The Nature of Goodness | Page 2

there is something about it perplexingly abstruse and remote.
Familiar it certainly is. It attends all our wishes, acts, and projects as
nothing else does, so that no estimate of its influence can be excessive.
When we take a walk, read a book, make a dress, hire a servant, visit a
friend, attend a concert, choose a wife, cast a vote, enter into business,
we always do it in the hope of attaining something good. The clue of
goodness is accordingly a veritable guide of life. On it depend actions
far more minute than those just mentioned. We never raise a hand, for
example, unless with a view to improve in some respect our condition.
Motionless we should remain forever, did we not believe that by
placing the hand elsewhere we might obtain something which we do
not now possess. Consequently we employ the word or some synonym
of it during pretty much every waking hour of our lives. Wishing some
test of this frequency I turned to Shakespeare, and found that he uses
the word "good" fifteen hundred times, and it's derivatives "goodness,"
"better," and "best," about as many more. He could not make men and
women talk right without incessant reference to this directive
conception.
But while thus familiar and influential when mixed with action, and
just because of that very fact, the notion of goodness is bewilderingly
abstruse and remote. People in general do not observe this curious
circumstance. Since they are so frequently encountering goodness, both
laymen and scholars are apt to assume that it is altogether clear and
requires no explanation. But the very reverse is the truth. Familiarity
obscures. It breeds instincts and not understanding. So inwoven has
goodness become with the very web of life that it is hard to disentangle.
We cannot easily detach it from encompassing circumstance, look at it
nakedly, and say what in itself it really is. Never appearing in practical
affairs except as an element, and always intimately associated with
something else, we are puzzled how to break up that intimacy and give
to goodness independent meaning. It is as if oxygen were never found
alone, but only in connection with hydrogen, carbon, or some other of

the eighty elements which compose our globe. We might feel its wide
influence, but we should have difficulty in describing what the thing
itself was. Just so if any chance dozen persons should be called on to
say what they mean by goodness, probably not one could offer a
definition which he would be willing to hold to for fifteen minutes.
It is true, this strange state of things is not peculiar to goodness. Other
familiar conceptions show a similar tendency, and just about in
proportion, too, to their importance. Those which count for most in our
lives are least easy to understand. What, for example, do we mean by
love? Everybody has experienced it since the world began. For a
century or more, novelists have been fixing our attention on it as our
chief concern. Yet nobody has yet succeeded in making the matter
quite plain. What is the state? Socialists are trying to tell us, and we are
trying to tell them; but each, it must be owned, has about as much
difficulty in understanding himself as in understanding his opponent,
though the two sets of vague ideas still contain reality enough for
vigorous strife. Or take the very simplest of conceptions, the
conception of force--that which is presupposed in every species of
physical science; ages are likely to pass before it is satisfactorily
defined. Now the conception of goodness is something of this sort,
something so wrought into the total framework of existence that it is
hidden from view and not separately observable. We know so much
about it that we do not understand it.
For ordinary purposes probably it is well not to seek to understand it.
Acquaintance with the structure of the eye does not help seeing. To
determine beforehand just how polite we should be would not facilitate
human intercourse. And possibly a completed scheme of goodness
would rather confuse than ease our daily actions. Science does not
readily connect with life. For most of us all the time, and for all of us
most of the time, instinct is the better prompter. But if we mean to be
ethical students and to examine conduct scientifically, we must
evidently at the outset come face to face with the meaning of goodness.
I am consequently often surprised on looking into a treatise on ethics to
find no definition of goodness proposed. The author assumes that
everybody knows what goodness is, and that his own business is
merely to point out under what conditions it may be had. But few
readers do know what goodness is. One suspects