The other sort of egotism, not sharply distinguished from this in all cases, belongs to people who have stability of mind and conduct, but still without breadth and richness of sympathy, so that their aims and sentiments are inadequate to the life around them—narrow, hard, mean, self-satisfied, or sensual. This I would call the rigid type of egotism because the essence of it is an arrest of sympathetic development and an ossification as it were of what should be a plastic and growing part of thought. Something of this sort is perhaps what is most commonly meant by the word, and everyone can think of harsh, gross, grasping, cunning, or self-complacent traits to which he would apply it. The self, to be healthy or to be tolerable to other selves, must be ever moving on, breaking loose from lower habits, walking hand-in-hand with sympathy and aspiration. If it stops too long anywhere it becomes stagnant and diseased, odious to other minds and harmful to the mind it inhabits. The men that satisfy the imagination are chastened men; large, human, inclusive, feeling the breadth of the world. It is impossible to think of Shakespeare as arrogant, vain, or sensual; and if some, like Dante, had an exigent ego, they succeeded in transforming it into higher and higher forms. Selfishness of the stable or rigid sort is as a rule more bitterly resented than the more fickle variety, chiefly, no doubt, because, having more continuity and purpose, it is more formidable. One who accepts the idea of self, and of personality in general, already set forth, will agree that what is ordinarily called egotism cannot properly be regarded as the opposite of “altruism,” or of any word implying the self-and-other classification of impulses. No clear or useful idea of selfishness can be reached on the basis of this classification, which, as previously stated, seems to me fictitious. It misrepresents the mental situation, and so tends to confuse thought. The mind has not, in fact, two sets of motives to choose from, the self-motives and the other-motives, the latter of which stand for the higher course, but has the far more difficult task of achieving a higher life by gradually discriminating and organizing a great variety of motives not easily divisible into moral groups. The proper antithesis of selfishness is right, justice, breadth, magnanimity, or something of that sort; something opposite to the narrowness of feeling and action in which selfishness essentially consists. It is a matter of more or less symmetry and stature, like the contrast between a gnarled and stunted tree and one of ample growth.