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Updated: May 27, 2025
He sat down in the woods to wonder and to pray. It was not until some time after that he realized any change in himself, and not until he returned from Litchfield did his father perceive it. His conversion was thorough. Not only was he turned about, his face God-ward instead of self-ward, but he was impelled toward "those sitting in darkness."
Nature is cruel, "red in tooth and claw." The deathward tendency is what I may call the self-ward tendency in the upward struggle of all organic forms, that is, one organism only exists at the expense of other organisms.
If the true life is the life which is lived in terms of the whole, then the sinful life is the life which is lived for self alone. No man, however depraved, succeeds in living the selfish life all the time; if he did he would sink below the level of the brutes. Sin makes for death; love makes for life. Sin is self-ward; love is All-ward.
The farther back we go, the stronger seems the self-ward tendency. The natural state of uncivilised man is a state of war. Man in primitive communities only exists and flourishes by destroying other communities. A most curious thing it is, too, that apparently our domestic and civic virtues have grown out of this state of war. A man used to carry his wife off by main force.
It is what I call the self-ward tendency, the desire to grasp and keep at the expense of other individualities other societies than our own. But in history, and from those very earliest times down to our own, another tendency has shown itself at work, a counter tendency.
Probably he does not want it all for himself; he works for love of his family or love of the community, and his desire to serve them makes his work gladder, so that already he has more abundant life than he would otherwise possess. Analyse human action, no matter what, and it will be seen to point in one or other of these two directions, self-ward or all-ward.
Ruskin has a grimly amusing paragraph on the parallel between an earlier civilisation and that of to-day, and the identity in principle of the self-ward tendency in both. In mediaeval times, as he would say, the robber baron was wont to possess himself of a mountain fortress, whence he swooped down upon hapless passers-by to rob them of their possessions and their lives.
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