es its absolute negation in others. Hence Love can never be
the essential and root of social feeling, and hence the necessity for
the instinct of abstract justice which takes no account of preferences
or aversions. And here I may say that all application of the word LOVE
to unknown, distant creatures, to mere OTHERS, is a perversion and
a wasting of the word love, which, taking its origin in sexual and
parental preference, always implies a preference of one object to the
other. To love everybody is simply not to love at all. And it is
JUST BECAUSE of the passionate preference instinctively felt for
some individuals, that mankind requires the self-regarding and
self-respecting passion of justice."

Now this is not altogether contradictory of what I hold. I disagree that
because love necessarily expresses itself in preference, selecting this
rather than that, that it follows necessarily that its absolute negation
is implied in the non-selected cases. A man may go into the world as a
child goes into a garden and gathers its hands full of the flowers that
please it best and then desists, but only because its hands are full and
not because it is at an end of the flowers that it can find delight in.
So the man finds at last his memory and apprehensions glutted. It is
not that he could not love those others. And I dispute that to love
everybody is not to love at all. To love two people is surely to love
more than to love just one person, and so by way of three and four to
a very large number. But if it is put that love must be a preference
because of the mental limitations that forbid us to apprehend and
understand more than a few of the multitudinous lovables of life, then
I agree. For all the individuals and things and cases for which we have
inadequate time and energy, we need a wholesale method--justice. That is
exactly what I have said in the previous section.

3.26. THE WEAKNESS OF IMMATURITY.

One is apt to write and talk of strong and weak as though some were
always strong, some always weak. But that is quite a misleading version
of life. Apart from the fact that everyone is fluctuatingly strong and
fluctuatingly weak, and weak and strong according to the quality we
judge them by, we have to remember that we are all developing and
learning and changing, gaining strength and at last losing it, from
the cradle to the grave. We are all, to borrow the old scholastic term,
pupil-teachers of Life; the term is none