He leaves us in no doubt as to the sort of good which he conceives men to seek when they practice what has the appearance of generosity. Contract he calls a mutual transference of rights, and he distinguishes gift from contract as follows: "When the transferring of right is not mutual, but one of the parties transferreth, in hope to gain thereby friendship, or service from another, or from his friends, or in hope to gain the reputation of charity or magnanimity, _or to deliver his mind from the pain of compassion_, or in hope of reward in heaven, this is not contract but gift, free gift, grace, which words signify the same thing." [Footnote: _Ibid_. I, xiv. The italics are mine. It was thus that Hobbes accounted for his giving a sixpence to a beggar: "I was in pain to consider the miserable condition of the old man; and now my alms, giving him some relief, doth also ease me." _Hobbes_, by G. C. ROBERTSON, Edinburgh, 1886, p. 206.] There is a passage from the pen of the British divine, Paley, which appears to merit a place alongside of the citations from Hobbes, widely as the men differ in many of their views. It reads: "We can be obliged to nothing but what we ourselves are to gain or lose something by; for nothing else can be a 'violent motion' to us. As we should not be obliged to obey the laws, or the magistrate, unless rewards or punishments, pleasure or pain, somehow or other, depended upon our obedience; so neither should we, without the same reason, be obliged to do what is right, to practice virtue, or to obey the commandments of God." [Footnote: _Moral Philosophy,_ Book II, chapter ii.] 97. EQUIVOCAL EGOISM?--The above is unquestionably egoism. The man who accepts such a doctrine and consistently walks in the light must be set down as self-seeking. But self-seeking, as understood by different men, appears to take on different aspects. Shall we class all those who frankly accept it as man's only ultimate motive with Aristippus and Epicurus and Hobbes? Thomas Hill Green writes: "Anything conceived as good in such a way that the agent acts for the sake of it, must be conceived as his own good." [Footnote: _Prolegomena to Ethics,_ Sec 92.] The motive to action is, he maintains, always "some idea of the man's personal good." [Footnote: Sec Sec 95, 97.] He does not hesitate to say that a man necessarily lives for himself; [Footnote: Sec 138.] and he calls "the human self or the man" [Footnote: Sec 99.] a self-seeking ego, a self-seeking subject, and a self- seeking person. [Footnote: Sec Sec 98, 100, 145.] Were Green's book a lost work, only preserved to the memories of men by such citations as the above, the author would certainly be relegated to a class of moralists with which he had, in fact, little sympathy.