Every animal loves itself with a brute, sensible love,
not a love to find fault with, nor yet a noble and exalted
sentiment--a love purely self-regarding, quite apart from the good
that is in self, but embracing self simply as self, and self alone.
This is the first love of self even in man. But over and above this
animal and sensible love, which no man lacks, there is in all men
worthy of the name a second self-regarding affection of an
intellectual cast, whereby a man loves himself as discerning with the
eye of his soul the excellence of his own nature--"how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a
god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals." Intellectual
self-complacence overflows from self to similars. It is not self-love,
it is love of the race, "the milk of human kindness," philanthropy.
2. But man is a disappointing creature, after all a mere "quintessence
of dust," unless he can rise above himself by relation with some
superhuman being, and make his final fortune in some better region
than this world.
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