yet all are not called selfish. Lastly, it is not a general name for the bad self, because all sorts of wrong-doing are not indiscriminately called selfish. Weak yielding, self-conceit, pride, revenge and other vices are not so called. It would be absurd, for instance, to say ‘how selfish!’ when we hear of a murder; and we see at once that, though selfishness belongs to the bad self, it is not co-extensive with it. If we ask what selfishness is, the readiest answer will be perhaps ‘thinking only of yourself;’ and this appears to be right, though it needs explanation. Thinking only of oneself implies first that we think, that we are self-conscious reflecting beings; and hence it seems a misnomer to call a beast or a young child selfish. Secondly, we think of nothing but ourselves; and this means that the ends we set before us have not an objective content which is desired for itself, and without regard to its relation to our private selves. The selfish man, so far as he is selfish, has objects of desire which are not subordinated to any principle higher than his private satisfaction. If you ask what is the general end which includes his ends, you can point to none; but you find that he treats all objects as means, that he cares for none in itself, but will sacrifice any with readiness; and when you enquire what is common to them all, you find that they minister to his personal comfort; this comfort being a certain quantum of the pleasant and of absence of pain, which satisfies him, and which he either consciously aims at or unconsciously uses as a measure of all objects of desire. The ideal voluptuary consciously pursues pleasure in abstraction; the real voluptuary consciously pursues the pleasant feelings which come from the satisfying of certain desires; the selfish man pursues the generally pleasant, and avoids the painful in general, neither separating the feeling of pleasure as an explicit end, nor troubling himself with hunting for the pleasant for the sake of the pleasant, but making objects his end, either consciously or unconsciously, only so long as they are pleasant. If he separated pleasure from the pleasant and hunted for the maximum of that, he would be the ideal voluptuary: if he hunted for a certain sort of pleasant feeling as such, he would be the real voluptuary. He is neither; he is characterized not so much by his end as his absence of end, by his readiness to use anything as a mere means, to be let go when it ceases to serve the
Page:Ethical Studies (reprint 1911).djvu/254
