The definition we are discussing, then, is not true--indeed it is
hardly intelligible--if we take it in the one-sided way in which it is
usually announced. The demand for adaptation does not proceed
exclusively from environment, surroundings, circumstance. The stone,
the tree, the man, conforms these to itself as truly as it is
conformed to them. There is mutual adaptation. Undoubtedly this is
implied in the definition, and the petty employment of it which I have
been attacking would be rejected also by its wiser defenders. But when
its meaning is thus filled out, its vagueness rendered clear, and the
mutual influence which is implied becomes clearly announced, the
definition turns into the one which I have offered. Goodness is the
expression of the largest organization. Its aim is everywhere to bring
object and environment into fullest cooperation. We have seen how in
any organic relationship every part is both means and end. Goodness
tends toward organism; and so far as it obtains, each member of the
universe receives its own appropriate expansion and dignity. The
present definition merely states the great truth of organization with
too objective an emphasis; as that which found the satisfaction of
desire to be the ground of goodness over-emphasized the subjective
side. The one is too legal, the other too aesthetic. Yet each calls
attention to an important and supplementary factor in the formation of
goodness.



VII

In closing these dull defining chapters, in which I have tried to sum
up the notion of goodness in general--a conception so thin and empty