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"By no feat of intention can we achieve courage in loneliness so long as we feel indeed alone. An isolated man, an egoist, an Epicurean man, will always fail himself in the solitary place. There must be something more with us to sustain us against this vast universe than the spark of life that began yesterday and must be extinguished to-morrow.
It was on one of those bad days that Pascal, approaching a window, saw his neighbor, M. Bellombre, the retired professor, making the round of his garden to see if his fruit trees were well covered with blossoms. The sight of the old man, so neat and so erect, with the fine placidity of the egoist, on whom illness had apparently never laid hold, suddenly put Pascal beside himself.
"I won't tell on ye," he said. "I feel like it meself, at times. Ada's a good child, as good as a born egoist can be, but well we are not all made on the same plan. And this life don't suit you. You're a dreamer. I know one when I see one, for I've that side to meself, and now that life is easy it's most the only side I've got left.
He may be an egoist incapable of the continuous self-sacrifice and self-abnegation demanded by the home, quarrelsome and selfish. Sometimes he is wedded to an ideal of achievement or work and believes that he travels best who travels alone. Often in these days of late marriage he has waited until he could "afford" to marry and then finds that his habits chain him to single life.
She possesses that fatal craving the craving for disinterested affection, a source of heartache to the perfect egoist for whom affection of this particular kind is not a necessity but a luxury, and therefore desirable above all else desirable, and how seldom attained! The pause continues. I make a little movement, to attract notice. She looks up, but only her eyes reply.
It is especially worthy of remark that in judging a system of doctrine we must take it as a whole, and not confine ourselves to a few utterances of the man who urges it, however unequivocal they may appear when taken in isolation. He whose motive to action is always some idea of his own personal good is an egoist.
His perfections are those of a prig and an egoist, and he passes like the sun itself over his parterre of adoring worshippers. The ladies who are devoted to Sir Charles Grandison are, indeed, very numerous, but the reader's interest centres in three of them the mild and estimable Harriet Byron, the impassioned Italian Clementina della Porretta, and the ingenuous ward Emily Jervois.
He who has property scattered over four continents and watches with absorbing interest all movements upon the political and economic stage may nevertheless be a thorough-going egoist. The breadth of his horizon will not redeem him.
But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the common-sense recognition of this fact that the youth of the lower orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its wholesomeness we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under discussion do not read 'The Egoist' and 'The Master Builder. It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes.
Renan also divided his hero's pity from his hero's pugnacity. Renan even represented the righteous anger at Jerusalem as a mere nervous breakdown after the idyllic expectations of Galilee. As if there were any inconsistency between having a love for humanity and having a hatred for inhumanity! Altruists, with thin, weak voices, denounce Christ as an egoist.
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