It would be idle not to admit that La Rochefoucauld has been almost exclusively regarded as the chief exponent of egotism among the great writers of Europe. He has become--he became during his own lifetime-- the bye-word for bitterness. He is represented as believing that egotism is the _primum mobile_ of all human action, and that man is wholly the victim of his passions, which lead him whither they will. He denies all spirituality and sees a physical cause for everything we do. His own words are quoted against him. It is true that he says, "All the passions are nothing but divers degrees of heat or cold in the blood." It is true that he says, "All men naturally hate one another," and again, "Our virtues are mostly vices in disguise." Yet again, he defines the subject of his mordant volume in terms which seem to exclude all bountiful theories concerning the disinterested instincts of the human soul, for he says "_Amour-propre_ is the love of one's self and of all things for one's self; it turns men into their own idolators, and, if fortune gives them the opportunity, makes them the tyrants of others.... It exists in all states of life and in all conditions; it lives everywhere and it lives on everything; it lives on nothing." He does not admit that Christianity itself is immune from the ravages of this essential cankerworm, which adopts all disguises and slips from one Protean shape into another. "The refinements of self-love surpass those of chemistry," and the purpose of La Rochefoucauld is to resolve all our virtues in a crucible and to show that nothing remains but a poisonous deposit of egotism.