3.25. OF LOVE AND JUSTICE.
Now here the friend who has read the first draft of this book falls into
something like a dispute with me. She does not, I think, like this
dismissal of Justice from a primary place in my scheme of conduct.
"Justice," she asserts, "is an instinctive craving very nearly akin to
the physical craving for equilibrium. Its social importance corresponds.
It seeks to keep the individual's claims in such a position as to
conflict as little as possible with those of others. Justice is the root
instinct of all social feeling, of all feeling which does not take
account of whether we like or dislike individuals, it is the feeling of
an orderly position of our Ego towards others, merely considered AS
others, and of all the Egos merely AS Egos towards each other. LOVE
cannot be felt towards others AS others. Love is the expression of
individual suitability and preference, its positive existence in some
cases implies its absolute negation in others. Hence Love can never be
the essential and root of social feeling, and hence the necessity for
the instinct of abstract justice which takes no account of preferences
or aversions. And here I may say that all application of the word LOVE
to unknown, distant creatures, to mere OTHERS, is a perversion and a
wasting of the word love, which, taking its origin in sexual and
parental preference, always implies a preference of one object to the
other. To love everybody is simply not to love at all. And it is JUST
BECAUSE of the passionate preference instinctively felt for some
individuals, that mankind requires the self-regarding and
self-respecting passion of justice."
Now this is not altogether contradictory of what I hold. I disagree that
because love necessarily expresses itself in preference, selecting this
rather than that, that it follows necessarily that its absolute negation
is implied in the non-selected cases. A man may go into the world as a
child goes into a garden and gathers its hands full of the flowers that
please it best and then desists, but only because its hands are full and
not because it is at an end of the flowers that it can find delight in.
So the man finds at last his memory and apprehensions glutted. It is not
that he could not love those others. And I dispute that to love
everybody is not to love at all. To love two people is surely to love
more than to love just one person, and so by way of three and four to a
very large number. But if it is put that love must be a preference
because of the mental limitations that forbid us to apprehend and
understand more than a few of the multitudinous lovables of life, then I
agree. For all the individuals and things and cases for which we have
inadequate time and energy, we need a wholesale method--justice. That is
exactly what I have said in the previous section.
