After all, yourself is the only person you can by no possibility get away from in this life, and, may be, in another. It is worth a little pains and money to do good to him. For it is he, and not our derivatively educated minds or our induced emotions, who preserves in us the undefeated senior instinct of independence. You can test this by promising yourself _not_ to do a thing, and noticing the scandalous amount of special pleading that you have to go through with yourself if you break your promise. A man does not always remember, or follow up, the great things which he has promised himself or his friends to do; but he rarely forgets or forgives when he has promised himself _not_ to do even a little thing. This is because Man has lived with himself as an individual, vastly longer than he has lived with himself under tribal conditions. Consequently, facts about his noble solitary self and his earliest achievements had time to get well fixed in his memory. He knew he was not altogether one with the beasts. His amazing experiences with his first lie had shown him that he was something of a magician, if not a miracle-worker; and his first impulse towards self-denial, for ends not immediately in sight, must have been a revelation of himself to himself as stupendous as a belief in a future life, which it was possibly intended to herald. It is only natural, then, that individuals who first practised this apparently insane and purposeless exercise came later to bulk in the legends of their Tribe as demigods, who went forth and bearded the gods themselves for gifts--for fire, wisdom, or knowledge of the arts. But one thing that stands outside exaggeration or belittlement--through all changes in shapes of things and the sounds of words--is the bidding, the guidance, that drives a man to own himself and upholds him through his steps on that road. That bidding comes, direct as a beam of light, from that Past when man had grown into his present shape, which Past, could we question it, would probably refer us to a Past immeasurably remoter still, whose Creature, not yet Man, felt within him that it was not well for him to jackal round another brute’s kill, even if he went hungry for a while. It is not such a far cry from that Creature, howling over his empty stomach in the dark, to the Heir of all the Ages counting over his coppers in front of a cookshop, to see if they will run to a full meal--as some few here have had to do; and the principle is the same: “At any price that I can pay, let me own myself.”