Page:Essays on the Principles of Human Action (1835).djvu/143

 fare. Self-love used in the sense which the above objection implies must therefore mean something very different from an exclusive principle of deliberate, calculating selfishness, which must render us indifferent to every thing but own advantage, or from the love of physical pleasure and aversion to physical pain, which would produce no interest in any but sensible impressions.

Supposing therefore that our most generous feelings and actions were equivocal, the object only bearing a shew of disinterestedness, the motive being always selfish, this would be no reason for rejecting the common use of the term disinterested benevolence, which expresses nothing more than an immediate reference of our actions to the good of others, as self-love expresses a conscious reference of them to our good, as means to an end. This is the proper meaning of the terms. If there is any impropriety in the one, the other must be equally objectionable, the same fallacy lurks under both.

Secondly, the objection is not true in itself, that is, I see no reason for resolving the feelings of compassion, &c. into a principle of mechanical self-love. That the motive to action exists in the mind of the person who acts, is what no one can deny. The passion excited and the impression producing it must necessarily affect the individual. There must always be some one to feel and act, or there could be no such thing as feeling or action. It cannot therefore be implied as a condition in the love of others, that this love should not be felt by the person who loves them, for this would be to say that he must love them and not love them at the same time, which is palpable nonsense. This absurd inference, I say, could never be implied in the common use of the terms, as it could never be imagined