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
defined. Now the conception of goodness is something of this sort,
something so wrought into the total framework of existence that it is
hidden from view and not separately observable. We know so much about
it that we do not understand it.
For ordinary purposes probably it is well not to seek to understand
it. Acquaintance with the structure of the eye does not help seeing.
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