The Nature of Goodness | Page 8

organism, while the facts of life reveal conditions widely
unlike those here represented.
What these conditions are becomes apparent when we put significance
into the letters hitherto employed. Let our diagram become a picture of
the organic life of John. Then A might represent his physical life, B his
business life, C his civil, D his domestic; and we should have asserted
that each of these several functions in the life of John assists all the rest.
His physical health favors his commercial and political success, while
at the same time making him more valuable in the domestic circle. But
home life, civic eminence, and business prosperity also tend to confirm
his health. In short, every one of these factors in the life of John
mutually affects and is affected by all the others.
But when thus supplied with meaning, Figure 3 evidently fails to
express all it should say. B is intended to exhibit the business life of
John. But this is surely not lived alone. Though called a function of
John, it is rather a function of the community, and he merely shares it. I
had no right to confine to John himself that which plainly stretches

beyond him. Let us correct the figure, then, by laying off another beside
it to represent Peter, one of those who shares in the business experience
of John. This common business life
[Fig. 4]
of theirs, B, we may say, enables Peter to gratify his own adventurous
disposition, E; and this again stimulates his scientific tastes, F. But
Peter's eminence in science commends him so to his townsmen that he
comes to share again C, the civic life of John. Yet as before in the case
of John, each of Peter's powers works forward, backward, and across,
constructing in Peter an organic whole which still is interlocked with
the life of John. Each, while having functions of his own, has also
functions which are shared with his neighbor.
Nor would this involvement of functions pause with Peter. To make our
diagram really representative, each of the two individuals thus far
drawn would need to be surrounded by a multitude of others, all
sharing in some degree the functions of their neighbors. Or rather each
individual, once connected with his neighbors, would find all his
functions affected by all those possessed by his entire group. For fear of
making my figure unintelligible
[Fig 5.]
through its fullness of relations, I have sent out arrows in all directions
from the letter A only; but in reality they would run from all to all. And
I have also thought that we persons affect one another quite as
decidedly through the wholeness of our characters as we do through
any interlocking of single traits. Such totality of relationship I have
tried to suggest by connecting the centres of each little square with the
centres of adjacent ones. John as a whole is thus shown to be good for
Peter as a whole.
We have successively found ourselves obliged to broaden our
conception until the goodness of a single object has come to imply that
of a group. The two phases of goodness are thus seen to be mutually
dependent. Extrinsic goodness or serviceability, that where an object
employs an already constituted wholeness to further the wholeness of
another, cannot proceed except through intrinsic goodness, or that
where fullness and adjustment of functions are expressed in the
construction of an organism. Nor can intrinsic goodness be supposed to
exist shut up to itself and parted from extrinsic influence. The two are

merely different modes or points of view for assessing goodness
everywhere. Goodness in its most elementary form appears where one
object is connected with another as means to end. But the more
elaborately complicated the relation becomes, and the richer the
entanglement of means and ends--internal and external--in the
adjustment of object or person, so much ampler is the goodness. Each
object, in order to possess any good, must share in that of the universe.

II
But the diagram suggests a second question. Are all the functions here
represented equally influential in forming the organism? Our figure
implies that they are, and I see no way of drawing it so as to avoid the
implication. But it is an error. In nature our powers have different
degrees of influence. We cannot suppose that John's physical,
commercial, domestic, and political life will have precisely equal
weight in the formation of his being. One or the other of them will play
a larger part. Accordingly we very properly speak of greater goods and
lesser goods, meaning by the former those which are more largely
contributory to the organism. In our physical being, for example, we
may inquire whether sight or digestion is the greater good; and our only