Lewis Carroll brings clarity and comprehension to something we’ve all wondered about: the possibility or impossibility of purely altruistic acts.
And so you have found out that secret--one of the deep secrets of Life--that all, that is really worth the doing, is what we do for others? Even as the old adage tells us, “What I spent, that I lost; what I gave, that I had.” Casuists have tried to twist “doing good” into another form of “doing evil,” and have said “you get pleasure yourself by giving this pleasure to another: so it is merely a refined kind of selfishness, as your own pleasure is a motive for what you do.” I say it is not selfishness, that my own pleasure should be a motive so long as it is not the motive that would outweigh the other, if the two came into collision. The “selfish man” is he who would still do the thing, even if it harmed others, so long as it gave him pleasure: the “unselfish man” is he who would still do the thing, even if it gave him no pleasure, so long as it pleased others. But, when both motives pull together, the “unselfish man” is still the unselfish man, even though his own pleasure is one of his motives!
(Quoted from page 196 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
For a brief biography of Lewis Carroll, click here. For images of or relating to Lewis Carroll, click here.
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