The second question--whether the altruistic affections of man do not imply, or are not necessarily connected with, the development of his reason or self-consciousness--is even more important. Comte, like Hume, took all the desires, higher and lower, as tendencies given apart from the reason, which can only devise the means of satisfying them, and is, therefore, necessarily their servant. Reason itself on this view does not essentially affect the character of those tendencies which it obeys. "_Cupiditas est appetitus cum ejusdem conscientia_," said Spinoza, and he then went on to speak as if the "_conscientia_" made no change in the character of the "_appetitus_." But if we think of appetites or desires--some of them tending to the good of the individual, others to the good of the species--as existing in an animal which is not conscious of a self, these appetites will neither be selfish nor unselfish in the sense in which we apply these terms to man. Where there is no _ego_ there can be no _alter-ego_, and therefore neither egoism nor altruism. The idea of the self as a permanent unity to which all the different tendencies are referred, and the rise in consequence of a new desire of pleasure, distinct from the desires of particular objects, are essential to egoism. The idea of an _alter-ego_, _i.e._, of a community with others which makes their interests our own, and hence the rise of a love for them,--which is not merely disinterested as the animal appetites are disinterested, because they tend directly to their objects without any thought of self, but disinterested in the sense that the thought of self is conquered or absorbed, is essential to altruism. Each of these tendencies may in its matter, or rather in its first matter, coincide with the appetites; viewed from the outside, they may seem to be nothing higher than hunger or thirst, or sexual or parental impulse, but their form is different. They are changed as by a chemical solvent, which dissolves and renews them; nay, as by a new principle of life, whose first transformation of them is nothing but the beginning of a series of transformations both of their matter and their form; so that, in the end, the simple direct tendency to an object--the uneasiness which sought its cure without reflection either upon itself or upon anything else--becomes changed, on the one side, into a gigantic ambition and greed, which would make the whole world tributary to the lust of the individual, and, on the other, into a love of humanity in which self-love is altogether transcended or absorbed. Neither of these, however, nor any lower form of either, is in such wise _external_ to reason, that we can talk of them as determining it to an end which is not its own. Both are simply the expression in feeling of that essential opposition of the self to the not self, and at the same time that essential unity of the self with the not self, which are the two