Love is so often proclaimed as a social panacea that I have thought it well to subject it to a careful criticism and indicate its defects when regarded as a complete embodiment of altruism. Some of those defects are incidental. Since it is an affair of human beings it cannot fail to show the imperfections characteristic of such wayward creatures. Seldom does even marriage, love’s best opportunity, attain that full mutuality which I have eulogized. Self-assertion intrudes early. The interests of one or the other party become predominant, and mutuality gradually declines. When the simple-minded man was told that in marriage two persons become one, he naturally enough asked: “Which one?” Yet if the completely conjunct life is rare, it is precious as an ideal for directing conduct. We often speak of love as something we fall into. Rather it is something to be made, developed, steadily approximated. The best marriages are accomplished works of art, yielding large rewards through all their progressive stages. But love is ever unstable. Unwatched, it slips down among the lower forms of altruism.

These defects of love are, however, but incidental and such as are common in all man’s undertakings. There is nothing in love which can render it immune from human infirmity. But there are also in it certain fundamental defects which prevent it from becoming an organizing world-principle. At least before it can weld individuals into societies and states it must undergo large transformation and appear rather as justice than domestic affection. For love is naturally selective and individual, picking out one and rejecting another. It does not offer its bounty alike to all. Private altruism, it might be called, so that it always seems indelicate to speak of it in public. It concerns only those immediately involved and only their most intimate experiences. From such limitations it needs to be freed before it can become formative over society. All that is conjunctive in it must be retained and only its exclusions removed. In this way general justice will supplement individual love. All the varieties of mutuality are alike in joining self-regard with extra-regard. They differ only in the extent of that extra-regard.

In my last chapter I began the discussion of that superpersonal love which I called Justice. It is concerned with functions rather than individuals, and love is thus extended to a multitude who still remain unknown. To keep the framework of society steady large co-operation is required, each of its members becoming responsible for the working of some one among its many functions and having his own well-being bound up with its. To that function each is to devote himself as the lover does to his lady, and through it he sends his benefactions abroad to whoever stands in need. Such is the ideal of professional responsibility; and whether seen in shoemaker, doctor, or head of a family, it is something of wider scope and more generous impulse than private love.

Yet even in professional responsibility an element of selection remains. After studying the needs of the community I pick out what work I will do. On some single need I fasten—the need of settling quarrels, and I become a lawyer; the need of instruction, and I become a teacher; the needs of the breakfast-table, and I become a grocer. In all these cases my service is given not to man as man, but only to a section of men, to those who are conscious of a certain specific need. It is possible, however, to extend justice and, not confining attention to wants already known, to endeavor to enlarge the whole intellectual horizon of our fellows. Thus love becomes peculiarly impersonal and creative.

For example, when I become an artist or scientific man I do not know precisely what I shall contribute to the good of the public. The public itself has experienced no want of the wares which I shall furnish. In devoting myself to the higher mathematics I am pursuing something for which a practical application may never be found. But that uncertainty should not hold me back. I know that the mind of man moves off in that direction. I will follow and see how far it can be pressed. These investigations I am making in astronomy are curious. They satisfy my passion for knowing. Believing they will satisfy that passion in others also, I ask no more. Passing beyond the immediate application of my results, I simply aim at developing persons more fully as persons, so that their capacity for knowledge may be increased. Just so does the artist attempt to reveal aspects of beauty hitherto unperceived. When he furnishes what has been done before, what men have learned to enjoy and now demand, he is a professional workman and belongs in the preceding class. But a true artist explores phases of unacknowledged beauty. Having himself seen what others have not seen, he takes the risk of announcing it, certain that if it is comprehended he will open men’s eyes to fresh enjoyment. Rightly therefore do we hold artists and scientific men in high honor as enlargers of humanity. We see that altruism like theirs calls for risk and special disinterestedness. They are discoverers, going out into wide lands, far from sure what will be found there, but ready to sacrifice themselves for possible human betterment. Intellectual soldiers, we may call them, accepting the risks of doubtful battle. Theirs is a lofty altruism, and none the less because success may bring them fame and fortune.

Perhaps I strain the word justice in applying it to them, yet they as truly as the professional man do not pick out individuals as receivers of their benefits. Indeed, that absence of particularity so emphasized in justice goes to such a degree with them that their work seems to proceed from the spirit of science or spirit of beauty rather than from a particular person. They strike us as transcending their age, their own peculiarities, and to embody the conjunct self of humanity.

Still another form of justice, or of love, which passes beyond the individual, is the service of institutions. Artists, scientific and professional men all follow interests of their own, believing, however, that their work in the long run will benefit the public. But in the service of institutions not only does the public receive a benefit, it fixes also what our work toward bringing it about shall be. Personal choice, therefore, altogether disappears. The action is conjunctive throughout. But to understand this dark saying we must bring clearly before our minds what an institution is. It is a large term which we are apt to allow to fill out a big gap in our knowledge.

I mean by institutions those fairly permanent relations between persons which past experience has established for the promotion of human welfare and successive generations have approved. Ever since civilization began men have been experimenting how to live together most helpfully. The results, tested by the induction of ages, become the inherited habits of individuals and the institutions of society. Maintained through passing years, criticised, readjusted to meet more fully the needs they were intended to fulfil, they furnish each of us a working capital as soon as we enter the world. We are not obliged to decide in childhood whether to have three meals a day, whether man’s dress shall differ from woman’s, whether to have provision made for our instruction, worship, settlement of quarrels, safety on the street. These matters were considered before we were born, and judgments about them form our most precious inheritance. It is a veritable bank stock of experience on which to draw for our support. We accept it all as a thing of course at first, then begin to scrutinize it, asking how far these particular institutions save social friction, open avenues for enlarged activity, and how far that which once served these ends serves them no more.

Such institutions are intended for the general good. By identifying ourselves with them we both share in that good and exercise an impartial love for mankind. For these have an influence over men unequalled by any other agency. They fashion us in our unconscious years and carry forward our purposes in years of discretion. To comprehend their consolidated wisdom and conform ourselves to it will be our chief means of serving our fellow men; to neglect or weaken them through individual caprice is to be an enemy of society. Only we must discriminate in our modes of strengthening. An institution is not proved good by the bare fact of its existence. Perhaps the presumption should be in its favor, for it could hardly get itself established if injurious. But its original adaptation to human wants is unstable, and strengthening it will really mean fitting it more neatly to present circumstances. To maintain its outward form when it no longer serves its purpose is to be unfaithful to it. Constructive criticism is constantly required if institutions are to be kept sweet and wholesome. Only it should be borne in mind that changes in the framework of society can best come about slowly and only at the desire of large groups of those affected. Presumptuous, indeed, is he who will attempt to stand outside any of our fundamental institutions. The setting up of his individual will against the general will proves him no true socialist. He should remember that since everybody is wiser than anybody his first business is to conform to the institutions into which he is born, then to study elaborately their meaning, and finally to persuade his fellows to join in readjusting them with a view to their more effective working. Our love for our fellow men is shown each day in our maintenance, critical study, and reform of the social institutions around us. They survive only through our constant approval, are too important to be neglected or lightly set aside, and too liable to decay to be left uncriticised.

It is obvious, however, that institutions are of many grades of importance. Some are fundamental, as the family, property, democracy; others are local and individual, as Harvard University, Boston, the Episcopal Church, the Democratic Party. As they become narrower our acceptance of them changes its character, affectionate loyalty playing a larger part, dutiful obedience less. A member of a college, for example, comes to think of it almost as a person, symbolized in Alma Mater, and gives to it the loving devotion he would feel for a revered friend. Members of institutions so individual are apt to take their membership as something like a personal trust and to pride themselves on fidelity to it. But because such institutions are of limited range and not applicable to all mankind, failure in allegiance to them is generally regarded not as a moral lapse, but as an error of judgment.

Such are some of the aspects of justice, the impartial love of our fellow men. When we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourself, we cannot excuse ourselves by saying that love does not move by command but takes its own way according to individual temperament. Even of the simpler forms of love this is only partially true; wisdom, purpose, and patience being also essentials of permanence even in our private loves. But that public love to which we are summoned is no mere emotion, arising blindly and passing with the mood. It is the rational acceptance of our place in a social organization where all are dependent on each. A good synonym for what I have called justice would be public-mindedness.

And in this extended and superpersonal love altruism attains its fullest and steadiest expression. But so does egoism, too. That abstract egoism, it is true, which seeks its own gain regardless of that of others, is submerged. It was always fictitious, and rapidly conducted him who pursued it to emptiness. But that conjunct self, the person constituted through relations, finds in this justicial love his large opportunity. In like manner the abstract and sentimental alter, figured as that uncriticisable idol to which individual interests must daily be offered up, is overthrown and shown to have reality only in the degree in which it fosters personal life. Socialism which does not promote individuality, individuality which does not tend toward an ever-completer social consciousness, are alike delusive. Each must find its justification in the service it is able to render to its pretended foe. Pure gifts, to individuals or the state, are rightly objects of suspicion. Only when transmuted by mutuality can they be kept free from taint.

Such at least is the doctrine of this book. In it there is nothing new. Vaguely, waveringly, and with but a half understanding, I believe it has ever guided the best endeavors of mankind. I have only hoped to drag it into clearer light by a novel sort of approach. The dangers of that mode of approach I readily see and wish my readers also to see. As a pedagogue I have torn apart things which belong together and have separately exhibited our protective, generous, and identifying impulses as successively different aspects of the altruistic life. In this way we teachers are obliged to proceed, picking to pieces a concrete whole, even when our aim is to show wholeness. But my readers will not be so simple as to imagine that things occur in experience so disjointed as on my pages. Life is more closely compacted than our expositions. Higher stages and lower move forward together, assisting one another. The disparagements which I put on the lower varieties of altruism these deserve only so far as they are detached from the higher. In conjunction, the higher altruisms ennoble the lower and are themselves enriched and diversified by whatever inferior stages they absorb. Among the ingredients of character none can safely be thrown away. We study ethics merely to find a place where each may be helpful to all.