A usage more curious still occurs in the nursery. There when the
question is asked, "Has the baby been good?" one discovers by degrees
that the anxious mother wishes to know if it has been crying or quiet.
This elementary life has as yet not acquired positive standards of
measurement. It must be reckoned in negative terms, failure to
disturb. Heaven knows it does not always attain to this. But it is its
utmost virtue, quietude.

In short, whenever we inspect the usage of the word good, we always
find behind it an implication of some end to be reached. Good is a
relative term, signifying promotive of, conducive to. The good is the
useful, and it must be useful for something. Silent or spoken, it is
the mental reference to something else which puts all meaning into it.
So Hamlet says, "There's nothing either good or bad, but thinking
makes it so." If I have in mind A as an end sought, then X is good.
But if B is the end, X is bad. X has no goodness or badness of its
own. No new quality is added to an object or act when it becomes good.



IV

But this result is disappointing, not to say paradoxical. To call a
thing good only with reference to what lies outside itself would be
almost equivalent to saying that nothing is good. For if the moment
anything becomes good it refers all its goodness to something beyond
its own walls, should we ever be able to discover an object endowed
with goodness at all? The knife is good in reference to the stick of
wood; the wood, in reference to the table; the table, in reference to