From Time and Tide for July 16, 1926 pp. 648-649

I have been asked to write an account of the Freewoman, and those who asked me were wise, for that paper, unimportant as it was in content, – and amateurish in form, had an immense effect on its time. But unfortunately, I have forgotten nearly everything about it. It must have lived about 14 or 15 years ago, because I know I was about 17 or 18 years of age; and in the intervening years I have done so much else and have so completely lost touch with the other persons involved, that the details are fogged in my mind.

The paper was the creation of Dora Marsden, who was one of the most marvellous personalities that the nation has ever produced. She had, to begin with, the most exquisite beauty of person. She was hardly taller than a child, but she was not just a small woman; she was a perfectly proportioned fairy. She was the only person I have ever met who could so accurately have been described as flower-like that one could have put it down on her passport. And on many other planes she was as remark able. In her profession she had been more than ordinarily successful. Though she was still under thirty, she was head of a training college for teachers. She was one of the fighting suffragettes under Mrs. Pankhurst, and in the course of her activities she had shown courage that even in that courageous company seemed magnificent. She had been to prison more than once, and had behaved with what would have been amazing heroism in any woman, but which was something transcendent in her case, since she was physically fragile and the victim of a tiresome form of ill-health.

She conceived the idea of starting the Freewoman because she was discontented with the limited scope of the suffragist movement. She felt that it was restricting itself too much to the one point of political enfranchisement and was not bothering about the wider issues of Feminism. I think she was wrong in formulating this feeling as an accusation against the Pankhursts and suffragettes in general, because they were simply doing their job, and it was certainly a whole time job. But there was equally certainly a need for someone to stand aside and ponder on the profounder aspects of Feminism. In this view she found a supporter in Mary Gawthorpe, Yorkshire woman who had recently been invalided out of the suffrage movement on account of injuries sustained at the hands of stewards who had thrown her out of a political meeting where she had been interrupting Mr. Winston Churchill. Mary Gawthorpe, was a merry militant saint who had travelled round the provinces, living in dreary lodgings on $15 or $20 a week, speaking several times a day at outdoor meetings, and suffering fools gladly (which I think she found the hardest job of all), when trying to convert the influential Babbits of our English zenith cities. Occasionally she had a rest in prison, which she always faced with a sparrow-like perkiness. She had wit and common sense and courage, and each to the point of genius. She lives in the United States now, but her inspiration still lingers over here on a whole generation of women.

These two came together and planned this paper, but Dora Marsden played the chief part of organizing and controlling it throughout the whole of its life, for at that time Mary Gawthorpe was sick almost unto death.

Dora Marsden came to London with her devoted friend Grace Jardine, who was Martha to her Mary, and they found a publisher to finance them. At this point I had better remind my readers that again and again radical movements find themselves obliged to be financed by the insane. Radicals may take comfort in reflecting that the same is true of non-radical movements, but that the fact is so serious because there is no striking antithesis between such movements and their financiers. This particular gentleman financed not only the Freewoman, but Chesterton and Belloc’s The Eye Witness, and a fashionable illustrated paper. which was tended by a beautiful lady with red gold hair and decorative footwear. Her slippers gleam undimmed across the gulf of time; I have not been able to forget them. The movies had not come into their own, but she anticipated the anima of Mr. Cecil de Mille. He also published his own poetry, which consisted of Wordsworthian nature verse and Browningish monologues about he soul. One I remember particularly was a touching lament by St. Augustine on his own celibacy. And this gentleman also published, with the utmost generosity of terms, various books by young lions. For example, he brought out Katherine Mansield’s first volume of short stories “In a German Pension.” So we started in; or rather they did. I did not join them till later; in fact, I never wrote for the Freewoman till it had got such a bad name for its candour that I was forbidden to read it by my family, and thus I came to adopt my present pseudonym. The initial group consisted of Dora Marsden, Grace Jardine and a glorious red-haired bachelor of science, who had been in and out of gaol for the cause, named Rona Robinson. They went at first or all the conventional Feminist articles of faith. In their early numbers I fancy they represented as nearly as possible the same program as the National Woman’s Party. That program has certainly been accepted by English women of this subsequent period with an extraordinary completeness. I think there are probably hardly any subscribers to the quiet orthodox woman’s weekly of to-day, Time and Tide, who do not take it for granted that it is degrading to woman, and injurious to the race to leave the financing of the mother and her children to the double-barrelled caprice of the father and the father’s employer. They may differ regarding the specific remedies they propose to end this state of affairs, but hardly any of them would defend it. I am convinced that this change of outlook is partly due to the strong lead given by the Freewoman. But the greatest service that the paper did its country was through its unblushingness. It paralleled the achievement of Miss Christabel Pankhurst, who did an infinite service to the world by her articles on venereal disease. The content of them was not too intelligent. It blamed the impurity of men for a state of affairs to which the impurity of women and the social system are also contributory causes. But it mentioned venereal diseases loudly and clearly and repeatedly, and in the worst possible taste; so that England fainted with shock, and on recovering listened quite calmly when the experts came forward and said that since the subject had at last been mentioned they might urge that the state could do this and that to prevent these diseases. Even so, the Freewoman mentioned sex loudly and clearly and repeatedly, and in the worst possible taste; and likewise the content was not momentous. Those who laugh at Freud and Jung should turn back to those articles and see how utterly futile and blundering discussions on these points used to be even when they were conducted by earnest and intelligent people. But the Freewoman by its candour did an immense service to the world by shattering, as nothing else would, as not the mere cries of intention towards indepence had ever done, the romantic conception of women. It pointed out that lots of women who were unmated and childless resented their condition. It pointed out that there were lots of women who were mated and who had children who found elements of dissatisfaction in their position. It even mentioned the existence of abnormalities of instinct. In fact, it smashed the romantic pretence that women had as a birthright the gift of perfect adaptation; that they were in a bland state of desireless contentment which, when they were beautiful, reminded the onlooker of goddesses, and when they were plain were more apt to remind him of cabbage. If this romantic conception had been true, there would have been no reason for the emancipation of women, since as they could be happy anywhere and anyhow, there was never any need to alter their environment. It had to be admitted that women were vexed human beings who suffered intensely from mal-adaptation to life, and that they were tortured and dangerous if they were not allowed to adapt themselves to life. That admission is the keystone of the modern Feminist movement. Dora Marsden made her point with unique effectiveness, considering the length of the paper’s life. Nevertheless the paper was coming to an end psychically when it came to an end physically. Its psychic death was due to the fact that Dora Marsden started on a train of thought which led her to metaphysics. She began to lose her enthusiasm for bringing women’s industry on equal terms with men, because it struck her that industrialism destroyed more in life than it produced. She began to be sceptical of modern civilisation and this led her to preaching a kind of Tolstoyism which would have endeavoured to lead the world back to primitive agriculture. waged war with her on this point in a correspondence that the curious might hunt down in the files. I signed myself therein Rachel East. I got no chance to convince her, for already she had retreated to further remotenesses and was developing an egoistic philosophy on the lines foreshadowed by Max Stirner. About this time the brick fell. Our publisher fled suddenly to North Africa, with the lady of the shoes and a considerable sum of money which an unfortunate gentleman had entrusted him as an investment in the business. It then turned out that he was a criminal of a singular type; really a naïve moral imbecile. After various financial fantasias and a number of carelessly conceived and executed bigamies he had settled down as a publisher not a mile from our police department offices at Scotland Yard, and had there flourished for two years; and no doubt would have done so for many more years had not the young lions been so expensive and the lady with the shoes so desirous of foreign travel.

He was brought back and sent to a place of seclusion for some Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc and Dora Marsden and her flock were homeless for a time. Then odd people turned up and financed it, and it was reissued as The Egoist, of which paper I was literary editor. That did not last long. My position seemed to me impossible. The routine of the office was not impeccable. There was an arrivist American poet who intended to oust me, and his works and those of his friends continually appeared in the paper without having passed me. This was unbearably irritating, particularly at that age. And Dora Marsden, more and more remote in her ether of speculation, could not understand it when I objected to articles which did not come up to a certain standard of taste and literary skill. So I quit. I am quite sure that she never understood why. An argument that there is relation between the expression and what is expressed, and that if the one is coarse the other is unlikely to be authentic, seemed to her a far away babble, for it was becoming less and less imperative for her to express herself. Hers was now to be rather than to do.

The paper lived some time after I left it. It did a magnificent thing for literature in publishing James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Of its last days I cannot speak, for about that time ill-health fell on me and for long I was out of things. I have heard nothing of Dora Marsden for ten years or so. It may be that the wisdom she has obtained is not communicable, but I am sure to some far peak of wisdom she must have attained, and I cannot think that it is not good for the race when some of its component atoms reach projection, even if they cannot transmit it to their fellows. At any rate, Dora Marsden left us a heritage in the unembarrassed honesty of our times.

Discover rare photographic glimpses of pioneering egoists such as Dora Marsden and Benjamin R. Tucker, and delve into the visionary project to produce a Braille edition of Max Stirner’s magnum opus for the indomitable Helen Keller. Unearth a plethora of fascinating artifacts pertaining to Malfew Seklew, and be riveted by the astonishing revelation of Ragnar Redbeard’s brief yet impactful foray as a Canadian Socialist Provocateur.

This sixth issue of Der Geist is sure to delight and offend, but most of all, serve as an essential philosophical reference work for centuries to come.

DER GEIST: The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945 | ISSUE 6 | Winter 2023
Paperback, 212 pages, $15
ISBN 978-1-944651-29-9, ISSN 2639-5339

Der Geist, (Trevor Blake, editor; Kevin I. Slaughter, co-editor) is an English-language journal for an international audience, publishing original scholarship on the philosophy of egoism. The journal is descriptive of the first century of egoism in print (from the 1845 publication of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner to the end of 1945), not prescriptive in advocacy of egoism.

CONTENTS

Introduction by the Editor  2

1. Max Stirner   7

Max Stirner’s Anarchist Gospel | A Dutch Review of Stirner’s Work | Anarchist Black Dragon | Max Stirner vs. Wahrheit-Sucher | “Celine Adele Marillier” | Pity and the Future | Max Stirner and the Grisette | Steven T. Byington’s Triple Score

2. Malfew Seklew  29

On “Bérnard’s Tour” | Minister Mocks Malfew  | Stern Critique of Christian Socialist  | Seklew Asks: Nietzsche to Blame?  | Social Aristocrat Socialist Secretary | A Freak Among Reformers  | No Guide for Anybody | Proletarians in Purgatory | No Justice for Malfew Seklew  | “We’re All More or Less Nutty” | Not Seeking Work  | Seklew Scolds Simpoleons, Supplies Sample Shilling Sericine Silk Set | No Detail Too Small!

3. Ragnar Redbeard   51

Redbeard in Canada | Desmond Selling George  | Give the New Hand a Show! | A.D. in the O.E.D.  | A Bogus Book | Australian Socialist Drinking Club | Redbeard’s Rough Stuff |“We Understand the Redbeard Philosophy” | Voima On Oikeus | Etc.

4. Dora Marsden  95

Dora Marsden for the Prosecution | The Freewomen of New York | Dora Marsden, unser aller Mutter  | Dora Marsden Ephemera | Rare Portraits

5. Benjamin DeCasseres   107

Emmeline Pankhurst | Pyrrhonism and Acatalepsy | Balzac | The Borrowed Mirror

6. Friedrich Nietzsche   117

Nietzsche and a Braille Stirner for Hellen Keller | “Will Nietzsche Come Into Vogue…” | The Works of Friedrich Nietzsche | Alexander Tille Reads Egoism

7. Enzo Martucci   135

A Sketch of Martucci | An Excerpt from The Red Sect | Martucci on Stirner

8. Free Spirits  159

Peter Lamborn Wilson Has Passed  | Hakim Bey: Real and Unreal | Vox Populi Vox Dei | Thompson at Rudolf Steiner Hall | Speakers’ Corner Anthology | Among the Anarchists | The True Comarade | Is This What You Call “Living?” | The Thirteenth Paragraph | Greeves Fisher, A Sketch | Dominance vs. Egoism | More Individualism | Individualism and Property | Why I am a Right-Wing Anarchist | Opening and Closing the Dil Pickle | Christmas a Joke! | “I” a poem  | “I GO” a poem| A Letter to the Editors of Freedom | Enrico Arrigoni Bibliography | Photo of Benjamin R. Tucker | About the Editors

First, two lines from the book-length poem The Atheist by George Bedborough (London: Garden City Press, 1919)…

“Dora Marsden writes well and so do her friends, / But The Egoist sometimes to crankiness tends.”

Second, an advertisement for The Egoist which appeared in Bruno’s Weekly Vol. III No. 19 (October 25, 1916)…

Essays by Dora Marsden (1882 – 1960) from her journal The Egoist. Introduction, annotations, glossary and index by Trevor Blake, author of Dora Marsden Bibliography.

Available from: Underworld Amusements | Amazon.com | Amazon.UK | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org

What a blight it is on life, to be sure, that honest speech is almost non-existent. Lo and behold, all are alike: the secret sin against the spirit of peace is universal, and can be proclaimed from the housetops.
The “poor” man is the one who lacks the power to get what he wants. If he had had the “might,” the “competence” to cover the wide expanse of these “rights,” he would not be in the position of a beggar asking for the favour of a job from a master: he would have set about being his own master: the one thing which to this day the ordinary wage earner steadily refuses to be. “Reformers” have tried to get a comprehensive view of the “world’s work”—which does not exist save in their own imagination—and they have come to neglect and hold lightly work viewed from its only real aspect—the personal satisfying of needs and wants as they rise up spontaneously from each varying individual. Social rebels will get no way until they acquiesce willingly in men and women being what they are: accept their oddities and wayward differences and then make the best and most of them to serve their individual ends.

Available from: Underworld Amusements

“Anarchists are an interesting body of people whom governments take too seriously and who, unfortunately, do not take themselves seriously enough.”  So begins Dora Marsden in this essay from The Egoist.

The Illusion of Anarchism was written in September 1914. Anarchism was so avant that Kropotkin was still alive. Britain was taking its first steps into World War One. The world was not yet on fire, but Dora was ready to stoke the flames against anyone who would dampen them.

Against the mutalist murmmering of anarchism comes Dora’s egoist exhortation that “men do not act after the anarchistic fashion one towards another. They are friendly and affectionate animals in the main: but interests are as imperative with them as with the tiger and the ape. [The world] is a bundle of interests, and falls to those who can push their own furthest.” But by its conclusion, The Illusion of Anarchism offers “the stirrings of a power sufficient” for anarchists willing to set aside their illusions.

From The Little Review
Vol. V. April 1919 No.11

The Reader Critic

Helen West Heller, Canton, Illinois: on The De Gourmont Number, The Little Review Vol. V. February-March No. 10-11

The De Gourmont number, great! I do not just admit the fineness of Ezra Pound, I am glad of him. What Roger Heller calls his poundigrams are a delight, but chiefly he is a Great Appreciator. It is a joy to find so exquisite a master of the exquisite differentiations of the English language. More, his thought has such urge of fine distinctions that only one speech irks him; he must be a Chaucer to an amalgam of the speech of two peoples.

All languages coalesced will be none too ample for the intense complexity of future thought. All languages and all arts are not enough with which to declare the sensings that wriggle within us. Ezra Pound and Margaret Anderson are administering the future to readers in this country. The English speaking denizens of the U.S. have been nursed by their silly eagle so long that it goes hard with them to have to learn something. But they probably will be compelled to swallow the cosmopolitan pill.

“Gourmont’s essays the best record of the civilized mind from 1885-1915.” From the excerpts here given de Gourmont would seem to be a condensed, transmuted record of Max Stirner’s ”Ego and his Own .” The War of the White Races was fought, is fighting, against three books: “Der Einzige Und Sein Eigenthum”, “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, “Das Kapital”; and the greatest of these is “Der Einzige Und Sein Eigenthum”.

INCIDENTS OF THE RAID
DISAPPOINTED SUFFRAGISTS
ONLY ONE OF THEM ADMITTED TO THE HOUSE
TWELVE ARRESTS

In accordance with the statement contained in Miss Pankhurst’s letter to the Prime Minister on Monday, the members of the Women’s Social and Political Union assembled in large numbers at Caxton Hall yesterday afternoon for the purpose of appointing a deputation to wait upon Mr. Asquith at the House of Commons.

Compared with previous gatherings of a similar nature, there was less enthusiasm in the proceedings, while in the streets there were further evidences of declining interest in the propaganda methods of the Union. A brass band aided in engendering a bellicose spirit by playing patriotic marches before the meeting.

The usual resolution, calling upon the Government to abandon their present policy and to give votes to those women disqualified by sex, was proposed by Mrs. Solomon, seconded by Mrs. Eates, and supported by Miss Smith (Birmingham), Mrs. Morris (Liverpool), Miss Woodlock (Liverpool), Miss Robinson (Manchester), and Miss Dora Marsden (Manchester).

The deputation, 29 in number, left Caxton Hall at ten minutes to four to the strains of the Marseillaise played by the band, and the encouraging cheers of a number of women sympathisers. Miss Dora Marsden carried the suffragist tricolour at the head of the procession. The deputation had only gone about fifty yards when the police stopped it, and courteously explained that their formation constituted a procession, which could not be allowed within a mile of the House. Miss Marsden was allowed to pass the cordon leaning on the arm of a gentleman, and still carrying her triclour. Other members of the party were passed through one at a time, and at such intervals as to render a procession out of the question. Miss Marsden reached the St. Stephen’s entrance just after four o’clock, and, of course, did not get beyond the police who guarded the entrance.

POLICE CAPTURE THE COLOURS
An exciting half-hour followed. Miss Marsden insisted on carrying her colours aloft, and the police broke the pole so as to prevent her doing this. She, however, retained the remains of her flag, and made determined attempts to mount the steps leading to the House of Commons. Altogether about twenty-four members of the deputation had now reached St. Stephen’s, where they were met by a solid cordon of police, and effectively prevented in their endeavours to gain admittance.

Acting Superintendent Boxall had given instructions that nobody should be arrested if arrests could possibly be avoided, and in carrying out that instruction his men displayed the utmost good temper and forbearance. Again and again the women secured a foothold on the pavement, and as they refused to return to the roadway they were pushed off as gently as might be. Some women insisted on addressing the crowd, but appears to have few sympathisers in the gathering. There was good deal of chaff, and the women were repeatedly advices to “go home.”

Two or three mounted policemen helped to keep the crowd on the move, and some of the more daring of the women contrived to seize the bridles of the horses, and were forced away with the greatest difficulty.

The police had absolute control, as was shown by the fact that they readily made a way to the House for a number of ladies who had legitimate business there, and for members passing to and from the House.

The Earl of Granard and his bride presented themselves, and surveyed for some time the exciting scene with evident amusement. The Earl ultimately passed into the House, and the Countess remained in her motor car and ordered it back home.

POLICEMEN’S FACES SMACKED
Shortly before five o’clock the police were compelled, in spite of their desire to avoid arrests, to take a small party of women to Cannon-row Police-station. The offenses alleged against them are of assault against the police. One woman deliberately struck a constable over the head with her umbrella, knocking his helmet off, and twice slapped the officer’s face. A second woman who was taken into custody also knocked off a policeman’s helmet. The leader and bearer of the bannerette became very violent, and, hatless and disheveled, again and again threw herself against the police cordon. Supt. Wells caught her in his arms as she made the rush and turned her back. The woman tried to strike him in the face, but Mr. Wells would not hear of her being arrested. One of his inspectors was also struck in the face, but showed similar forbearance.

In all the police made twelve arrests, the prisoners being:

• Mrs. Emily Davidson, 4, Clement’s Inn, London
• Miss Patricia Woodlock, Canning-chambers, Liverpool
• Mrs. Florence Farmer, 156, Tufnell Park-road, London
• Miss Helen Tolson, Zealand Hall, Manchester
• Miss Margaret Smith, 11, Colore-buildings, Birmingham
• Miss Dora Marsden, Manchester
• Miss Kate Noblet, 63, Bristol-road, Edgbaston
• Miss Alice Burton, 15, Upper Newington, LIverpool
• Mrs. Julia Scott, Woodfield, St. Anne-road, Chertsey
• Mrs. Bessie K. Morris, Wavertree
• Miss Rona Robinson, Fallowfield
• Mr. William Hutcheon, 113, Pepya-road, London, S. E.

A Criticism of the Philosophy of Egoism by Henry Meulen

To the Editor of The Egoist.

Madam,

The sudden change in the title of your journal fills me with misgivings: I was not aware that the Stirnerian Egoism had taken so strong a hold upon you, and I hasten to beg you to permit me to explain my disagreement with that philosophy.

Egoism is the doctrine that the motive of every human action is the pleasure of the performer, the word “pleasure” being taken to include all forms of moral satisfaction. The view of orthodoxy to-day is that people sometimes commit acts of self-sacrifice. Sometimes I seem to be foregoing a big “moral” pleasure (a pleasure that, so far as introspection carries me, I am at that moment appreciating to the full) for a smaller, less noble satisfaction; and sometimes I seem to be sacrificing a strong ignoble pleasure for the sake of a weaker noble one. How will you prove to me now that in both these cases I am in reality choosing in the direction of my greatest pleasure?

It is useless to tell me that the fact of my acting in a particular way proves the pleasure anticipated from that act to have been the stronger: this does but assume the point to be proved, for it advances no reason for denying that an action may sometimes proceed in the line of the weaker of two anticipated pleasures.

It is equally useless to tell me that the fact of my wanting to perform an act is a proof that I anticipate the greatest satisfaction from that course: this again simply assumes the point at issue, since I, who am surely able more accurately than any outsider to appraise the comparative strength of my anticipated pleasures, decide that I want to act in the direction of a weaker pleasure. You will doubtless here assert, as these ingenious Stirnerians do, that the fact of my wanting to perform a particular action A rather than B indicates that there is a greater hunger within me for satisfaction A than for B. Words—mere words. You cannot possibly know my intimate hungers so well as I, and I decide that my hunger for satisfaction A is less than that for B.

You will ask me why I wish to perform that particular action, if it is going to afford me less pleasure than another action that is equally open to me. I reply that I want to act thus for such and such reasons, but that, so far as I am aware, the performance of that action will afford me less total pleasure (moral gratification, future retrospective pleasure, or other satisfaction) than another course that is open to me. So far as I am able to examine and compare my desires, I seem sometimes to perform actions that will yield me small pleasures of a particular kind rather than other actions that will yield me large pleasures of a different kind, and your simple assertion that I must have anticipated more total pleasure from the former actions leaves me quite unconvinced of the truth of Egoism.

Lastly, you will not help your cause by asking me if I anticipate no pleasure from my projected course of action. I may confess the sweet secret; or I may assert that I expect only pain; but I may be able most truthfully to affirm that another action would yield me more total pleasure than the one in question. Of course, as I have insisted above, if you assert that the fact that I desire to perform a particular act proves that I expect most pleasure in that direction, you cut the ground from under my feet; but I reiterate that this assertion proves nothing—it simply assumes the point at issue. So long as there exists a man so obstinately deaf to your persuasions that he asserts that he sometimes deliberately performs actions that will yield him less total pleasure than other actions that were open to him, you have no way of proving the truth of your doctrine of Egoism to him.

Hence I am of opinion that the philosophy of Egoism rests upon unverifiable assumption. More­ over, since culture consists for the most part of a relinquishment of particular satisfactions for the sake of other satisfactions, it may be useful to retain the notion that some of the people whom we admire may, however rarely, have sacrificed strong pleasures for weaker ones in the performance of some of their admirable actions. This knowledge assists us to perform worthy actions—weak vessels that we are.

Views and Comments by Dora Marsden

This time it is hedonism. It was nominalism, and has been realism, intuitionism, individualism, Socialism. Given time, and the catholicity of these pages, we shall in the opinion of one or other off our readers rehearse the entire procession of isms and schisms, whether ancient, mediaeval or modern. The compliment paid to the wealth of our erudition would no doubt be pleasant—and wholly undeserved—did it not clash with our egoistic temper, which compels us to protest as to our status. Our modesty notwithstanding, we protest that we brew our own malt: we are not bottlers and retailers: we are in the wholesale and producing line of business. If our beer bears a resemblance in flavour to other brands, it is due to the similarity of taste in the makers. “Stirnerian” therefore is not the adejective [sic] fittingly to be applied to the egoism of The Egoist. What the appropriate term would be we can omit to state. Having said this, we do not seek to minimise the amount of Stirner which may be traced herein. The contrary rather, since having no fear that creative genius folded its wings when Stirner laid down his pen, we would gladly credit to him—unlike so many of the individualists who have enriched themselves somewhat at his hands—the full measure of his astounding creativeness. For it is not the smallness in measure of what one takes away from genius one admires which is creditable. It is a very old story—the comedy of discipleship—that though the banquet of wisdom is spread and open to all-comers the number of the foolish abroad does not materially diminish. We may take from where we please, but “how much” depends on how much we can. The wealth of the feast is the affair of the hosts: capacity to take from it concerns only the guest. Since then we recognise his value, why protest that we have drawn at the stream of his creation into thimbles? We take what we can, and our capacity is not measured by thimblefuls. And because it is not, “Stirnerian egoism” has not as Mr. Meulen suggests in the correspondence columns “taken such a firm hold” of us. If that appears a paradox to our correspondent we ask him to work it out. It is really very simple and straightforward if he will bear in mind that we are very great pots and can therefore afford to be honest. So few people can.

We can now consider Mr. Meulen’s dictum that “egoism is the doctrine that the motive of every human action is the pleasure of the performer.” The Egoist is an odd quarter wherein to present a word like “Pleasure” as the main term in a defini­tion. What is “Pleasure?” The text-books even will point out that there is a confusion: that there are concrete activities which may be called “pleasures,” which however vary with person, mood and circumstances, and if insisted upon are likely to be classed as nuisances and a bore. But “Pleasure” the vague generalisation it is impossible to define. It is of the order of the static concept which have the function of tombstones among words. Tombstones, as Mr. Allan Upward points out in his illuminating “Divine Mystery,” are intended to keep the spirit down: imprisoned underneath in the vault, and that is what words like “Pleasure” manage to do. They blur over with an abstract generality the positive active element in that which they pretend to name. Their only use is to create seemingly irreconcilable opposites, playing with which manages to keep the professors and scholars from swelling the ranks of the unemployed. They go in pairs: and “self-sacrifice” is the verbal opposite which nicely balances “Pleasure.” Both represent mental confusion, and we suggest to Mr. Meulen the advisability of abandoning both to the exclusive use of scholars and clergymen: putting in their place the active verbal form which comes nearest to expressing what they suggest rather than what they possess of meaning.

To “please” oneself is to set one’s energies moving in a channel in which they run readily and with comfort: that is a definition which for the moment will do for “Pleasure”; to sacrifice oneself is to set them on enterprises where they move reluctantly and with hardship. The motor-power in both cases comes from the self: the motive is self- satisfaction and fulfillment. Whether the issue is satisfactory or not is more or less accidental: with judgment it tends to become less rather than more. To “please oneself” and to “sacrifice oneself” are in the main, activities by the way, like the passing through roads of varying quality in the course of a long journey. A sturdy traveller will take them as they come philosophically. On occasion, the passing over a favourable tract will be undertaken and re­peated solely to enjoy the ease and facility with which it can be covered: as in advance the dancers will move continuously round the floor. And on the other hand, a difficult stretch will be undertaken and repeated in order to enjoy the ultimate satisfaction at not having been defeated by its rigours: as in the more difficult feats of mountain-climbing or in any of the “tasks” of “self-sacrifice” which men will set themselves to prove they can go through with them. It is a healthy method of hardening and weathering, and great fun as long as no one is mis­ taken by it. Whether men are “pleasing” themselves or “sacrificing” themselves they are enjoying themselves very well indeed, particularly in the latter if they have an audience. Probably because in the long history of experience the “hardening” process makes men more fit and inclined to venture into new fields than does the lingering over the facile and comfortable, the “hardening” always wins the applause of general common-sense, and it is because of this that instead of calling itself doggedness or sport, the “hardeners” have become accustomed to get their solatium in a left-handed way by calling their form of amusement “self-sacrifice.” If anyone speaks of “self-sacrifice” it is a certainty they are speaking to an audience, real or imaginary. They are getting at someone. They would call it a good old sport if they felt they were quite, quite alone.

* * *

We have of course been speaking of “pleasures” definitely entered upon as diversions and “self-sacrifice” adopted as a tonic with a strong probability of amusement in the form of applause rounding it off at the finish. Both are hobbies, off the track of life’s main courses. The “self-sacrifice” which has sprung up by instinct and veined itself into the mesh of life without any thought of pleasure or audience is not so easy to explain. Perhaps the feature which best helps to explain it is the fact that it never regards itself as “self-sacrifice.” The term is applied by onlookers after the event. The “sacrifices” of love in any of its forms in the eyes of the makers of them are desires whose frustration would be resented in a degree which itself explains the sacrifice. Of the desire to alleviate suffering, and the supposed existence of goodwill we have already spoken. In relation to the former it is to be noted that sensitive­ness, the form to which vital power runs, and the power to inflict suffering is curbed by the sensitiveness which makes the imagination of the suffering caused proportionately hateful. We mind our manners and our ways for our own sake. As for goodwill, it has no real existence. Sensitiveness, stupidity, and fear explain every form of its seeming appearance. The feeble or unintelligent man is ready to be persuaded into a belief that it exists because the schemes which are erected on it as a basis seem to meet his difficulties. But he is thinking of goodwill as existent not so much in himself as in the powerful: he expects them to adopt its precepts: whereas they, on the con­trary, merely see in it, a happy psychology for “government by consent.” The poor expect “good­ will” to give them “liberty”; the rich look to it to secure a docile serving community. In a few thousand years, after experimenting with every “constructive” scheme of government, “divine” and human, men will begin to understand that the only will existent is Self-will.

We are not an advice-bureau and give no recipes for conduct, though we do not deny ourselves the pleasure of expressing opinions upon other people’s conduct or even of saying what we would have done, or would do, in a given case. On the other hand, if anyone can cull useful advice from these pages the credit is theirs, and our attitude thereto could only be the deprecating one of the amiable cow to whom the small girl tendered grateful thanks for being so good as to give them milk. To be able gracefully to preach morals one must keep oneself blind to the fact that men ordinarily, and of their own accord, branch out into such adventures as they feel they have power for. To advise a man to be this and that, pioneer or follower, employer or employed, bold or discreet, master or servant, is to usurp the seat of judgment and take on a responsibility which only he who is to be actor in the drama is competent to occupy and undertake. Ethical propagandas are best left to people whose axes are to be ground in that way, whose interest lies along the line of “soul-saving”; ours, happily, is not, and we can afford to admit and speculate upon the varied range of human competency—to realize that for different powers daring, responsibility, morals, the immoral pleasures and satisfactions will generally take on an individually different expression. One can afford to recognize that there exist simple as well as astute, and that the first will form the opportunity of the second. And because they provide the astute ones’ opportunity and are exploited by them, their very usefulness forges a chain which binds the latter to them as securely as their own simplicity puts them under the control of the astute.