view to their joint fulfilment. It is customary to argue this principle of impartiality, according to which the merely personal consideration is declared to be irrelevant to the determination of moral value, by a critique of _egoism_. The _reductio ad absurdum_ of egoism has recently been formulated by G. E. Moore in as thorough and conclusive a manner as could be desired.[8] That writer analyzes egoism into a series of propositions all of which are equivocal, false, or, so far as true, non-egoistic in their meaning. I shall reduce Moore's propositions to two, and modify them to suit my own conception of goodness. {60} As an egoist you may, in the first place, affirm that _there are no interests but yours_. This proposition, however, is manifestly false. Accept any definition of an interest or desire that you will, and I can find indefinitely many cases answering your definition and falling outside the class of those which you claim as your own. None of these, if it conforms fully to your definition, is any the less an interest or desire than the one that happens to be moving you at the instant. There would be as good ground for saying that your brother was the only brother, or your book the only book. Even if you abate the rigor of the proposition, you cannot escape its essential falsity. If you affirm that there are no interests but the interests of _each_, or that _each_ man's interests are the only interests, you flatly contradict yourself. If you affirm that your interests are of superior importance, that they are exceptional, peculiar, entitled to pre-eminence--this is virtually equivalent to your original proposition. The respect in which your interests seem different from all others either enters into your definition of interest, in which case it becomes general; or it is some adventitious circumstance that does not belong to your interests as such, some accident of proximity which may have psychological or instrumental importance, but cannot rightly affect your judgment of good. For goodness lies in {61} the objective bearing of your action on such things as interests; precisely as the diagonal is a line connecting the vertices of opposite angles in a square, independently of all circumstances that do not affect the generic character of the square.