of a magnet had deranged the whole complicated machinery: and on equally
imperceptible, often undiscoverable, trifles does the healthy movement
of the mainspring of domestic happiness depend. Observe, then,
carefully, every irregularity in its motion, and exercise your
ingenuity to discover the cause in good time; the derangement may
otherwise soon become incurable, both by the strengthening of your own
habits, and the dispositions towards you which they will impress on the
minds of others.

Do let me entreat you, then, to watch yourself during the course of even
this one day,--first, for the purpose of ascertaining whether my
accusation of selfishness is or is not well founded, and afterwards, for
the purpose of seeking to eradicate from your character every taint of
so unlovely, and, for the credit of the sex, I may add, so unfeminine a
failing.

Before we proceed further on this subject, I must attempt to lay down a
definition of selfishness, lest you should suppose that I am so mistaken
as to confound with the vice above named that self-love, which is at
once an allowable instinct and a positive duty.

Selfishness, then, I consider as a perversion of the natural and
divinely-impressed instinct of self-love. It is a desire for things
which are not really good for us, followed by an endeavour to obtain
those things to the injury of our neighbour.[41] Where a sacrifice which
benefits your neighbour can inflict no _real_ injury on yourself, it
would be selfishness not to make the sacrifice. On the contrary, where
either one or the other must suffer an equal injury, (equal in all
points of view--in permanence, in powers of endurance, &c.,) self-love
requires that you should here prefer yourself. You have no right to