conomical, has had to be (literally or with one's imagination) in the
first person. The world has never really wanted yet (in spite of
appearances) its own way with a man. It wants the man. It is what he is
that concerns it. All that it asks of him, and all that he has to give,
is the surplus of himself. The trouble with our modern fashion of
substituting the second person or the third person for the first, in a
man's education, is that it takes his capacity for intense experience of
himself, his chance for having a surplus of himself, entirely away.

III

Egoism and Society

That the unpopularity of the first person singular is honestly acquired
and heartily deserved, it would be useless to deny. Every one who has
ever had a first person singular for a longer or shorter period in his
life knows that it is a disagreeable thing and that every one else knows
it, in nine cases out of ten, at least, and about nine tenths of the
time during its development. The fundamental question does not concern
itself with the first person singular being agreeable or disagreeable,
but with what to do with it, it being the necessary evil that it is.

It seems to be a reasonable position that what should be objected to in
the interests of society, is not egoism, a man's being interested in
himself, but the lack of egoism, a man's having a self that does not
include others. The trouble would seem to be--not that people use their
own private special monosyllable overmuch, but that there is not enough
of it, that nine times out of ten, when they write "I" it should be
written "i."

In the face of the political objection, the objection of the State to
the first person singular, the egoist defends every man's reading for
himself as follows. Any book that is allowed to come between a man and
himself is doing him and all who know him a public injury. The most
important and interesting fact about a man, to other people, is his
attitude toward himself. It determines his attitude toward every one
else. The most fundamental question of every State is: "What is each
man's attitude in this State toward himself? What can it be?" A man's
expectancy toward himself, so far as the State is concerned, is the
moral centre of citizenship. It determines how much of what he expects
he will expect of himself, and how much he will expect of others and how
much of books. The man who expects too much of himself develops into the
headlong and dangerous citizen