So Welcker and the commoners of Baden consider themselves secured only when they can count on selfishness. What is one to think, then, of the countless phrases of unselfishness with which their mouths overflow at other times?
To a cause which I am pushing selfishly I have another relation than to one which I am serving unselfishly. The following criterion might be cited for it: against the one I can _sin_ or commit a _sin_, the other I can only _trifle away_, push from me, deprive myself of,--_i. e._ commit an imprudence. Free trade is looked at in both ways, being regarded partly as a freedom which may _under certain circumstances_ be granted or withdrawn, partly as one which is to be held _sacred under all circumstances_.
If I am not concerned about a thing in and for itself, and do not desire it for its own sake, then I desire it solely as a _means to an end_, for its usefulness; for the sake of another end; _e. g._, oysters for a pleasant flavor. Now will not every thing whose final end he himself is serve the egoist as means? and is he to protect a thing that serves him for nothing,--_e. g._, the proletarian to protect the State?
Ownness includes in itself everything own, and brings to honor again what Christian language dishonored. But ownness has not any alien standard either, as it is not in any sense an _idea_ like freedom, morality, humanity, and the like: it is only a description of the--_owner_.
I--do I come to myself and mine through liberalism?
Whom does the liberal look upon as his equal? Man! Be only man, and that you are anyway,--and the liberal calls you his brother. He asks very little about your private opinions and private follies, if only he can espy "Man" in you.
But, as he takes little heed of what you are _privatim_,--nay, in a strict following out of his principle sets no value at all on it,--he sees in you only what you are _generatim_. In other words, he sees in you, not _you_, but the _species_; not Tom or Jim, but Man; not the real or unique one,[114] but your essence or your concept; not the bodily man, but the _spirit_.
As Tom you would not be his equal, because he is Jim, therefore not Tom; as man you are the same that he is. And, since as Tom you virtually do not exist at all for him (so far, to wit, as he is a liberal and not unconsciously an egoist), he has really made "brother-love" very easy for himself: he loves in you not Tom, of whom he knows nothing and wants to know nothing, but Man.
