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