range of a person's wants. It is something permanent, something which implies orderly arrangement. In the next place, though it represents the individual's good from his own point of view, it is not a good which is independent of other persons. Such an isolated individual has no real existence. On the contrary, a man's interest is mainly determined by the power which others have of rewarding or punishing him according as he falls in with or opposes their wishes. In other words, interest is not the same thing as a man's mere inclinations, supposing he were left to himself. In an inaccurate way we do sometimes use the idea thus, and we may then. say that the interest of any organism is to do what it likes. But this would not correspond to the idea which is contrasted with right or goodness. If interest were merely to have one's likings gratified, the interest of the bad man would be to be bad. But it is expressly declared by our moral experience that the interest of the bad man is in general to be good.

20. What may be called the phenomena of interest have been already stated. As a general rule interest is in agreement with goodness. On the one hand, it is my interest to be moral: we have all tried it, not one of us but has found that his misdeeds are on the whole unprofitable. On the other hand, morality secures the individual's interest. If a person declares that he never acts for his own interest, we suspect his sincerity, and we hold in any case that he is talking cant; and it is cant too when we are blamed for seeking after our own interest when this coincides with the public good. Whether a man is good depends not on his avoiding his own interests, but upon what his interests are, and whether he pursues them disinterestedly, that is to say, as part of the moral code. But though there is this. general agreement, there are undoubtedly some cases in which it is not to my interest to be good. This does not mean that a good man does not find his interest in

being good: it means only that supposing he were a different person, he might secure more happiness. The discrepancy of interest and right lies in the fact that there are certain persons under certain conditions who can get more happiness out of life by doing wrong than if they had been good men. They may do this though their misdeeds are known, and they may secure their interest most effectually of all if, being bad, they can get the credit of being good. These phenomena we have to explain.

21. The general identity of virtue and interest follows at once. Statically this identity means that morality is the reconciliation of diverse wants or interests' (to use the word in another sense); that it solves the problem. how to satisfy these wants together. It does so by creating a new type of character which has wants of only certain kinds. Dynamically the identity represents the fact that forces are arrayed on the side of good which are too powerful for the bad. Good is the victorious ideal it is my interest to be good because on account of the forces arrayed against badness I shall get less satisfaction out of my life if I am bad than if I am good. In the animal world the identity of interest and good is established by the extinction of those kinds of life which are different from the victorious species. In the end only the one kind remains, the others vanish. It would indeed appear absurd to hold that the interest of the beaten species is to give place to another and to die: but we are using language which is inappropriate where there is no choice. We must say that it is the interest of an animal in a species to belong to the victorious. variety. On the other hand, it is to the interest of the bad man to be good, because he can become good: his bad ideal must die like the weaker animal variety, but he himself can become a good man by replacing it by the good ideal.

22. If good and interest are on the whole identical,

The main

why distinguish between the two things? reason is that interest is not always identical with good, and is therefore a different and wider conception. But another reason for distinguishing them, even where they are identical, may be found in the following process. Before a man becomes good, we can think of a hypothetical interest which is different from morality. We can say of the weaker variety that its real interest could be found if the circumstances were such that it could maintain its existence. Of the bad man we can say that supposing the circumstances were favourable, his real interest would be to be bad. We can then add that interest and morality coincide because the hypothetical interests of the conquered varieties cannot be secured.

23. Let us now turn to the exceptional cases where interest does not coincide with morality, and first to those where the wrong-doing is overt and condemned. Wherever we have this discrepancy, it depends upon two different kinds of conditions, acting separately or conjointly. The first is the possession by the agent of a certain kind of disposition which renders him less sensitive to the forces which society can bring against him, or even contemptuous of them. Punishments and social censures are calculated from experience for the average wrong-doer. But there are some persons who do not feel them, or with whom they do not weigh against the profit of the wrong-doing: there are others, to take a less vulgar instance, who will feel the stings of conscience which represents the internal working of the social resistance to wrong, but may end by living down their remorse. A truly good man, just because he is good, would find a wrong act intolerable, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of persons who, in contemplating certain actions, declare they would never forgive themselves, or look others in the face again, if they performed them. But another might do the wrong and overlook the reproaches of

his fellows, and forget his own conscience.

It argues a

thick skin when a man can thus be comfortable under punishment.

The second kind of condition is the weakness of others. Partly this may be simply a relative inferiority on their side in strength or intelligence, or a relative superiority on the side of the wrong-doer; a man may attain power by unscrupulous means, attach others to his interest, and actually suppress by force the resistance of others. In other cases, and generally, it will be a moral weakness on the part of others which secures him his advantage. He succeeds because they are too careless of their social trust to punish him as he deserves. If a tradesman is known to make money by sharp practice, society has only itself to blame if it continues to deal with him or leaves him to enjoy his ill-gotten gains in peace. It is still more guilty if, forgetting his methods of acquisition, it goes on to pay him the court which great wealth usually receives. When it is worth a man's while to do wrong, the guilt lies as often with others as with himself.

Whatever the causes of this divergence of interest and virtue, we have in these exceptional cases the contradictory phenomenon that an ideal which can maintain its existence, and is therefore to the interest of the individual who acts by it, is yet declared to be bad, or a member of a vanishing variety. Such cases mark a stage of transition in the process by which the distinction of good or bad is established. The interested ideal is one which can hold its ground for a time because of the exceptional character of its possessor, or of the circumstances in which he finds himself. The analogy from natural organisms would be of the following kind. any variety there may be here and there an exceptionally endowed individual which will maintain itself for a time against the attacks of its enemies while its fellows are being extirpated. The same result would follow where an

individual either has to struggle with the weaker members of the successful variety against which it might maintain itself for a time (these would correspond to the weak but not culpable persons whom an unscrupulous person silences or uses); or where its struggle is with the members of an intermediate variety closely allied to the successful one, but itself in the process of extirpation, corresponding to those persons who, by culpable weakness in resisting evil, render it possible for evil-doing to be really profitable.

24. The analogy is more striking and easier to point out in those cases of discrepancy between interest and morality where a man's interest can be shown to lie in doing wrong but seeming to be good. Such pretence of goodness is not hard to find: one need not even be a monster of crime to fall under the description: all persons come under it who do what is right, not for its own sake, but merely for fear of the consequences. Whenever such action is to the wrong-doer's interest, we have an ideal which profits a person because it simulates the good and successful ideal. This simulation or imitation is not uncommon amongst animal species. An instance which is quoted by Darwin' is that of a butterfly, Leptalis, which mingles among the swarms of another species, the Ithomia, in certain districts of South America. Some of the mocking insects belong to distinct species, but "many of the mimicking forms of the Leptalis, as well as of the mimicked forms, can be shown by a graduated series to be merely varieties of the same species," just as the seeming good man will either vary exceedingly from the accepted code and trust to skilfulness in concealment, or may deviate only slightly, and more easily get credit for being good. It is noticeable, too, that just as the moral cases we are discussing are exceptional, so the "mockers are almost invariably rare insects, while the mocked abound in swarms."

1 Origin of Species, ch. xiv. p. 375 (6th edit.).