George Herbert Palmer

“ Equivalence should be brought about. In some way the one benefited should put back what he has received. If he allows it to stick in himself, untransmitted, he is disgraced.
I reserve to the last the completest ground of acceptance, love. Where love is, there is no superior or inferior, no giver or receiver. The two make up a conjunct self with mutual gain. Or shall we say that he who loves delights to think of himself as inferior, prides himself on it, and would be ashamed not to look up in glowing dependence? To him, therefore, gifts bring no disparagement, but happy gratitude. ”

“ Under what circumstances may we and may we not preserve our self-respect and still take money? If a stranger passing me on the street hands me a five-dollar bill, I should feel myself disgraced if it went into my pocket. If one I did not know wrote from a distant State his enjoyment of a book of mine, enclosing a check, I should return the check. If finding a person in distress and helping him he offered me money, I should refuse it. Independence is dear to most of us and we do not care to part with it on grounds so casual. ”

“ So nearly does generosity become identified with goodness that if I should ask a man whether John Smith was good to him yesterday I should be understood to ask if he gave unselfish attention to that man’s affairs. Goodness in this sense, the disposition to give, will in the popular mind cover a multitude of sins. In how many stories have past ages taken pleasure where the robber hero, crafty, merciless, and generous, bestows upon the poor plunder taken from the rich. The man ready to give, whatever else his quality, seemed to our ancestors always to deserve admiration. ”

“ Not that in friendship we set up such limits by our own volition, as is done in partnership. The limits are ingrained in the persons,104 and beyond them we know it is futile to press. When two natures have certain sides that fit, to the advantage of each, a friendship springs up. But how embarrassing when some friend whom we greatly value has limitations which oblige us to pause and he, not perceiving them, attributes to our adverse will the failure in full mutual accord! Because of its narrow bounds and because it is sought for individual gain, friendship is of far wider currency than love. ”

“ We do not act or speak precisely as if alone. In all our bearing there is a marked adjustment of one personality to another. I take on the color of him before whom I stand. I feel his psychological conditions and square myself accordingly. That is, I at once perceive that he and I are not quite independent. An acknowledgment of a certain community between us must be established before either of us can be at ease. Such acknowledgment may have a wide or narrow scope, but it will always imply regard for another for his own sake and not merely regard for my sake. ”

“ No one is so generous as he, so ready for self-sacrifice. To please and benefit the loved one is all his care. Let what he gives have cost him little, and he is dissatisfied. He longs to suffer for her sake. These are not marks of self-seeking. But they do indicate that the lover has reached a new conception of self, for which he is even more ardent than ever he was for the old. That old separate self he now despises, and knows that only as he loses it in the loved one will he have any worth. Until he has thoroughly cut himself off from his own detached interests he will be unworthy of her. ”

“ So far is the code from fettering individuality that it becomes the channel for its easiest outgo. A graceful gentleman is enviable in his freedom. He is at home anywhere. Every situation has been thought out by society beforehand. With its conclusions he has been long acquainted and in his own way swiftly adapts them to the delicate occasion at hand. There is no surprise, no awkwardness, no loss of dignity. The separate self is not altogether suppressed, but is present everywhere in the service of the conjunct. ”

“ Or do I distort this consummate altruism by calling it sacrifice? At least this should be added, that true sacrifice never knows itself to be sacrifice. Joyously the parents send their boy forth and joyously accept their own narrow routine. They do so feeling that he to whom they are giving their life is inseparable from themselves. They have learned to merge their abstract isolated self in him and to conceive themselves as living the larger conjunct life with him in his new opportunities. ”

“ It knows no persons, or rather it knows every one as a person and insures each his share in the common good. All the altruism of love is here, but without love’s arbitrary selection and limited interest. We do wrong in thinking of justice as chiefly concerned with penalties. These are incidental, inflicted on those who refuse to find their gain in the gain of others. The main work of justice is its equal distribution of advantage and its insistence that each individual shall be faithful to what he undertakes for the benefit of all. ”

“ They strike us as transcending their age, their own peculiarities, and to embody the conjunct self of humanity.
Still another form of justice, or of love, which passes beyond the individual, is the service of institutions. Artists, scientific and professional men all follow interests of their own, believing, however, that their work in the long run will benefit the public. But in the service of institutions not only does the public receive a benefit, it fixes also what our work toward bringing it about shall be. ”

“ These form successively higher stages of giving, the greatest gift of all being, in my judgment, the gift of growth. Curiously enough, Kant denounces this as immoral. Man, he urges, is a person, the only being, so far as we know, who is capable of self-development. To attempt to take away this power and substitute another’s developing agency is an intrusion. A man’s growth is the business of no one but himself. If another person can scatter a pleasure or two in his path, it is a worthy altruistic act. ”

“ When I try to detach myself from my surroundings I know I am attempting an impossibility. How much would there be left of me were there no one but this central ego, none with whom I might communicate, no language prepared for communication or thought, no common affections, interests, or undertakings? Evidently we are from the start social beings. If with the early moralists we make the opposite assumption, our subsequent interest in our fellow men will never quite clear itself of artificiality and mistake. ”

“ It will be noticed what prominence he gives to the negative function of manners, how in depicting generosity he sees the danger of condescension, and how he finds the crowning excellence of manners in that self-forgetting mutuality which sets all at their ease.
“The true gentleman carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast: all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint or suspicion or gloom or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at their ease and at home. ”

“ Nor is this danger confined to the passion of man for woman. Broader types of love show the same exclusive absorption. Each member of a household may be devoted to the rest and find his own gain through devotion to theirs. Here love attains a peculiarly beautiful mutuality. But it is still circumscribed. The family becomes sufficient for itself. Other families do not count. Love has been selective and, fixing its ardor on certain persons, shuts out the rest. Even the love of God and his children may narrow itself to interest in those only who approach him in the same way as ourselves. ”

“ Happiness is something delightful to share, at least until it becomes so great as to awaken envy. And though it is disagreeable to hear of petty annoyances, which a gentleman passes lightly by, serious misfortune is so much a part of the common lot that all will sympathize in hearing of it and be pleased that they have in this instance escaped. The death of a relative may not improperly put its mark on our very clothing, but it is indecent to speak of our vexations from servants and children.
Here, then, we see human society reposing on a widely distributed and systematized altruism. ”

“ More than Manners it hints at insincerity and conduct that hopes to gain something for itself. Beware of a polite man. He is likely to use you for his own ends. Might we then talk of Good Breeding? When any one calls me well-bred he praises my parents, not me. The excellence on which I pride myself has apparently come from their training. What shall we say of Courtesy? That it is a term of dignity, but suggests stooping. The one with whom I deal is accounted my inferior. Or Gentlemanliness? To call a young fellow a gentleman makes his heart throb. ”

“ Society, the special field for the cultivation of manners, would soon be sterile soil were it not abandoned during lenten intervals and summers in the country. After meeting a multitude of people and being obliged to adjust ourselves to only such matters as all can understand, what a relief it is to be in the open fields, social conventions dropped, responsibilities forgotten, and no regard for others marking our words, acts, or dress! ”

“ Our thoughts are there fixed on ourselves, heedless of the condition of whatever furnishes us profit. Oxen we like, because they supply our tables and till our fields. What matter if in doing so they perish? We tend the dog we love and do not let him be harmed in our service. In short, loving is our forthgoing toward one possessing a worth preferred above our own; liking, our feeling toward anything from which we derive benefit, even though inferior in general worth to ourselves. ”

“ He draws profit, it is true, from another man’s pocket, but he does not, like the gambler, stop there. He puts back into that pocket a little more than the equivalent of what he took out. The gambler breaks up this mutuality and lives as a bandit by attack. Thus dehumanized83 and shut up to his separate self he rots. When trade allows the double gain to drop out of sight, it too becomes gambling and shows the same predatory tendencies. Honest trade is a different matter. Its mutual profit carries altruism through a community more wholesomely than can any arbitrary will. ”

“ One desiring altruistic skill should be training himself perpetually: as he walks the street, as he meets an acquaintance, as he enters a shop, as he sits at table. Every situation affords opportunity for swiftly sympathetic adjustment, for removing self-absorption and substituting for it that generous imagination without which no gift is acceptable. A well-equipped giver, putting himself imaginatively in the other man’s place, perceives at once how his gift may be most easily received. ”

“ Any suspicion that we are expected to love a certain person alienates us from him. We cannot force ourselves to love even when we see it to be desirable; nor can we expel love when we find it unreturned or unworthy. Love insists on freedom, a certain absence of constraint, either from a person, from circumstance, from collateral advantages, or even from our own volition. Like giving, it recognizes no claim. ”

“ Indeed, wherever any one is true to his specific task, puts his heart into it, works not for money alone nor through interest in a single individual, but, without calculating any equivalence between what he gives and receives, studies how he may most fully perform the work to which he has been called, that man is exhibiting professional responsibility, honoring love, and exalting justice in a way to deserve profound reverence. ”

“ For several reasons it is unlikely he will be good for much thereafter. Seldom does a vice or virtue have only a single root. On the one hand the gambler gives up rational modes of guidance, ceases to calculate clearly, lives on the unexpected, and looks for some deliverance to drop from the sky. A hectic anxiety takes possession of him and disorganizes his life. But there are results worse still. Gambling, in contrast with honest trade, admits only a single gain. I can gain nothing for myself except by damaging another. ”

“ However glad, therefore, we may be to get our wants supplied, a disagreeable taste is apt to lurk about the acceptance of a gift. A good share of humility is required of one who will be an altogether happy receiver, a contented inferior. Our age has discovered this and has grown restive over charity. It would seem that in past ages those who lacked the things that make life worth living stood with outstretched hands to receive them from their rightful owners, and that those who owned counted it a prerogative of their station thus to assist their inferiors. ”

“ Thus love becomes peculiarly impersonal and creative.
For example, when I become an artist or scientific man I do not know precisely what I shall contribute to the good of the public. The public itself has experienced no want of the wares which I shall furnish. In devoting myself to the higher mathematics I am pursuing something for which a practical application may never be found. But that uncertainty should not hold me back. I know that the mind of man moves off in that direction. I will follow and see how far it can be pressed. ”

“ No doubt there are degrees of dignity in the work done. If as a physician I sell intellectual power and special knowledge, I am naturally honored more than if as a day laborer I sell only physical exertion. But work and wages are in themselves honorable, so that if ten cents is of more consequence to me than getting my hands dirty, I am not disgraced by blacking another man’s shoes.
A third case is of almost equal importance, though more complicated and more liable to error. We may accept money in trust, receiving it from an individual and returning its results to the public. ”

“ But a true artist explores phases of unacknowledged beauty. Having himself seen what others have not seen, he takes the risk of announcing it, certain that if it is comprehended he will open men’s eyes to fresh enjoyment. Rightly therefore do we hold artists and scientific men in high honor as enlargers of humanity. We see that altruism like theirs calls for risk and special disinterestedness. They are discoverers, going out into wide lands, far from sure what will be found there, but ready to sacrifice themselves for possible human betterment. ”

“ One must pay for dignity. It will not do, then, to assume that giving is always an altruistic act. It may be. Yet even where it is genuinely addressed to improving the condition of some needy person, the danger is not absent of lowering the independence of that other, of making him through our will our conscious inferior, and accordingly implying disparagement in our very bounty. If in giving we always keep the better end of the transaction for ourselves and hand the poorer to another, few adjustments of social life will call for more tact. ”

“ Such universal war is soon seen to bring damage to every one and social compacts arise, compromises, under which I concede to others the right of acting in certain ways on condition of their allowing my action in certain others. While this involves large sacrifice of one’s own desires for the sake of other people, it is endured because it pays, pays egoistically. We gain by it the largest scope for action our crowded world permits. But there is nothing disinterested about it. Genuine altruism is nowhere operative. ”

“ The professional spirit may vitalize work of every sort. Here is a poor man to whom few enjoyments are open, who goes out morning after morning to shovel gravel or to engage in some other labor equally uninteresting. He earns his two or three dollars a day, takes it home, and hands it to his slatternly wife. Once he was drawn to her by romantic love. With her he figured a real union, each continually happy in the sight of the other and each day bringing to both an inward joy. ”