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CHAPTER XII

The Subjective and the Objective Criterion


There is no contradiction of the introgenic principle in the contention that a partial drive acts in the interest of the collective.

Inherent in the drive for assimilation is an egotistical feature, but at the same time also an altruistic one - because each assimilation demands the consumption and the renunciation of one’s own power, and because introgenesis always connotes a reciprocal process.

Someone loves in another that which is similar to himself, that which the introgenic power formed alike in both. It is of course natural that the image he carries within himself - and which is consequently a part of himself - resembles the beloved object.

A man loves his child because he has produced it from that which is his own, because part of him is embodied in the child, and because the permanent influence, his upbringing, has made of the child an offshoot of himself. What he really loves is himself.

When someone mourns a deceased life’s companion, he thus mourns that part of himself that was embodied by him within the deceased through introgenesis; and the psychic part of the deceased which he himself had embodied, also mourns about itself its origin.

The subjective criterion of compassion and that of moral instincts especially, is expressed by the affinity for that which is created alike in proportion to the greater or lesser perfection of the similarity. The persons on the bridge were terrified because it was a human being that fell into the water; had it been an animal, the terror would have been slighter. But had it been one’s own child, the terror would have been extraordinarily great.

The latter emotional increment would not be justified by the objective criterion. The objective criterion is stipulated upon the quantity of introgenic abundance; if this abundance increases, the cause for the increment was objectively good, but if it decreases, it was evil.