Sometimes they are so
strong as to leave a person no other course than to adapt himself to
them. He cannot adapt them to himself. Plato has a good story of how a
native of the little village of Seriphus tried to explain Themistocles
by means of environment. "You would not," he said to the great man,
"have been eminent if you had been born in Seriphus." "Probably not,"
answered Themistocles, "nor you, if you had been born in Athens."
The definition we are discussing, then, is not true--indeed it is
hardly intelligible--if we take it in the one-sided way in which it is
usually announced. The demand for adaptation does not proceed
exclusively from environment, surroundings, circumstance. The stone,
the tree, the man, conforms these to itself as truly as it is
conformed to them. There is mutual adaptation. Undoubtedly this is
implied in the definition, and the petty employment of it which I have
been attacking would be rejected also by its wiser defenders. But when
its meaning is thus filled out, its vagueness rendered clear, and the
mutual influence which is implied becomes clearly announced, the
definition turns into the one which I have offered. Goodness is the
expression of the largest organization. Its aim is everywhere to bring
object and environment into fullest cooperation.
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