ct in India, and failed to
respond, he would never have had a moment's peace afterwards. This was
no more than the truth, and yet he would sometimes call himself
'selfish' in what I hold to be a non-natural sense. He frequently
complains of the use of such words as 'selfishness' and 'altruism' at
all. Selfishness, according to him, could merely mean that a man acts
from his own motives, and altruism would mean that he acted from
somebody else's motives. One phrase, therefore, would be superfluous,
and the other absurd. He insists, however, that, as he puts it, 'self is
each man's centre, from which he can no more displace himself than he
can leap off his own shadow.'[152] Since estimates of happiness differ,
the morality based upon them will also differ.[153] And from selfishness
in this sense two things follow. First, I have to act upon my own
individual conception of morality.

If, then, I meet a person whose morality is different from mine, and
who justifies what I hold to be vices, I must behave according to my own
view. If I am his ruler, I must not treat him as a person making a
possibly useful experiment in living, but as a vicious brute, to be
restrained or suppressed by all available means. And secondly, since
self is the centre, since a 'man works from himself outwards,' it is
idle to propose a love of humanity as the guiding motive to morality.
'Humanity is only "I" writ large, and zeal for humanity generally means
zeal for My Notions as to what men should be and how they should
live.'[154]

This, therefore, leads to the ultimate question: What, in the
utilitarian phrase, is the 'sanction' of morality? Here his answer is,
on one side at least, emphatic and unequivocal. Mill and the
positivists, according to him,[155] propose an utterly unsatisfactory
motive for morality. The love of 'humanity' is the love of a mere
shadowy abstraction. We can love our family and our neighbours; we
cannot really care much about the distant relations whom we shall never
see. Nay, he holds that a love of humanity is often a mask for a dislike
of concrete human beings. He accuses Mill of having at once too high and
too low an opinion of mankind.[156] Mill, he thinks, had too low an
estimate of the actual average Englishman, and too high an estimate of
the ideal man who would be perfectly good when all restraints were
removed. He excused himself for contempt of his fellows by professing
love for an abstraction. To set up the lov