Pronoun problems

pronoun problems
The passage below is from ‘the Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker.

http://evolbiol.ru/blankslate/blankslate.htm


Conflicts of interest are ubiquitous among living things, since two animals cannot both eat the same fish or monopolize the same mate. To the extent that social motives are adaptations that maximize copies of the genes that produced them, they should be designed to prevail in such conflicts, and one way to prevail is to neutralize the competition. As William James put it, just a bit too flamboyantly, “We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific virtues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.”

In this passage I don’t know why “William James” use the pronoun ‘they’ and ‘themselves’ instead of ‘we’ and ‘ourselves.’ They seems to refer to the same pronoun ‘We.’

Regards.