But love has produced effects that seem to contradict its nature.
It can be conceived that I increase my own happiness by a sacrifice
which I offer for the happiness of others; but suppose this sacrifice is
my life? History has examples of this kind of sacrifice, and I feel most
vividly that it would cost me nothing to die in order to save Raphael.
How is it possible that we can hold death to be a means of increasing
the sum of our enjoyments? How can the cessation of my being be
reconciled with the enriching of my being?
The assumption of immortality removes this contradiction; but it also
displaces the supreme gracefulness of this act of sacrifice. The
consideration of a future reward excludes love. There must be a virtue
which even without the belief in immortality, even at the peril of
annihilation, suffices to carry out this sacrifice.
I grant it is ennobling to the human soul to sacrifice present enjoyment
for a future eternal good; it is the noblest degree of egotism; but
egotism and love separate humanity into two very unlike races, whose
limits are never confounded.
Egotism erects its centre in itself; love places it out of itself in the
axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude.
Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot
in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the
ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the
throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the
following moment, or with the view to a martyr’s crown—indifferent
whether the reward is in this life or in the next.
Think, O Raphael, of a truth that benefits the whole human race to
remote ages; add that this truth condemns its confessor to death; that
this truth can only be proved and believed if he dies. Conceive this man
gifted with the clear all-embracing and illumining eye of genius, with
the flaming torch of enthusiasm, with all the sublime adaptations for
love; let the grand ideal of this great effect be presented to his soul;
let him have only an obscure anticipation of all the happy beings he
will make; let the present and future crowd at the same time into his
soul; and then answer me,—does this man require to be referred to a
future life?
The sum of all these emotions will become confounded with his
personality; will flow together in his personal identity, his I or Ego.
The human race he is thinking of is himself. It is a body, in which his
life swims forgotten like a blood-drop, forgotten, but essential to the
welfare of the economy; and how quickly and readily he will shed it to
secure his health.