An Experiment in Altruism

The race fell short of its grandest possibilities, he said, in losing its hold on abstract truths. Devotion to an ideal was forgotten in the adjustment of human lives to one another, rather than to something above and beyond them. In attempting to solve minor concrete problems, society had dissipated all energy for lofty thought.

In confiding to me his ideas for reconstruction the Altruist talked of human life as if it were something in which he did not share; as if he stood apart from its real issues, apart, and higher than his fellows, to whom he reached down a helping hand.