It may be so. Our very existence is so wonderful and so strange that it is impossible to dogmatize upon this subject. Suffice it to say, that human nature, when once endued, our homely mother nurse "does all she can to make her foster child" learn the first of her laws-self-preservation, selfknowledge, and, first of all, self-existence. As a child grows up he differs in this experience from other animals. They are soon cast off from their mothers, and set up on their own account. With them Nature is a hard teacher. The young sparrow, when it grows old enough, will, if strong, turn its father and mother out of their nest; if weak, will be driven a-field to look out for itself. The very hen of our farm-yards merely extends her love and her care for her brood up to a certain period. When they have been taught to scratch and pick for themselves, the paternal and maternal contract is at an end. The old hen, which is so careful to feed her young at first, resists as a grave insult any interference with her own domain. Upon the Thames, or on any river where swans are kept, we may watch a swan proudly sailing with arched neck, and driving away to other waters its own cygnets. The cat that tends her kittens in their blindness, and cherishes them when young, drives them away when mature enough to feed themselves. With man, education and cultivation have extended the paternal affection throughout life; and father and mother live over again in the joys of their children, become brave and bold in the triumphs of their sons, and renew youth and beauty in the bright looks of their daughters. Nay, human love endures all shocks bravely, lives out ingratitude and misbehaviour; and, stretching far beyond the present life, reaches into the dim but not uncertain future. When the child has passed from infancy to youth, and consciousness is fully developed, he has found his Ego, and has become surrounded by those impulses which bring to him every day, with increased force, the necessity for looking out for self. Left solely to themselves, we believe that in boys, and in girls too, the impulses towards the higher virtues of benevolence and generosity are very weak. Some philosophers have denied altogether that they exist, and insist that these virtues are implanted as well as cultivated by man. The “noble savage,” we have been taught by experience, is altogether a fictitious person. The savage is a very base and cruel animal, ready to slay, with a stealthy cowardice, to betray, to rob, to do anything vile and bad. It used to be the fashion with philosophers such as Voltaire, and with Christians of the time of Joseph Addison, to suppose the existence of a virtuous savage, without any of the guile of civilization, and with a soul as unsullied and clear as parchment, or white as new-fallen snow. An absence of civilization they took to be an absence of vice; and so Voltaire brings his Ingénu, a Huron chief, to Paris, to behold and wonder at the vices of his more civilized fellow-man. This is all very false, as false as Uncle Tom. It, indeed, might be true in one instance; but to ascribe the virtues of one to a whole race is simply puerile. It would be just as true were we to assert that all Englishmen were Howards or Greenacres, or that all Scotch men were Sawney Beans or Mrs. Chisholms. The savage is of a lower, viler nature; and to presume to place him on a level with, or to make him superior to the outwardly Christianized and civilized man, is as stupid and unjust as it is illogical. Alfred Tennyson, a much deeper thinker than either Addison or Voltaire, indignantly rejects the supposition, and tells us that we must not barter the magnificent birthrights which centuries of thinkers and workers in religion and art have dowered us with. No! thunders the Laureate : 66 “I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains, Lower, indeed, and the grey barbarian knows it well enough, and subjects himself to the Powers that be; but equal in this at least, that grey barbarian and Christian child alike, each pays its tribute to "Self and Company." Now we are not going to throw out any complaint against prevailing selfishness. We do not think that our nation deserves the reproach. Generous and confiding enough, ready to give and to work, the Englishman is not to be upbraided on that score. Nor is the Irishman, a component part of us, who is generous to a fault, who will give his money, his bread, and his sword with equal recklessness; nor is the most reticent of money of all three, the Scot, of an ungenerous nature, his warmth of heart being of a steadier but slower fire than either of the others, and being wisely confined to his own relations. We never were and never shall be friends to that careless and profuse giving which does so much harm, and which is too hasty to distinguish between him who is really deserving and him who merely puts on the most melancholy face. A wise selfishness, a certain adherence to our own Ego, would do us all good. "Selflove," says Shakspeare, always wise and true, "is not so vile a thing as self-neglecting ;" and many a fine fellow has utterly ruined himself by being profuse with his money, his time, his good name, and good nature; and all merely to please a set of lazy, careless fellows who want to make him as foolish as themselves! A wise selfishness is a great thing. Let us first know ourselves, and then be true to ourselves; and it must follow, "as the night the day, we cannot then be false to any man." But just because self is our closest companion, our best friend, and our deadliest enemy, we should be careful that he takes into his house none but the best companions. For there is always in the one EGO a double man ; and this duality of self the apostles called the flesh and the spirit. Plato, Socrates, nay, even before them Confucius, and no doubt others, had perceived this; and in common parlance, for minds unable to see the true distinction, we speak of a "better self." A wretched woman, who, in a fit of passion, had committed a murder, began her confession with, "When I came to myself." Here she distinctly referred to a double consciousness, and it is by the exercise of this consciousness alone that we are able to cultivate that self-watchfulness and self-repression which is so necessary to make a true and good man or woman. The most terse and epigrammatic of English poets-Dr. Young-tells us that a man may be clever, skilful, learned, and able, and yet, freely speaking, a fool. "Man," he says, "know thyself: all wisdom centres there ;" and this self-knowledge is one, not only of good, but of evil. We each of us know more good of ourselves than the world knows. We know of temptations withstood, of evil rebutted, of the little kindly thoughts and actions which never step out of the magic circle of self, but which yet make up the most valuable part of a man's existence. Each of us also knows more evil of him or herself than the world does. When Jaques wishes Orlando to rail against the world, he says, "No; I will rail only against myself, against whom I know most ill." A noble sentiment; a witness to the truth of which is borne by a story told of the celebrated Catherine de Médicis, who, when told of an author who had written a violent philippic against her, said, with a sudden touch of conscience," Ha! if he did but know against me half as much as I know against myself!" Self therefore needs to be guarded. It is never quite stationary. It advances and recedes, becomes better or worse, as a man treats it. It has its enemies-self-love, self-conceit, self-opinion, self-indulgence. But on the other side it has troops of friends: there is shame which checks the conceit; examination, the self-opinion; and reproach, the self-indulgence. The counsels of these friends will often lead to self |