Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 1.djvu/411

ALTRUISM in St. John's Pro-Cathedral, Altoona, 24 September. There has been a steady growth of the Catholic population, especially from immigration. Almost every nationality is represented; Slavs and Italians predominate in the mining districts. There are some scattered Greek and Syrian Catholics within the limits of the diocese, who are visited occasionally by priests of their own nationality. The diocese is amply supplied with priests, and almost every parish has its school. The relations of the Catholic with the non-Catholic body are all that could be desired, the good influence of the early Catholic settlers having done much to disarm prejudice. Catholics are well represented in the social, business, and professional life of the community.

In the diocese there are seventy-four secular priests and sixteen regulars; with forty lay brothers, members of religious communities; about three hundred members of the various sisterhoods, chiefly engaged in teaching; and thirty parish schools educating seven thousand children. The Franciscan Brothers conduct a college at Loretto, with an average attendance of about one hundred students; the Sisters of Mercy have a flourishing academy at Cresson, with about the same number of young ladies. There is a children's home at Ebensburg, in charge of the Sisters of St. Joseph, with about seventy-five inmates.

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Altruism, a term formed by Auguste Comte in 1851, on the Italian adjective altrui, and employed by him to denote the benevolent, as contrasted with the selfish propensities. It was introduced into English by George H. Lewes in 1853 (Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences, 1, xxi), and popularized thereafter by expounders and advocates of Comte's philosophy. Though used primarily, in a psychological sense, to designate emotions of a reflective kind, the immediate consequences of which are beneficial to others, its important significance is ethical. As such it defines a theory of conduct by which only actions having for their object the happiness of others possess a moral value. Anticipations of this doctrine are found in Cumberland's "De Legibus Naturæ" (1672), and in Shaftesbury's "Inquiry concerning Virtue and Merit" (1711). Comte, however, is the founder of the Social Eudæmonism, based on Positivism, to which the name of Altruism is given. Comte's system is both ethical and religious. Not only is the happiness to be found in living for others the supreme end of conduct, but a disinterested devotion to Humanity as a whole is the highest form of religious service. His ethical theory may be epitomized in the following propositions. (1) The dominion of feeling over thought is the normative principle of human conduct, for it is the affective impulses that govern the individual and the race. (2) Man is under the influence of two affective impulses, the personal or egoistic, and the social or altruistic. (3) A just balance between these two is not possible, one or other must preponderate. (4) The first condition of individual and social well-being is the subordination of self-love to the benevolent impulses. (5) The first principle of morality, therefore, is the regulative supremacy of social sympathy over the self-regarding instincts. To bring about the reign of altruism Comte invented a religion which substituted for God an abstraction called Humanity. To this new supreme being, worship was to be paid, especially in its manifestations and representatives, woman, namely, and the benefactors of the race.

The religious part of Comte's system was never acceptable to more than a few of his adherents. It was too extravagant, and as he himself confesses, it transcended positive science. Even Littré, one of the earliest, ablest, and most ardent of his followers, disavowed it. In England, it is true, it has one advocate of prominence, Frederic Harrison. Practically, however, it has ceased to attract any attention. The main defects of Comte's ethical system are those that are common to all forms of Eudæmonism: its norm of morality is relative and contingent; it possesses no principles by which the quality of its subject-matter, social happiness, may be defined; its imperative imposes no moral obligation. Its special defects are mainly those of Positivism, which denies or ignores any reality beyond external facts, and recognized no law except the successions, coexistences, and resemblances of those phenomena. Hence it can set before us no summum bonum outside the region of sense. It confounds physical law with moral law, the fact that the affective faculty moves to action sufficing to make it also the norm of action. It, moreover, contracts the field of morality, and immorality as well, by making purely personal virtue or vice non-ethical. The English school of Altruists differs from the French in appealing to psychology for their facts, and in interpreting them by the principles of evolution. Comte based his system on a theory of cerebral physiology borrowed with modifications from Gall. Littré found the origin of morality in two primary physiological needs, nutrition, and reproduction, and in their transformation into the conflicting impulses of egoism and altruism. Both rejected the evolutionary hypothesis, and looked with disfavour on psychology. The representative exponent of English altruism is Herbert Spencer. The leading features of his system are these: (1) Conduct becomes ethical in the latest stages of evolution, when it assumes social aspects, when namely its tendency is to raise the aggregate happiness of the community. (2) The sense of duty originates in egoistic feelings of utility. But these in the process of evolution are modified by experience which associates personal happiness with social, political, and religious well-being and their sanctions. These associated experiences are recorded in the brain, and by hereditary transmission, and accumulation in successive generations they finally become certain faculties or moral intuitions, which we mistake for the voice of a superhuman authority. (3) The conflict between egoism and altruism is not to be removed by giving preponderance to either, since pure egoism and pure altruism are both fatal to society; but by compromise of their respective claims such that the final result will be general altruism, as distinguished from the altruism that ministers to the egoistic satisfaction of others only, whether these others be individuals, or the community impersonally conceived. (4) This reconciliation can only be reached when society is perfectly evolved; when namely we are so constituted that our spontaneous activities are congruous with conditions imposed by our social environments and social relations are so complete in their adjustments that altruism will not be associated with self-sacrifice, nor egoism with disregard for others. (5) Hence the distinction between Absolute Ethics which formulates the behaviour of the completely adapted man in completely evolved society, and Relative Ethics which enjoins only what is relatively right, or least wrong. The former serves as a standard by which we estimate divergences from right; the latter by which we guide ourselves, as well as we can, in solving the problems of real conduct. By absolutely right conduct is understood, of course, that which produces pleasure unalloyed with pain; by relatively right conduct, that which has any painful concomitants or consequences.

Spencer's system is eudæmonistic and, therefore, subject to the defects already noted. Moreover, he reduces the moral imperative to a psychological con-