§ 1. In the preceding chapters I have used the term “Egoism,” as it is most commonly used, to denote a system which prescribes actions as means to the end of the individual’s happiness or pleasure. The ruling motive in such a system is commonly said to be “self-love.” But both terms admit of other interpretations, which it will be well to distinguish and set aside before proceeding further.
For example, the term “egoistic” is ordinarily and not improperly applied to the basis on which Hobbes attempted to construct morality; and on which alone, as he held, the social order could firmly rest, and escape the storms and convulsions with which it seemed to be menaced from the vagaries of the unenlightened conscience. But it is not strictly the end of Egoism as I have defined it--greatest attainable pleasure for the individual--but rather “self-preservation,” which determines the first of those precepts of rational egoism which Hobbes calls “Laws of Nature,” viz., “Seek peace and ensue it.” And in the development of his system we often find that it is Preservation rather than Pleasure, or perhaps a compromise between the two,[78] that is taken as the ultimate end and standard of right conduct.
Again, in Spinoza’s view the principle of rational action is necessarily egoistic, and is (as with Hobbes) the impulse of self-preservation. The individual mind, says Spinoza, like everything else, strives so far as it is able to continue in its state of being: indeed this effort is its very essence. It is true that the object of this impulse cannot be separated from pleasure or joy; because pleasure or joy is “a passion in which the soul passes to higher perfection.” Still it is not at Pleasure that the impulse primarily aims, but at the mind’s Perfection or Reality: as we should now say, at Self-realisation or Self-development. Of this, according to Spinoza, the highest form consists in a clear comprehension of all things in their necessary order as modifications of the one Divine Being, and that willing acceptance of all which springs from this comprehension. In this state the mind is purely active, without any admixture of passion or passivity: and thus its essential nature is realised or actualised to the greatest possible degree.