Herbert Spencer, the Radical

Aside from Darwin, the writer most commonly associated with evolution in Victorian Britain, and the country’s most famous living philosopher, was the individualistic Herbert Spencer. Spencer certainly seems an unlikely altruist, but it was the influence of his writings, including his Data of Ethics (1879), that did most to guarantee the wider dissemination of the language of altruism from the 1870s onwards. This chapter explains what altruism meant to Spencer; how he used it in his attacks on the brutality and hypocrisy of British imperialism; how it led many readers, to his great frustration, to identify him as a disciple of Comte; and how he finally dropped the term as it came to be associated with socialism. Spencer’s combination of altruism abroad and egoism at home made sense as two sides of his resistance to political and ideological movements which he thought represented the ‘New Toryism’.

Encounters with Positivism

To employ the language of altruism was, for much of the Victorian period, to associate oneself directly with Auguste Comte and his philosophy of ‘positivism’. Even in 1897, almost half a century after its first introduction, the dean of Rochester spoke not just about ‘altruism’ but about Comte’s ‘Altruism’. ‘Sociology’, ‘positivism’, and ‘altruism’ were all Comtean terms which could be used as philosophical watchwords or as political banners. This chapter examines the inventor of ‘altruism’ and how he came to have an impact on the English language.

Egomania

This chapter surveys varieties of post-Victorian moral thought at the turn of the century, as exemplified in the individualistic, egoistic, and aesthetic philosophies of Oscar Wilde, Friedrich Nietzsche and his British followers, and G. E. Moore. All of these new philosophies involved radical redefinitions and revaluations of altruism and marked the beginnings of a post-Victorian ‘egomania’, which looked for ways to escape from the dull and cloying cult of sentimental selflessness that characterized high Victorian moralism. Wilde mocked the idea of living for others and instead celebrated Jesus Christ as the first and greatest of all individualists. Nietzsche and his British admirers waged war on Christian pity and Spencerian altruism as different varieties of a single decadent value-system. G. E. Moore used analytic philosophy to articulate and justify a neo-pagan ethics of art and emotion.

The Darwinian Conscience

This chapter retells the story of Darwin, the moral theorist. Although Charles Darwin himself neither used nor explicitly resisted the language of altruism, many others, from the 1870s to the present, have made claims about Darwin as a theorist of altruism and selfishness. Darwin, in fact, saw sympathy and love, alongside selfishness and violence, throughout the natural world. In insect societies as well as human ones, cooperation and benevolence had evolved for good reasons. The theory of the evolution of the moral sense that Darwin developed in The Descent of Man (1871) was complicated and not entirely ‘Darwinian’. It combined ideas from moral philosophy with observations of the instincts of insects, all within a theoretical framework that included a belief in the heritability of acquired characteristics and the ability of nature to select at the level of communities as well as individuals.

Introduction

Prior to 1852, nobody used the word ‘altruism’ to refer to moral sentiments, actions, or ideologies. In that year the philosopher and critic G. H. Lewes approvingly introduced the term to a British readership in an article in the Westminster Review about the latest work by the atheistic French thinker who was credited with its coining—Auguste Comte. The creation and acceptance of this new word made it possible to experience oneself and the world in new ways, to communicate new ethical concepts, and to create new moral and religious identities. This book explains how and why the language of altruism was imported, adopted, resisted, and finally accepted between its first introduction as a strange and unwelcome neologism and its successful naturalization as a ‘traditional term’ in ethical discourse around the turn of the twentieth century.

Conclusion

This chapter uses the historical account of Victorian science, religion, and ethics as the basis for some brief reflections on philosophical problems and political pitfalls that are in some cases still associated with concepts of altruism. It was a sense of intellectual confinement that led nineteenth-century theorists such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer to invent new words with which to construct new scientific visions of humanity and society. Terms such as ‘sociology’ and ‘altruism’ made those new visions possible. People have now inherited the categories that they created, and those categories can themselves be confining rather than liberating. By providing accounts of the contingent circumstances in which they were created, the intellectual historian can draw attention to the provisional nature of our categories and can thus help to undermine the sense that they are inevitable, or even natural.

Motherhood and the Ascent of Man

This chapter looks at three different ways that evolutionary science developed from the 1880s onwards to give rise to some quite different visions of altruism—including those which featured in two of the best-selling non-fiction works of the 1890s. Henry Drummond’s The Ascent of Man (1894) provided a theistic version of human evolution dominated by motherhood and altruism. Benjamin Kidd’s Social Evolution (1894) endorsed August Weismann’s rejection of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and consequently argued that increased altruism could only be guaranteed by the cultural impact of religion rather than by heritable moral improvements in the race. Nonetheless, advocates of eugenics continued to put forward proposals for how to achieve moral progress through selective human breeding. Despite their scientific and political differences, these writers all agreed about the desirability of altruism and shared the hope that it might somehow be increased.

Poverty and the Ideal Self

The 1880s were the pivotal years in Victorian moral thought. A new wave of awareness of the plight of the urban poor was expressed in a range of both practical and intellectual activities. Some, such as Charles Booth, committed themselves to a vast project of social-scientific surveying and classifying of the urban poor. The 1880s was also the decade that saw the flourishing of respectable unbelief. The atheist Charles Bradlaugh took his seat in Parliament, and the agnostic Thomas Huxley became president of the Royal Society. The best-selling novel of the decade, Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), told the story of an Anglican clergyman losing his faith and founding a new religious brotherhood in the East End of London based on a humanistic reinterpretation of Christianity.

Death and Immortality

One of the main appeals of the language of altruism, especially in the first twenty or thirty years of its existence, was its association with a scientific and humanistic religiosity. Its growing acceptance by users of the English language both enabled and reflected intellectual and institutional shifts away from Christianity and towards some form of humanism. Altruism in the 1870s was strongly associated with the denial not only of the existence of God but also of the immortality of the soul. It was the watchword of an atheistic and humanistic ethics. In sermons, books, and articles in periodicals, defenders of Christianity found this and other reasons to resist the humanistic ideology which they believed the advocacy of altruism entailed, and which they associated with positivists and high-minded unbelievers such as Frederic Harrison and George Eliot.

Making Moral Meanings

This chapter explains how ‘altruism’ made its way into the first published part of the greatest record of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary. It uses this story of lexicographers, readers, definitions, and illustrative quotations as an initial vignette of the world of Victorian moral thought. It also discusses the relationship between words and concepts and the different assumptions and methods appropriate to writing the histories of each. In his History in English Words, Owen Barfield noted that the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of English words formed in combination with ‘self-’. Mentioning especially ‘self-help’ and a newly positive sense of ‘self-respect’, he saw this development as an aspect of the rise of Victorian ‘individualism’ and ‘humanism’.