort; millions of essentially good-hearted people are guilty of selfish acts through thoughtlessness and stagnant sympathy.  Conscious cruelty is rare compared with moral insensibility.  It cannot be too often repeated that selfishness is not a way of feeling about people, it is a way of acting toward them.  To be wholly free from selfish conduct necessitates insight into the needs and feelings of others as well as a vague good will toward them.  The girl who allows her mother to drudge that she may have immaculate clothes, the mother who keeps her son at home when he ought to be given the opportunity of a wider life, is conscious only of love; but she is really putting her own happiness before that of the loved one.  The owner of the vilest tenement houses is sometimes a generous and benevolent-minded man, the luxuriously rich are often honest and glad to confer favors, the political boss is full of the milk of human kindness; but the superficial or adventitious altruism of such men should not blind us to their fundamental, though often entirely unrealized, selfishness.  A complementary fallacy is that which denies the epithet “unselfish” to a man who enjoys helping others.  Who has not heard the cynical remark, “There’s nothing unselfish about So-and-So’s benevolence that is his enjoyment in life!” Such a comment ignores the fact that the goal of moral progress lies precisely at the point where we shall all enjoy doing what it is our duty to do.  Altruistic impulses are our own impulses, as well as egoistic ones; the distinction between them lies not in the pleasure they may give to their possessor, or the sacrifice they may demand, but in the objective results they tend to attain.  Happy is the man whose delight is in the law of the Lord!  Unselfish action is, in the broader sense, all action that is not selfish; in the narrower and positive sense, it is all action that tends to the welfare of others at the expense of the narrower interests of the individual.