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ALTRUISM
ITS NATURE AND VARIETIES
ALTRUISM
ITS NATURE AND VARIETIES
THE ELY LECTURES FOR 1917–18
BY
GEORGE HERBERT PALMER
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK ❦ ❦ ❦ ❦ 1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published January, 1919
[Illustration]
THE ELY FOUNDATION
The Elias P. Ely Lectureship was founded by Mr. Zebulon Stiles Ely, May
8, 1865. The deed of gift contains the following paragraphs:
“The undersigned gives the sum of ten thousand dollars to the Union
Theological Seminary of the City of New York to found a Lectureship
in the same, the title of which shall be the ‘Elias P. Ely Lectures
on the Evidences of Christianity,’ on the following conditions:
“The course of lectures given on this foundation is to comprise any
topics that serve to establish the proposition that Christianity is
a religion from God, or that it is the perfect and final form of
religion for man. Among the subjects discussed may be the nature
and need of a revelation; the character and influence of Christ and
His apostles; the authenticity and credibility of the Scriptures,
miracles, and prophecy; the diffusion and benefits of Christianity;
the philosophy of religion in its relation to the Christian system.”
Under date of May 24, 1879, Mr. Ely addressed a communication to the
Directors of the Seminary in which the conditions of the Lectureship
are amplified as follows:
“The conditions of the foundation of the Elias P. Ely Lectureship,
dated May 8, 1865, are hereby modified, so that the course of
public lectures therein provided for, may not only be on ‘The
Evidences of Christianity,’ but on such other subjects as the
Faculty and Directors, in concurrence with the undersigned, while
living, may deem for the good of man.”
PREFACE
I here present the substance of eight Ely Lectures delivered in the
spring of 1918 at Union Theological Seminary in New York. They were
spoken without manuscript. In writing them out from the stenographer’s
notes I have condensed them considerably. In these belligerent days
publishers are disposed to economize paper and print, and readers
to prize brevity in everything except newspapers. Such restrictions
force on us loquacious bookmakers greater regard for compactness and
lucidity, and are thus not altogether an injury.
The book seeks to call attention to a section of ethics in regard to
which the public mind greatly needs clarifying. Altruism and egoism,
socialism and individualism, are in our time sentimentally arrayed
against one another as independent and antagonistic agencies, each
having its partisans. A careful examination will show, I think, that
the one has meaning only when in company with its supposed rival. I
have thought to make this clearest by tracing three stages through
which the altruistic impulse passes in every-day life, exhibiting their
varying degrees of dignity and the helpful presence in all of them of
egoistic balance. If through my notion of a conjunct self I have made
this curious partnership plain I shall count it no mean contribution to
our generous, sacrificial, self-assertive, and perplexed time.
GEORGE HERBERT PALMER.
CAMBRIDGE, October 21, 1918.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. MANNERS 13
III. GIFTS 32
IV. DEFECTS OF GIVING 56
V. MUTUALITY 75
VI. LOVE 91
VII. JUSTICE 110
VIII. CONCLUSION 126
ALTRUISM
ITS NATURE AND VARIETIES
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
I have been moving about lately through different parts of our country,
sitting down to dinner in many homes, and I have everywhere found the
family eating bread made of Indian meal, rye, barley, or oatmeal. When
I have asked, “Are you especially fond of this sort of food?” I have
pretty generally received the answer, “Why, no! We all like wheat bread
better. But we are not eating it now, for other nations need it.”
That is altruism, one of the most fundamental, familiar, and mysterious
of all the virtues. This course of lectures will be devoted to
elucidating it. To a recognition of it the Western mind has risen
slowly. The Greeks attached little importance to it; for though
philanthropy, regard for man as man, is a Greek word, it is not a
Greek idea. Plato does not include it among his four virtues nor
anywhere lay stress on its practice. In Aristotle’s _Ethics_, it is
true, there are magnificent chapters on friendship, and friendship
plays a great part in the teaching of the Epicureans and Stoics. But
all alike speak of attachment to another person chiefly as a means
of strength for oneself. The thought of whole-hearted giving without
correspondent personal gain would have puzzled a Greek.
When we turn to the other branch of our civilization and examine what
we have derived from the Hebrews, we find a nearer approach to modern
ideas. Commonly enough the Hebrews speak of mercy and grace, and pair
these off against justice and truth. Apparently when these terms are
applied to God’s dealings with us, the second pair indicates his exact
return for what we have done for him; but the first pair points to
something over and above, a surplusage of generosity, lying outside the
field of equal pay. God is conceived as altruistic and we are summoned
to imitate him in this. Jesus develops the thought to such a degree
that love becomes the centre of his teaching. We are told that without
it all other excellence is worthless. We must love as God loves,
letting our sun shine on the evil and on the good. Indeed, we must love
even our enemies.
While modern nations have allowed such precepts to stand as counsels of
perfection and have been ready to see in occasional acts an embodiment
of them, parallel with them they have always recognized a contrary and
more powerful tendency, namely, the disposition to seek one’s own. This
they have believed to be essential for carrying on the daily affairs
of life. At the same time altruistic conduct has ever been thought
“superior,” “higher”; egoistic, as containing nothing to call forth
admiration.
When men, however, began to think seriously about ethics it became
impossible to allow two such springs of action to remain in permanent
discord. Attempts were made to bring them into harmony by showing that
the one is only a disguised form of the other. Hobbes, for example
(1588–1679), the first in his great book, _Leviathan_, to stir the
English mind to ethical reflection, maintains that altruism is strictly
impossible. Each of us seeks self-preservation and acts through a
passion for power. This necessarily brings us into conflict with
our neighbors and makes of society a strife of each with all. Such
universal war is soon seen to bring damage to every one and social
compacts arise, compromises, under which I concede to others the right
of acting in certain ways on condition of their allowing my action
in certain others. While this involves large sacrifice of one’s own
desires for the sake of other people, it is endured because it pays,
pays egoistically. We gain by it the largest scope for action our
crowded world permits. But there is nothing disinterested about it.
Genuine altruism is nowhere operative. A man cannot escape from himself
and feel another’s pleasure as his own. As well might I profess to
feel your toothache more keenly than my own as to declare myself more
interested in your welfare than in that of myself. Fundamentally, each
of us must be egoistic; but we can be successfully so only by taking
others into the account.
This attempt of Hobbes to resolve altruism into a larger form of
egoism naturally shocked England, and a century was spent by the
English moralists in trying to prove that the benevolent feelings
are equally original with the self-seeking. Cumberland, Shaftesbury,
Hutcheson, Butler, eagerly demonstrated benevolence to be a constant
and independent factor of human life; but when they attempted to show
the relation in which this stands to its seeming opposite, they became
vague. Apparently there are two rival forces within us. Now one acts,
now the other.
A few of the attempts that have been made to effect a junction of the
two, and to show how we cross from our egoistic to altruistic desires,
deserve notice. Hartley (1705–1757) proposed an ingenious one. The two
passions become fused through association. We are all familiar with the
man who begins to accumulate money in order to supply his daily wants
and then by degrees withdraws his attention from those wants and fixes
it upon money itself. What was originally a means becomes an end. In
just this way Hartley thought our egoistic desires become transformed.
To reach satisfaction they usually require assistance from other
people. Conscious at first of our dependence on others for aid, we
become by degrees interested in others for their own sake, and finally
seek to aid them rather than have them aid us. Our self-regarding
powers and our extra-regarding powers are thus by association blurred
into one. An important school of ethical writers, among whom the two
Mills are the most notable, have held this view.
An interesting variation was adopted by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832).
It might be called the quantitative view. The one thing desired by us
all is happiness. We seek to produce as much of it as possible, paying
little attention to the one on whom it falls. Of course our primary
desire looks toward ourselves. But in seeking to increase that bulk of
happiness from which we draw, egoism largely disappears in the search
after the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This formula must
always be convenient and valuable in a democratic state.
One of the most curious of these methods of extracting altruistic gold
from a baser metal is that of Bishop Paley (1743–1805). According to
him we have none of us an interest in our fellows’ happiness and
should never of ourselves seek it. But we read in our Bibles the
command to love our neighbor and are told that we shall fall into
eternal misery if we do not. With his customary audacious clearness
Paley states the matter thus: “The greatest virtue is doing good
to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of
everlasting happiness.” That is, the one thing of importance is
altruistic endeavor. But this is so alien to our disposition that it
can be brought about only through divine interposition, making it a
condition of our own permanent enjoyment.
A subtler doctrine, and one much closer to the facts of human nature,
is that of Adam Smith (1723–1790). He has observed how large a part
sympathy plays in our ordinary affairs. If I am near a person when
he is moved by any feeling, that feeling tends to jump across and to
become mine also. Such identification of myself and him gives pleasure
to us both. We all have experienced how sympathy heightens enjoyment
and diminishes distress. In sympathy two sets of feelings become so
nearly identified that the result can be called neither egoistic nor
altruistic.
Now I do not propose in these lectures to combat or defend any of these
theories. No one of them seems to me to be without weight, all deserve
consideration, and something like the operation of each I trace in
people around me. The one with which I am in largest agreement is the
last, where Adam Smith would identify the two moral aims. But all the
theories are vitiated by a false start, which in these lectures I wish
to avoid.
Each of them looks upon man in his original estate as a self-centred
being, a distinct ego. By degrees this single person discovers other
persons about him and learns that he must have relations with them.
The relations may be altruistic or egoistic, but they are subsequent
and supplemental. In himself he is separate and detached. Now, I hold
that this conception is altogether erroneous. There is no such solitary
person. One person is no person. The smallest known unit of personality
is three, father, mother, child. None of us came into the world in
separateness, nor have separately remained here. Relations have
encompassed us from birth. Through them we are what we are, social
beings, members of a whole. While it is true that the ties of parentage
loosen as the child matures, these drop away only because others,
now more formative, take him in charge. Before we have a separate
consciousness we know ourselves as members of a family, of a state, of
the community of human kind. We never stand alone.
Not that it is an error to say “I.” This, properly, is our commonest
word and commonest thought. Only with reference to it does anything
else have value. However interlocked the total frame of things may be,
at certain centres where relations converge there are unique spots
of consciousness capable of estimating reality and of sending forth
modifying influences. Such a centre of consciousness, unlike all else,
we rightly call a person, a self or ego; and because of its importance
we often fix attention on it, withdrawing notice for the moment from
the relations which encompass it. Such an abstraction, if clearly
understood, is entirely legitimate. I shall frequently make use of
it under the title of the separate or abstract self. But it should
be borne in mind that it is an abstraction and that the real person
is what I shall call the conjunct or social self, made up of that
centre of consciousness and the relations in which it stands. While
these two are usefully distinguishable, they are not separable. When
I try to detach myself from my surroundings I know I am attempting an
impossibility. How much would there be left of me were there no one
but this central ego, none with whom I might communicate, no language
prepared for communication or thought, no common affections, interests,
or undertakings? Evidently we are from the start social beings.
If with the early moralists we make the opposite assumption, our
subsequent interest in our fellow men will never quite clear itself of
artificiality and mistake.
Yet while the separate self and the conjunct self lodge in the same
being, the degree and kind of attention accorded to the latter marks
the stage of moral maturity at which man or nation has arrived. In
certain undeveloped forms of social life the conjunctive elements
are but slightly emphasized, while the separate self bulks large.
With the advance of morality the opposite principle obtains. Wider
and more subtle relationships are seen to make our lives our own.
Many as are these social varieties, I have thought they might
advantageously be examined under three headings, to which I give the
rather unintelligible names of Manners, Gifts, and Mutuality. While
recognizing that every phase of human life is altruistic in some
degree, I hold that there are higher grades which give to the principle
a prominence and scope which the lower lack. My general subject, then,
might be entitled The Forms and Stages of the Conjunct Self. I begin
where the conjunctive principle appears in its narrowest range and
advance into the broader altruism only as I am logically compelled to
do so. Endeavoring to see how small a section of human conduct need be
affected by altruism, I am ultimately forced to make it as extensive as
life itself.
Maintaining, however, as I do, that the two contrasted elements always
are and should be mutually serviceable, I naturally have nothing to
say in condemnation of self-seeking. On the contrary, I hold it to be
praiseworthy. Rightly does Aristotle assert that the good man is always
a lover of himself. But of which self is Aristotle thinking, the
conjunct or the separate? Much of the mystery surrounding the notion of
altruism is due to confusion on this point. For example, when a man is
charged with selfishness it is usually because he is thought to have
obtained some advantage. But why should he not? He is blamable only
when he detaches the thought of his own advantage from advantage to
others. My good must not be had at another’s expense. When a plate of
apples is passed and I pick out the best one, the wrong is not in my
obtaining a good apple but in my depriving somebody else of one. That
is selfishness. Whenever my gain is not inconsistent with his or, as is
usually the case, actually contributes to it, the larger the gain made
by me the better.