Experience, as well as theory, confirms the truth of the above assertions. Consider even your own case with relation to any sacrifice of your own real happiness to the supposed happiness of another. I can imagine this possible even in a selfish disposition, not yet hardened. Your good-nature, warm feelings, and pride (in you a powerfully actuating principle) may have at times induced you to make, in moments of excitement, sacrifices of which you have not fully "counted the cost." Let us, then, examine this point in relation to yourself, and to the petty sacrifices of daily life. If you have allowed others to encroach too much on your time, if you have given up to them your innocent pleasures, your improving pursuits, and favourite companions, has this indulgence of their selfishness really added to their happiness? Has it not rather been unobserved, except so far to increase the unreasonableness of their expectations from you, to make them angry when it at last becomes necessary to resist their advanced encroachments? On your own side, too, has it not rather tended to irritate you against people whom you formerly liked, because you are suffering from the daily and hourly pressure of the sacrifices you have imprudently made for them? Believe me, there can be no peace or happiness in domestic life without a _bien entendu_ self-love, which will be found by intelligent experience to be a preservative from selfishness, instead of a manifestation of it.
From all that I have already said, you will, I hope, infer that I am not likely to recommend any extravagant social sacrifices, or to bring you in guilty of selfishness for actions not really deserving of the name. Indeed, I have said so much on the other side, that I may now have some difficulty in proving that, while defending self-love, I have not been defending you. We must therefore go back to my former definition of selfishness--namely, a seeking for ourselves that which is not our real good, to the neglect of all consideration for that which is the real good of others. This is viewing the subject _an grand_,--a very general definition, indeed, but not a vague one, for all the following illustrations from the minor details of life may clearly be referred under this head.