EGOISM AND PRIDE.

It is well known that the greater part of the miseries of life originate from the egoism of men. Since each one thinks of himself before thinking of others, and is concerned above all with satisfying his own desires, each one naturally takes care to procure for himself that satisfaction at any cost, and without scruple sacrifices the interests of others, both in the most insignificant things and in the greatest, whether of a moral or of a material order. Hence all the social antagonisms, all the struggles, all the conflicts, and all the miseries, since each one seeks only to despoil his neighbor.

Egoism, in its turn, arises from pride. The exaltation of personality leads man to consider himself above others. Judging himself to have superior rights, he takes offense at whatever, in his view, constitutes an affront to those rights. The importance which, through pride, he attributes to his own person naturally makes him egoistic.

Egoism and pride are born of a natural sentiment: the instinct of self-preservation. All instincts have their reason for being and their usefulness, for God can have made nothing useless. He did not create evil; it is man who produces it, abusing the gifts of God by virtue of his free will. Held within just limits, that sentiment is good in itself. It is exaggeration that makes it bad and pernicious. The same is true of all the passions which man frequently diverts from their providential aim. He was not created egoistic, nor proud, by God, who created him simple and ignorant; it is man who made himself egoistic and proud, exaggerating the instinct that God granted him for his preservation. Men cannot be happy unless they live in peace, that is to say, unless they are animated by a sentiment of mutual benevolence, indulgence, and condescension; in a word: so long as they seek to crush one another. Charity and fraternity sum up all the conditions and all the social duties; both, however, presuppose self-abnegation. Now, self-abnegation is incompatible with egoism and pride; therefore, with those vices, true fraternity is not possible, nor, consequently, equality, nor liberty, given that the egoistic and the proud man want everything for himself.

They will always be the gnawing worms of all progressive institutions; so long as they prevail, the most generous social systems, the most wisely combined, will crumble under their blows. It is beautiful, no doubt, to proclaim the reign of fraternity, but why do so if a destructive cause exists? It is to build upon shifting ground; it would be the same as decreeing health in an unhealthy region. In such a region, for men to fare well, it will not suffice to send physicians, for these will die like the others; it is imperative to destroy the causes of the unhealthiness. For men to live on Earth as brothers, it does not suffice to give them lessons in morality; it is important to destroy the causes of antagonism, to attack the root of the evil: pride and egoism. This is the sore upon which all the attention of those who seriously desire the good of Humanity must be concentrated. So long as such an obstacle subsists, they will see all their efforts paralyzed, not only by a resistance of inertia, but also by an active force that will work incessantly to destroy the work they undertake, for every great, generous, and emancipating idea ruins personal pretensions.

It is impossible, it will be said, to destroy pride and egoism, because they are vices inherent in the human species. If that were so, we should have to despair of all moral progress; meanwhile, when one considers man in the different epochs that have elapsed, it cannot be denied that evident progress has taken place. Now, if he has progressed, he will naturally progress still. On the other hand, will no man be found without pride or egoism? Are there not, on the contrary, creatures of a generous nature, in whom the sentiments of love of neighbor, of humility, of devotion, and of self-abnegation seem innate? Their number, positively, is greater than that of the egoists; if it were not so, the latter would not be the makers of the law. There are far more such creatures than is thought, and if they seem so few, it is because pride puts itself in evidence, whereas modest virtue keeps itself in obscurity. If, therefore, pride and egoism were counted among the necessary conditions of Humanity, like that of nourishment for the sustenance of life, there would be no exceptions. The essential point, then, is to bring it about that the exception becomes the rule; for this, it is a matter, above all, of destroying the causes that produce and sustain the evil.

Of these causes, the principal one evidently resides in the false idea that man forms of his nature, of his past, and of his future. Because he does not know where he comes from, he believes himself to be more than he is; and not knowing where he is going, he concentrates all his thought upon earthly life; he finds it as agreeable as possible; he yearns for all satisfactions, for all enjoyments; this is the reason why he tramples his fellow without scruple, if the latter opposes some difficulty to him. But for this, it is necessary that he predominate; equality would give to others rights that he wants for himself alone; fraternity would impose on him sacrifices to the detriment of his well-being; liberty, too, he wants for himself alone, and only grants it to others when it in no way injures his prerogatives. As all nourish the same pretensions, the result has been the perpetual conflicts that lead them to pay very dearly for the rare enjoyments they manage to obtain. Let man identify himself with the future life, and his manner of seeing will completely change, like that of an individual who is to remain for only a few hours in a poor dwelling, and who knows that, on leaving, he will have another, magnificent, for the rest of his days.

The importance of the present life, so sad, so short, so ephemeral, fades away for him before the splendor of the infinite future that unfolds before his eyes. The natural and logical consequence of that certainty is for man to sacrifice a fleeting present to a lasting future, whereas before he sacrificed everything to the present. Taking the future life as his objective, it matters little to him to be a little more or a little less in this other one; worldly interests become the accessory, instead of being the principal; he works in the present with the aim of assuring his position in the future, all the more so when he knows under what conditions he will be able to be happy. As regards earthly interests, men can create obstacles for him: he has to remove them, and he becomes egoistic by the very force of things. If he raises his eyes on high, toward a happiness that no one can obstruct, he will find no interest in oppressing anyone whomsoever, and egoism becomes for him devoid of object. Nevertheless, there will remain the stimulant of pride.

The cause of pride lies in the belief, on which man takes his stand, of his individual superiority. There again the influence of the concentration of thoughts upon corporeal life makes itself felt. In one who sees nothing ahead of himself, behind himself, nor above himself, the sentiment of personality predominates, and pride remains without counterweight.

Incredulity not only lacks the means to combat pride, but stimulates it and gives it justification, denying the existence of a power superior to Humanity; the incredulous man believes only in himself; it is, then, natural that he should have pride. While, in the blows that strike him, he sees solely a work of chance and rises to combat it, the man who has faith perceives the hand of God and submits. To believe in God and in the future life is, consequently, the first condition for moderating pride; but it does not suffice. Together with the future, it is necessary to see the past, in order to form an exact idea of the present. For pride to cease making man believe in his superiority, it must be proved to him that he is no more than others, and that these are as much as he; that equality is a fact and not merely a beautiful philosophical theory; that these truths emerge from the pre-existence of the soul and from reincarnation.

Without the pre-existence of the soul, man is led to believe that God, supposing he believes in God, conferred exceptional advantages upon him; when he does not believe in God, he renders thanks to chance and to his own merit. Initiating him into the prior life of the soul, pre-existence teaches him to distinguish, from corporeal life, transitory, the spiritual life, infinite; he comes to know that souls all issue equal from the hands of the Creator; that all have the same point of departure and the same end, which all will attain in more or less time, according to the efforts they employ; that he himself did not come to be what he is except after having, for a long time and painfully, vegetated, like the others, on the inferior degrees of evolution; that, between the most backward and the most advanced, there is only a question of time; that the advantages of birth are purely corporeal and independent of the Spirit; that the simple proletarian may, in another existence, be born upon a throne, and the greatest potentate be reborn a proletarian. If he takes into account only planetary life, he sees only the social inequalities of the moment, which are the ones that impress him; if, however, he casts his eyes upon the whole of the life of the Spirit, upon the past and the future, from the point of departure to that of arrival, those inequalities vanish, and he recognizes that God granted no advantage to any of his children to the prejudice of the others; that He gave an equal portion to all and did not smooth the way more for some than for others; that one who appears less advanced than he on Earth may take the lead over him, if he works more than he to perfect himself; he will recognize, finally, that, since none reaches the goal except by his own efforts, the principle of equality is a principle of justice and a law of Nature, before which the pride of privilege falls. Proving that Spirits can be reborn in different social conditions, whether through expiation or through trial, reincarnation teaches that, in one whom we treat with disdain, there may be one who was our superior or our equal in another existence, a friend or a relative. If he knew it, the one who encounters him would treat him with consideration, but in that case he would have no merit; on the other hand, if he knew that his present friend was his enemy, his servant, or his slave, he would no doubt repel him. Now, God did not will that it should be so, wherefore He cast a veil over the past. In this way, man is led to see, in all, his brothers and his equals, whence a natural basis for fraternity; knowing that he may be treated as he has treated others, charity becomes for him a duty and a necessity founded upon Nature itself. Jesus established the principle of charity, of equality, and of fraternity, making of it an express condition for salvation; but it was reserved to the third manifestation of the will of God, to Spiritism, by the knowledge it affords of spiritual life, by the new horizons it unveils, and by the laws it reveals, to sanction this principle, proving that it does not enclose a mere moral doctrine but a law of Nature which man has the utmost interest in practicing. Now, he will practice it as soon as, ceasing to regard the present as the beginning and the end, he understands the solidarity that exists between the present, the past, and the future. In the immense field of the infinite, which Spiritism allows him to glimpse, his capital importance is annulled, and he perceives that, by himself alone, he is worth nothing and is nothing; that all have need of one another and that some are no more than others: a double blow, at his egoism and at his pride. But for this, faith is necessary to him, without which he will remain in the routine of the present, not blind faith, which flees the light, restricts ideas, and, in consequence, feeds egoism. He needs intelligent, rational faith, which seeks the light and not the darkness, which boldly tears the veil of mysteries and widens the horizon. That faith, the basic element of all progress, is what Spiritism provides him, a robust faith, because grounded upon experience and upon facts, because it furnishes him with palpable proofs of the immortality of his soul, shows him where he comes from, where he is going, and why he is on Earth, and, finally, settles for him the ideas, still uncertain, about his past and about his future. Once he has decisively entered upon this path, no longer having that which incites him, egoism and pride will be extinguished little by little, for want of object and of nourishment, and all social relations will be modified under the influx of charity and fraternity well understood.

Can this come about by the effect of an abrupt change? No, it would be impossible: nothing operates abruptly in Nature; never does health return suddenly to an invalid; between sickness and health, there is always convalescence. Man cannot instantaneously change his point of view and turn his gaze from Earth toward heaven; the infinite confounds and dazzles him; he needs time to assimilate the new ideas.

Spiritism is, without contradiction, the most powerful element of moralization, because it undermines egoism and pride at the base, affording a point of support to morality. It has worked miracles of conversion; it is true that these are still only individual cures, and not infrequently partial ones. What, however, it has produced with regard to individuals constitutes a pledge of what it will produce one day upon the masses. It is not possible for it to tear out the weeds at a single stroke. It gives faith, and faith is the good seed, but it is necessary that this seed have time to germinate and to bear fruit, which is why not all Spiritists are already perfect. It took man in the midst of life, in the fire of the passions, in the full force of prejudices, and if, in such circumstances, it worked prodigies, what will it not do when it takes him at birth, still virgin of all unhealthy impressions; when the creature draws in charity with its milk and has fraternity rocking its cradle; when, in short, an entire generation is educated and nourished with ideas which reason, developing, will strengthen, instead of falsifying? Under the dominion of these ideas, cementing the faith common to all, progress no longer colliding with egoism and pride, institutions will reform themselves by themselves, and Humanity will advance rapidly toward the destinies that are promised it on Earth, while awaiting those of heaven.