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74 our own powers profitlessly, and shall try to preserve our own health, and to cultivate our own wits in useful ways, all this is to tell us that unselfish wise men are not fanatics. It may be useful to say this, but it is not useful to the discussion of fundamental moral doctrines. We want to know, for the first, not how successfully to be altruistic, or selfish, but why the effort to be altruistic or to be selfish is morally right or wrong.

If now such comparisons of the claims of altruism and egoism throw no light on the fundamental moral questions, what shall we say of the chance that the “conflict” may be explained or diminished by any proof that the evolution of our race will tend in time to diminish, or even to extinguish, the opposition? If some one shows us that by and by the most selfish being in the social order will find it his own bliss to give as much bliss as he can to everybody else, so that men shall all be even as the people at a successful party, getting pleasure as freely as they give it, and giving it because they get it: and if such predictions seem to anybody to help us to know what duty is, then what can we say in reply, save to wonder at the insight that sees the connection between all these facts and our present duty? If a society ever does grow up in which there are no moral conflicts, nothing but a tedious cooing of bliss from everybody, then in that society there will be no moral questions asked. But none the less we ask such. If the people of that day no longer