As to the sophistical refinement that all our social sympathies are fundamentally selfish, there can be no doubt that, under the influence of that passion for unity which is the inspiration of system-builders, {298} Hartley, after Hobbes, did common sense the dishonour of publicly propounding this theory. But he propounded it, after his fashion, in a very innocent way; in such a way indeed as to show that the whole question arises out of a confusion of language, or, what is worse, a studied affectation of using words in a different sense from that in which they are used by the vulgar.[298.1] To the thinker this is a matter of indifference; not so to the vulgar: they all insist in using common words in their common sense, and allow the subtle qualifications of the philosopher to drop. It is strange, however, to observe that there are even at the present day writers of pith and judgment who seem to imagine that there is something more than a mere juggle of words in this question. Mr. Barrett, in his _Physical Ethics_, an ingenious and thoughtful work, says that “the merit of Hartley was not only that he showed the ultimate selfishness of all motives, but that he saw the true subordination among the various emotions, and their natural evolution from their simple elements.” This sentence, by the simple abuse of a single word, does great injustice to Hartley. The word _selfishness_, in the classical use of the English language, is a word of a very bad odour; it is equivalent to the φιλαυτία of the Greeks, and means that excessive regard to self which leads a man to disregard and to disown the rights and feelings of other selves in the complex social machine of which he is a part. Now Hartley {299} does not use this word; he uses a word capable also of a good meaning--_self-interest_, better still if he had stumbled on Bentham’s phrase, _self-regard_. But as it is, the ingenious association-moralist (i. 458) divides self-interest into three species-- _Gross self-interest_, _Refined self-interest_, and _Rational self-interest_, which, when analysed, turn out to be altogether different things baptized with the same name. If a rational self-interest convinces me that, when I see my neighbour fall into the sea, it is my duty to jump in after him at the risk of being drowned myself, it requires an open force put upon language to say that such an action is the result of any kind of deliberate self-regard; it seems more like the result of a social instinct, and so far from being the product of any sort of prudential calculation, it is more likely to be strangled in the first conception than brought to a brilliant birth by the consideration of self in any shape. It seems to me indeed quite unworthy of anything styling itself philosophy to deal in such manifest quibbles. I might in a similar way, for instance, classify all religions under a common name, according as they are inspired by