When our ancestors wished to account for what led 

men to act in one way or another, they did so in a very 

simple fashion. Down to the present day, certain catholic 

images may be seen that represent this explanation. A man 

is going on his way, and without being in the least aware 

of it, carries a devil on his left shoulder and an angel on

his  right. The devil prompts him to do evil, the angel tries

to  keep him back. And if the angel gets the best of it and

the man remains virtuous, three other angels catch him up

and  carry him to heaven. In this way everything is explained  

wondrously well.

	Old Russian nurses full of such lore will tell you never  

to put a child to bed without unbuttoning the collar of its

shirt. A warm spot at the bottom of the neck should be left 

bare, where the guardian angel may nestle. Otherwise the 

devil will worry the child even in its sleep.

	  These artless conceptions are passing away. But

though  the old words disappear, the essential idea

remains the same.

	Well brought up folks no longer believe in the devil, but 

as their ideas are no more rational than those of our

nurses, they do but disguise devil and angel under a

pedantic wordiness honored with the name of philosophy.

They do not say  "devil" nowadays, but "the flesh," or "the

passions."  The"angel" is replaced by the words

"conscience" or "soul,"  by "reflection of the thought of a

divine creator" or "the  Great Architect," as the Free-

Masons say. But man's action  is still represented as the

result of a struggle between two  hostile elements. And a

man is always considered virtuous  just in the degree to

which one of these two elements      --the  soul or

conscience--  is victorious over the other  --the flesh or 

passions.

	  It is easy to understand the astonishment of our

great-grandfathers when the English philosophers, and

later the  Encyclopedists, began to affirm in opposition to

these primitive ideas that the devil and the angel had

nothing to do  with human action, but that all acts of man,

good or bad,  useful or baneful, arise from a single motive:

the lust for  pleasure.

	  The whole religious confraternity, and, above all,

the numerous sects of the pharisees shouted "immorality."

They  covered the thinkers with insult, they

excommunicated them.  And when later on in the course

of the century the same  ideas were again taken up by

Bentham, John Stuart Mill,  Tchernischevsky, and a host of

others, and when these thinkers began to affirm and prove

that egoism, or the lust for  pleasure, is the true motive of

all our actions, the maledictions redoubled. The books

were banned by a conspiracy of silence; the authors were

treated as dunces.

	 And yet what can be more true than the assertion

they  made? 

	Here is a man who snatches its last mouthful of

bread  from a child. Every one agrees in saying that he is a

horrible egoist, that he is guided solely by self-love.

	 But now here is another man, whom every one

agrees to  recognize as virtuous. He shares his last bit of

bread with  the hungry, and strips off his coat to clothe the

naked. And  the moralists, sticking to their religious

jargon, hasten to say  that this man carries the love of his

neighbor to the point of  self-abnegation, that he obeys a

wholly different passion from  that of the egoist. And yet

with a little reflection we soon  discover that however

great the difference between the two  actions in their result

for humanity, the motive has still been  the same. It is the

quest of pleasure.

	 If the man who gives away his last shirt found no

pleasure  in doing so, he would not do it. If he found

pleasure in  taking bread from a child, he would do that

but this is distasteful to him. He finds pleasure in giving,

and so he gives.  If it were not inconvenient to cause

confusion by employing  in a new sense words that have a

recognized meaning, it might  be said that in both cases

the men acted under the impulse  of their egoism. Some

have actually said this, to give prominence to the thought

and precision to the idea by presenting  it in a form that

strikes the imagination, and at the same  time to destroy

the myth which asserts that these two acts  have two

different motives. They have the same motive,  the quest of

pleasure, or the avoidance of pain, which comes  to the

same thing.

	 Take for example the worst of scoundrels: a Thiers,

who  massacres thirty-five thousand Parisians, or an

assassin who  butchers a whole family in order that he may

wallow in debauchery. They do it because for the moment

the desire of  glory or of money gains in their minds the

upper hand of  every other desire. Even pity and

compassion are extinguished  for the moment by this other

desire, this other thirst. They  act almost automatically to

satisfy a craving of their nature.  Or again, putting aside

the stronger passions, take the petty  man who deceives his

friends, who lies at every step to get  out of somebody the

price of a pot of beer, or from sheer  love of brag, or from

cunning. Take the employer who  cheats his workmen to

buy jewels for his wife or his mistress. Take any petty

scoundrel you like. He again only  obeys an impulse. He

seeks the satisfaction of a craving, or  he seeks to escape

what would give him trouble.

	 We are almost ashamed to compare such petty

scoundrels  with one who sacrifices his whole existence to

free the oppressed, and like a Russian nihilist mounts the

scaffold. So  vastly different for humanity are the results of

these two  lives; so much do we feel ourselves drawn

towards the one  and repelled by the other.

	 And yet were you to talk to such a martyr, to the

woman  who is about to be hanged, even just as she nears

the gallows,  she would tell you that she would not

exchange either her life  or her death for the life of the

petty scoundrel who lives on  the money stolen from his

work-people. In her life, in the  struggle against monstrous

might, she finds her highest joys.  Everything else outside

the struggle, all the little joys of the  bourgeois and his

little troubles seem to her so contemptible,  so tiresome, so

pitiable! "You do not live, you vegetate,"  she would

reply; "I have lived."

	 We are speaking of course of the deliberate,

conscious acts  of men, reserving for the present what we

have to say about  that immense series of unconscious, all

but mechanical acts,  which occupy so large a portion of

our life. In his deliberate,  conscious acts man always seeks

what will give him pleasure.

	 One man gets drunk, and every day lowers himself

to the  condition of a brute because he seeks in liquor the

nervous  excitement that he cannot obtain from his own

nervous system. Another does not get drunk; he takes no

liquor, even  though he finds it pleasant, because he wants

to keep the  freshness of his thoughts and the plentitude of

his powers,  that he may be able to taste other pleasures

which he prefers  to drink. But how does he act if not like

the judge of good  living who, after glancing at the menu

of an elaborate dinner rejects one dish that he likes very

well to eat his fill of  another that he likes better.

	 When a woman deprives herself of her last piece of

bread  to give it to the first comer, when she takes off her

own scanty rags to cover another woman who is cold,

while she  herself shivers on the deck of a vessel, she does

so because  she would suffer infinitely more in seeing a

hungry man,  or a woman starved with cold, than in

shivering or feeling  hungry herself. She escapes a pain of

which only those who  have felt it know the intensity.

	 When the Australian, quoted by Guyau, wasted

away beneath the idea that he has not yet revenged his

kinsman's  death; when he grows thin and pale, a prey to

the consciousness of his cowardice, and does not return to

life till he has  done the deed of vengeance, he performs

this action, a heroic  one sometimes, to free himself of a

feeling which possesses  him, to regain that inward peace

which is the highest of  pleasures.

	 When a troupe of monkeys has seen one of its

members fall  in consequence of a hunter's shot, and

comes to besiege his  tent and claim the body despite  the

threatening gun; when  at length the Elder of the band

goes right in, first threatens  the hunter, then implores him,

and finally by his lamentations induces him to give up the

corpse, which the groaning  troupe carry off into the

forest, these monkeys obey a feeling  of compassion

stronger than all considerations of personal  security. This

feeling in them exceeds all others. Life itself  loses its

attraction for them while they are not sure whether  they

can restore life to their comrade or not. This feeling 

becomes so oppressive that the poor brutes do everything

to  get rid of it.

	When the ants rush by thousands into the flames of

the  burning ant-hill, which that evil beast, man, has set on

fire,  and perish by hundreds to rescue their larvae, they

again obey a craving to save their offspring. They risk

everything for  the sake of bringing away the larvae that

they have brought up with more care than many women

bestow on their children.

 	To seek pleasure, to avoid pain, is the general line

of action  (some would say law) of the organic world.

	 Without this quest of the agreeable, life itself

would be impossible. Organisms would disintegrate, life

cease.

	 Thus whatever a man's actions and line of conduct

may be,  he does what he does in obedience to a craving of

his nature.  The most repulsive actions, no less than

actions which are  indifferent or most attractive, are all

equally dictated by a  need of the individual who

performs them. Let him act as  he may, the individual acts

as he does because he finds a  pleasure in it, or avoids, or

thinks he avoids, a pain.

	 Here we have a well-established fact. Here we have

the  essence of what has been called the egoistic theory.

	 Very well, are we any better off for having reached

this  general conclusion?

	 Yes, certainly we are. We have conquered a truth

and  destroyed a prejudice which lies at the root of all

prejudices.  All materialist philosophy in its relation to

man is implied  in this conclusion. But does it follow that

all the actions  of the individual are indifferent, as some

have hastened to  conclude? This is what we have now to

see.