They are the very guide of life, and without them our reasonings would be of little service. They should be treated gently, gratefully, with reverence. To them human societies owe their stability, their capacity for an orderly development, the smooth working of the machinery of daily life. Their presence does not exclude the employment of reasoning, but they furnish a basis upon which the reason can occupy itself with profit. They are a safeguard against those utopian schemes which would shatter our world and try experiments in creation out of nothing. Nevertheless, he who busies himself with ethics as science must study them critically and strive to estimate justly their true significance. He may come to regard them, not as something fixed and changeless, but as living and developing, coming into being, and modifying themselves, in the service of life. Does he dishonor them who so views them? CHAPTER XXIV EGOISM 95. WHAT IS EGOISM?--Egoism has been defined as "any ethical system in which the happiness or good of the individual is made the main criterion of moral action," [Footnote: _Encyclopedia Britannica_, 11th edition.] or as "the doing or seeking of that which affords pleasure or advantage to oneself, in distinction to that which affords pleasure or advantage to others." [Footnote: _Century Dictionary_.] It may strike the average reader as odd to be told that such definitions bristle with ambiguities, and that it is by no means easy to draw a sharp line between doctrines which everyone would admit to be egoistic, and others which seem more doubtfully to fall under that head. "Happiness," "good," "advantage," "self," all are terms which call for scrutiny, and which set pitfalls for the unwary. 96. CRASS EGOISMS.--We may best approach the subject of what may properly be regarded as constituting egoism, by turning first to one or two "terrible examples." No one would hesitate to call egoistic the doctrine of Aristippus, the Cyrenaic, the errant disciple of Socrates. He made pleasure the end of life, and taught that it might be sought without a greater regard to customary morality than was made prudent by the penalties to be feared as a consequence of its violation. Where the centre of gravity of the system of the Cyrenaics falls is evident from their holding that "corporeal pleasures are superior to mental ones," and that "a friend is desirable for the use which we can make of him." [Footnote: Diogenes Laertius, _Lives of the Philosophers,_ "Aristippus," viii.] The doctrine of the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, is as unequivocally egoistic. "Of the voluntary acts of every man," he writes, [Footnote: _Leviathan,_ Part I, xiv.] "the object is some good to himself;" and again, [Footnote _Ibid_. xv.] "no man giveth, but with intention of good to himself; because gift is voluntary; and of all voluntary acts the object is to every man his own good."