The social spirit is as “natural” as the individual spirit. It is conspicuously visible in action among us, but we have hidden it under false names. “Altruism” is one of these. This in its very assumption of “others” preserves the ego intact, and that ego has never yet been convinced of any rational cause for surrendering to those other egos. We have only been able to urge it under our equally mistaken Pay concept, trying to show that we should meet reward either from the other egos, or from God. And as our nobler instincts have always revolted from the Pay concept, the progress of Altruism has been retarded. We need merely to understand it to withdraw all this opposition. What we call altruism should be called—has been called[1]—“omniism”; it is a feeling for all of us, and _includes_ the ego. It is, if you please, an extension of self-consciousness, a recognition that my self is society, and my “ego” only a minute fraction of the real me. Footnote 1: By Mr. J. G. Phelps Stokes. Article in _Wilshire’s Magazine_, March, 1903. This omniism is as normal a growth as egoism. The preservation of the individual by individual action required egoism, and developed it. The preservation of society, by collective action, requires omniism and develops it. That it is not more generally developed is due to the resistance and confusion of our brains. The superiority of omniism to egoism is in its being a later and more complex development, an organic superiority. As the single cell is lower than the organism, so cell-consciousness, if there be such, is lower than self-consciousness, and as the single organism is lower than the social organism so self-consciousness is lower than social consciousness. Egoism is common to all beasts, is perfectly natural, useful, right; but omniism is a human distinction, progressively developed as we become socialised. My “self” is my conscious area of working machinery, wherewith I receive impressions and produce expressions, and if I were a tenfold Siamese twin—if I felt, and thought, and worked with the bodies of twenty men—those twenty men would be my “self,” and to care for them would be as “selfish” as it is for a solitary animal to care for itself, and as perfectly right. Not to care for them, to be only actively conscious of my twentieth part “self,” would be a condition of arrested development, pitiable rather than blameworthy. In a social condition of existence, the life and prosperity of each member is absolutely interwoven with that of the others, of the whole, and not to recognise this, and act accordingly, is to manifest an inferior plane of development.