Intelligence, skill, beauty, learning--we admire them all; but when we
see an act of self-sacrifice, however small, an awe falls on us; we
bow our heads, fearful that we might not have been capable of anything
so glorious. We thus acknowledge self-sacrifice to be the very
culmination of the moral life. He who understand it has comprehended
all righteousness, human and divine. But how does self-sacrifice
accord with self-development? Will he who is busy cultivating himself
sacrifice himself? Is there not a kind of conflict between the two?
Yet can we abandon either? And if not, must not the formula of self-
realization accept modification?
This, then, is the problem to which I must now turn: the possible
adjustment of these two imperative claims,--the claim to realize one's
self and the claim to sacrifice one's self. And I shall most easily
set my theme before my readers if I state at once the four historic
objections to the reality of self-sacrifice. I call them historic, for
they have appeared and reappeared in the history of ethics, and have
been worked out there on a great scale. While not altogether
consistent with one another, no one of them is unimportant. Together
they compactly present those conflicting considerations which must be
borne in mind when we attempt to comprehend the subtleties of self-
sacrifice.
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