“Where did these two elements in our nature, egoism and altruism, come from? Why have human beings and all other beings known to terrestrial intelligence these two elements, just as they are, in their natures? Why have they not all egoism or all altruism? Why have not the beings in the universe a tendency to act each for its own individual self without any particle of regard for others? Or why are they not so natured as to be oblivious of self and conscious only of those around them? These are profound questions and questions of superlative importance to the student of social culture. What the social scientist is attempting to do, or should be attempting to do, is to ameliorate the relation of associated beings, and this is to be accomplished by improving the conduct or modifying the modes of motion of these beings. And it is necessary in order to modify these modes of motion to know where and how these modes of motion have been acquired. It is impossible for a physician to prescribe rationally to a pathology whose causation he does not know.”

— J. Howard Moore

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, pp. 98–99

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J. Howard Moore 183

1862–1916

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“The acts of living beings are, as a rule, neither all altruism nor all egoism. They consist generally of blends of the two elements, with a preponderance of egoism. It is frequently impossible, too, to estimate just the amount of each element in a given act. An act which may seem altruistic may be in reality only sly and far-sighted egoism.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, p. 96

“In the nature of living beings there are two elements—that element which impels a living creature to move in behalf or in the interests of itself, and that which prompts or prevents movement out of consideration for others. The former of these two elements is called egoism, the latter, altruism.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Egoism and Altruism, p. 92

“A tree or a mineral or a man is a combination of elements or parts, and each must have its projected life term. If we violently and prematurely cut them off one from the other, certain consequences must ensue. Each constituent requires its own time for dissolution. And suicide being a violent destruction of the first element - body - the other two, of soul and spirit, are left without their natural instrument. The man then is but half dead, and is compelled by the law of his own being to wait until the natural term is reached.”

William Quan Judge (1851–1896) American occult writer

Suicide Is Not Death The Lamp, September 1894

“It’s demonstrably not ‘simply human nature’ to annihilate all around us. No, it’s the nature of this particular human culture. Human potential is so much more, and that’s why conflating the two is so toxic.”

Shaun Chamberlin

"Humanity – not just a virus with shoes", Dark Optimism (2019) http://www.darkoptimism.org/2019/08/06/humanity-not-just-a-virus-with-shoes/#post-6037

“Why do I see things differently from the way other people see them? Why do I pursue the questions that I pursue, even if others regard them as, as they say, "controversial?" Which merely means that they have a difference of opinion. They see things differently. I am interested both in nature, and in the human side of nature, and how the two can be brought together, and effectively used.”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

Academy of Achievement interview (1991)

“This is the nature of human energy; individuals generate it, and control it. Each person is self-controlling, and therefore responsible for his acts. Every human being, by his nature, is free.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Source: Discovery of Freedom: Man's Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. xii.

“Act toward others as you would act toward a part of your own self is, it seems to me, the plainest and truest and the most comprehensive and useful rule of conduct ever formulated on this earth. It is the expression of balanced egoism and altruism. It is the soul of sympathy and oneness. It may be called the Law of the Larger Self.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

It is the extension of the regard which we have for ourselves to those below, above, and around us. It is simply the law of the individual organism widened to apply to the Sentient Organism. It is the message which is destined in time to come to redeem this world from the primal curse of selfishness. It is the dream which has been dreamed by the great teachers of the past independently of each other, merely by observing the actions of men and thinking what rule if followed would cure the wrongs and sufferings of this world.
Source: Ethics and Education (1912), The Larger Self, pp. 58–59

“There are two religions in earth, which have distinct enmity against all other religions. These two are Christianity and Islam. They are not just satisfied with observing their own religions, but are determined to destroy all other religions. That’s why the only way to make peace with them is to embrace their religions.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Original works of Rabindranath Vol. 24 page 375, Vishwa Bharti; 1982.

“In this fact we have reached the essential form of every spirit or person — the organic union of the particular with the universal, of its private self-activity in the recognition of itself with its public activity in the recognition of all others. That is, self-consciousness is in the last resort a conscience, or the union of each spirit's self-recognition with recognition of all. Its self-definition is therefore definite, in both senses of the word: it is at once integral in its thorough and inconfusible difference from every other, and yet it is integral in terms of the entire whole that includes it with all the rest. Thus in both of its aspects — and both are essential to it — in a commanding sense it excludes alternative, and there is universal determinism, that is, universal and stable definiteness, just because there is universal self-determination, or genuine freedom. But this universal self-defining implies and proclaims the universal reality, the living presence in all, of one unchangeable type of being — the self-conscious intelligence; and this, presented in all really possible forms, or instances, of its one abiding nature.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.353-4

“Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

Letter to the editor of The New York Times Saturday Book Review (August 1901), as quoted in Joseph Conrad: A Life (2007) by Zdzisław Najder, translated by Halina Najder, p. 315

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