THE DOUBLE ASPECT OF GOODNESS


In undertaking the following discussion I foresee two grave
difficulties. My reader may well feel that goodness is already the
most familiar of all the thoughts we employ, and yet he may at the
same time suspect that 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