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
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.
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