To determine beforehand just how polite we should be would not
facilitate human intercourse. And possibly a completed scheme of
goodness would rather confuse than ease our daily actions. Science
does not readily connect with life. For most of us all the time, and
for all of us most of the time, instinct is the better prompter. But
if we mean to be ethical students and to examine conduct
scientifically, we must evidently at the outset come face to face with
the meaning of goodness. I am consequently often surprised on looking
into a treatise on ethics to find no definition of goodness proposed.
The author assumes that everybody knows what goodness is, and that his
own business is merely to point out under what conditions it may be
had. But few readers do know what goodness is. One suspects that
frequently the authors of these treatises themselves do not, and that
a hazy condition of mind on this central subject is the cause of much
loose talk afterwards. At any rate, I feel sure that nothing can more
justly be demanded of a writer on ethics at the beginning of his
undertaking than that he should attempt to unravel the subtleties of
this all-important conception. Having already in a previous volume
marked out the Field of Ethics, I believe I cannot wisely go on
discussing the science that I love, until I have made clear what
meaning I everywhere attach to the obscure and familiar word _good_.
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