The Meaning of Good-A Dialogue Part 11

"And in this pursuit they have been expending, great men and small alike, or rather those whom we call great and small, all that store of energy, of pa.s.sion, and blood and tears which makes up the drama of history?"

"Undoubtedly!"

"But that expenditure, as we now see, was futile and absurd. The purposes to which it was directed were not really good, nor had they any tendency to promote Good, unless it were in some particular case by some fortunate chance. Whatever men have striven to achieve, whether like Christ, to found a religion, or, like Caesar, to found a polity, whether their quest were virtue or power or truth, or any other of the ends we are accustomed to value and praise, or whether they sought the direct opposites of these, or simply lived from hour to hour following without reflexion the impulse of the moment, in any and every case all alike, great and small, good and bad, leaders and followers, or however else we may cla.s.s them, were, in fact, equally insignificant and absurd, the idle sport of illusions, one as empty and baseless as another. The history of nations, the lives of individual men, are stripped, in this view, of all interest and meaning; nowhere is there advance or retrogression, nowhere better or worse, nowhere sense or consistency at all. Systems, however imposing, structures, however vast, fly into dust and powder at a touch. The stars fall from the human firmament; the beacon-lights dance like will-o'-the-wisps; the whole universe of history opens, cracks, and dissolves in smoke; and we, from an ever-vanis.h.i.+ng sh.o.r.e, gaze with impotent eyes at the last gleam on the wings of the dove of Reason as it dips for ever down to eternal night. Will not that be the only view we can take of the course of human action if we hold that what we believe to be goods have no relation to the true Good?"

"Yes," he admitted, "I suppose it will."

"And if we turn," I continued, "from the past to the present and the future, we find ourselves, I think, in even worse case. For we shall all, those of us who may come to accept the hypothesis you put forward, be deprived of the consolation even of imagining a reason and purpose in our lives. The great men of the past, at any rate, could and did believe that they were helping to realize great Goods; but we, in so far as we are philosophers, shall have to forego even that satisfaction. We shall believe, indeed, that Good exists, and that there is a method of discovering it by pure reason; but this method, we may safely a.s.sume, we shall not most of us have ascertained. Or do you think we shall?"

"I cannot tell," he said; "I do not profess to have ascertained it myself."

"And meantime," I said, "you have not even the right to a.s.sume that it is a good thing to endeavour to ascertain it. For the pursuit of Truth, it must be admitted, is one of the things which we call good; and these, we agreed, have not any relation to the true Good.

Consider, then, the position of these unfortunate men who have learnt indeed that there is a Good, but who know nothing about it, except that it has nothing to do with what they call good. What kind of life will they live? Whatever they may put their hand to, they will at once be paralyzed by the thought that it cannot possibly be worth pursuing.

Politics, art, pleasure, science--of these and all other ends they know but one thing, that all is vanity. As by the touch of enchantment, their world is turned to dust. Like Tantalus they stretch lips and hands towards a water for ever vanis.h.i.+ng, a fruit for ever withdrawn. At war with empty phantoms, they 'strike with their spirit's knife,' as Sh.e.l.ley has it, 'invulnerable nothings,' Dizzy and lost they move about in worlds not only unrealized, but unrealizable, 'children crying in the night, with no language but a cry,' and no father to cry to. And in all this blind confusion the only comfort vouchsafed is that somehow or other they may, they cannot tell how, discover a Good of which the only thing they know is that it has no connection with the Goods they have lost. Is not this a fair account of the condition to which men would be reduced who really did accept and believe your hypothesis?"

"Yes," he said, "perhaps it is, but still I must protest against this appeal to prejudice and pa.s.sion. Supposing the truth really were as I suggested, we should have to face it, whether or no it seemed to ruin our own life."

"Yes," I agreed, "supposing the truth were so. But, after all, we have no sufficient theoretical reason for believing it to be so, and every kind of practical reason against it. We cannot, it is true, demonstrate--and that was admitted from the first--that any of our judgments about what is good are true; but there is no reason why we should not believe--and I should say we must believe--that somehow or other they do at least have truth in them."

"Well, and if so?"

"If so, we do not depend, as you said we do, or at least we do not believe ourselves to depend, for our knowledge about Good, upon some purely rational process not yet discovered; but those things which we judge to be good really, we think, in some sense or so, and by a.n.a.lyzing and cla.s.sifying and comparing our experiences of such things we may come to see more clearly what it is in them that we judge to be good; and again by increasing experience we may come to know more Good than we knew; and generally, if we once admit that we have some light, we may hope, by degrees, to get more; and that getting of more light will be the most important business, not only of philosophy, but of life."

"But if we can judge of Good at all, why do we not judge rightly?

If we really have a perception, how is it that it is confused, not clear?"

"I cannot tell how or why; but perhaps it is something of this kind.

Our experience, in the first place, is limited, and we cannot know Good except in so far as we experience it--so, at least, I think, though perhaps you may not agree. And if that be so, even if our judgments about Good that we have experienced were clear, our conclusions drawn from them would yet be very imperfect and tentative, because there would be so much Good that we had not experienced. But, in fact, as it seems, our judgments even about what we do experience are confused, because every experience is indefinitely complex, and contains, along with the Good, so much that is indifferent or bad. And to a.n.a.lyze out precisely what it is that we are judging to be good is often a difficult and laborious task, though it is one that should be a main preoccupation with us all."

"You think, then, that there are two reasons for the obscurity and confusion that prevail in our judgments about Good--one, that our experience is limited, the other that it is complex?"

"Yes; and our position in this respect, as it always seems to me, is like that of people who are learning to see, or to develop some other sense. Something they really do perceive, but they find it hard to say what. Their knowledge of the object depends on the state of the organ; and it is only by the progressive perfecting of that, that they can settle their doubts and put an end to their disputes, whether with themselves or with other people."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, if you will allow me to elaborate my metaphor, I conceive that we have a kind of internal sense, like a rudimentary eye, whose nature it is to be sensitive to Good, just as it is the nature of the physical eye to be sensitive to light. But this eye of the soul, being, as I said, rudimentary, does not as yet perceive Good with any clearness or precision, but only in a faint imperfect way, catching now one aspect of it, now another, but never resting content in any of these, being driven on by the impulse to realize itself to ever surer and finer discrimination, with the sense that it is learning its own nature as it learns that of its object, and that it will never be itself a true and perfect organ until it is confronted with the true and perfect Good. And as by the physical eye we learn by degrees to distinguish colours and forms, to separate and combine them, and arrange them in definite groups, and then, going further, after discerning in this way a world of physical things, proceed to fas.h.i.+on for our delight a world of art, in that finer experience becoming aware of our own finer self; so, by this eye of hers, does the soul, by long and tentative effort, learn to distinguish and appraise the Goods which Nature presents to her; and then, still unsatisfied, proceed to shape for herself a new world, as it were, of moral art, fas.h.i.+oning the relations of man to Nature and to his fellow-man under the stress of her need to realize herself, ever creating and ever destroying only to create anew, learning in the process her own nature, yet aware that she has never learnt it, but pa.s.sing on without rest to that unimagined consummation wherein the impulse that urges her on will be satisfied at last, and she will rest in the perfect enjoyment of that which she knows to be Good, because in it she has found not only her object but herself. Is not this a possible conception?"

"I do not say," he replied, "that it is impossible; but I still feel a difficulty."

"What is it?" I said, "for I am anxious not to s.h.i.+rk anything."

"Well," he said, "you will remember when Parry suggested that the perception of Good might perhaps be an instinct, you objected that instincts conflict one with another, and that we therefore require another faculty to choose between them. Now it seems to me that your own argument is open to the same objection. You postulate some faculty--which perhaps you might as well call an instinct--and this faculty, as I understand you, in the effort to realize itself, proceeds to discriminate various objects as good. But, now, does this same faculty also know that the Goods are good, and which is better than which, and generally in what relations they stand to one another and to the absolutely Good? Or do we not require here, too, another faculty to make these judgments, and must not this faculty, as I said at first, have previously achieved, by some method of its own, a knowledge of Good, in order that it may judge between Goods?"

"No," I said, "in that way you will get, as you hint, nothing but an infinite regress. The perception of Good, whenever it comes, must be, in the last a.n.a.lysis, something direct, immediate, and self-evident; and so far I am in agreement with Parry. My only quarrel with him was in regard to his a.s.sumption that the judgments we make about Good are final and conclusive. The experiences we recognize as good are always, it seems to me, also bad; because we are never able to apprehend or experience what is absolutely Good. Only, as I like to believe--you may say I have no grounds for the belief--we are always progressing towards such a Good; and the more of it we apprehend and experience, the more we are aware of our own well-being; or perhaps I ought to say, of the well-being of that part of us, whatever it may be--I call it the soul--which pursues after Good. For her att.i.tude, perhaps you will agree, towards her object, is not simply one of perception, but one of appetency and enjoyment. Her aim is not merely to know Good, but to experience it; so that along with her apprehension of Good goes her apprehension of her own well-being, dependent upon and varying with her relation to that, her object. Thus she is aware of a tension, as it were, when she cannot expand, of a drooping and inanition when nutriment fails, of a rush of health and vigour as she pa.s.ses into a new and larger life, as she freely unfolds this or that aspect of her complex being, triumphs at last over an obstacle that has long hemmed and thwarted her course, and rests for a moment in free and joyous consciousness of self, like a stream newly escaped from a rocky gorge, to meander in the sun through a green melodious valley. And this perception she has of her own condition is like our perception of health and disease. We know when we are well, not by any process of ratiocination, by applying from without a standard of health deduced by pure thought, but simply by direct sensation of well-being. So it is with this soul of ours, which is conversant with Good. Her perception of Good is but the other side of her perception of her own well-being, for her well-being consists in her conformity to Good.

Thus every phase of her growth (in so far as she grows) is in one sense good, and in another bad; good in so far as it is self-expression, bad in so far as the expression is incomplete. From the limitations of her being she flies, towards its expansion she struggles; and by her perception that every Good she attains is also bad, she is driven on in her quest of that ultimate Good which would be, if she could reach it, at once the complete realization of herself, and her complete conformity to Good."

"But," he objected, "apart from other difficulties, in your method of discovering the Good is there no place for Reason at all?"

"I would not say that," I replied, "though I am bound to confess that I see no place for what you call pure Reason. It is the part of Reason, on my hypothesis, to tabulate and compare results. She does not determine directly what is good, but works, as in all the sciences, upon given data, recording the determinations not (in this case) of the outer but of the inner sense, noticing what kinds of activity satisfy, and to what degree, the expanding nature of this soul that seeks Good, and deducing therefrom, so far as may be, temporary rules of conduct based upon that unique and central experience which is the root and foundation of the whole. Temporary rules, I say, because, by the nature of the case, they can have in them nothing absolute and final, inasmuch as they are mere deductions from a process which is always developing and transforming itself.

Systems of morals, maxims of conduct are so many landmarks left to show the route by which the soul is marching; casts, as it were, of her features at various stages of her growth, but never the final record of her perfect countenance. And that is why the current morality, the positive inst.i.tutions and laws, on which Parry insisted with so much force, both have and have not the value he a.s.signed to them. They are in truth invaluable records of experience, and he is rash who attacks them without understanding; and yet, in a sense, they are only to be understood in order to be superseded, because the experience they resume is not final, but partial and incomplete. Would you agree with that, Parry, or no?"

"I am not sure," he said. "It would be a dangerous doctrine to put in practice."

"Yes," I said, "but I fear that life itself is a dangerous thing, and nothing we can do will make it safe. Our only hope is courage and sanity."

"But," said Dennis, "to return to the other point, on your view is our knowledge of Good altogether subsequent to experience?"

"Yes," I replied, "our knowledge is, if you like; but it is a knowledge of experience in Good. We first recognize Good by what I call direct perception; then we a.n.a.lyze and define what we have recognized; and the results of this process, I suppose, is what we call knowledge, so far as it goes."

"And there can be no knowledge of Good independent of experience?"

"I do not know; perhaps there might be; only I should like to suggest that even if we could arrive at such a knowledge by pure reason, we should have achieved only a definition of Good, not Good itself; for Good, I suppose you will agree, must be a state of experience, not a formula."

"Even if it be so," he said, "it might still be possible to arrive at its formula by pure reason."

"It may be so," I replied, "only I console myself with the thought, that if, as is the case with so many of us, we cannot see our way to any such method, we are not left, on my hypothesis, altogether forlorn. For though we cannot know Good, we can go on realizing Goods, and so making progress towards the ultimate Good, which is the goal not merely of knowledge but of action."

"And how, may I ask," said Wilson, after a pause, "in your conception, is Good related to Happiness?"

"That," I replied, "is one of the points we have to ascertain by experience. For I regard the statement that happiness is the end as one of the numerous attempts which men have made to interpret the deliverances of their internal sense. I do not imagine the interpretation to be final and complete, and indeed it is too abstract and general to have very much meaning. But some meaning, no doubt, it has; and exactly what, may form the subject of much interesting discussion in detail, which belongs, however, rather to the question of the content of Good, than to that of the method of discovering it."

"The method!" replied Wilson, "but have you really indicated a method at all?"

"I have indicated," I replied "what I suppose to be the method of all science, namely, the interpretation of experience."

"But," he objected, "everything depends on the kind of interpretation."

"True," I admitted, "but long ago I did my best to prove that we could not learn anything about Good by the scientific method as you defined it. For that can tell us only about what is, not about what ought to be. At the same time, the recording and comparing and cla.s.sifying of the deliverances of this internal sense, has a certain a.n.a.logy to the procedure of science. At any rate, it might, I think, fairly be called a method, though a method difficult to apply, and one, above all, which only he can apply who has within himself the requisite experience. And in this respect the study of the Good resembles the study of the Beautiful."

"How do you mean?"

"Why," I said, "those who are conversant with the arts are well aware that there is such a thing as a true canon, though they do not profess to be in complete possession of it. They have a perception of the Beautiful, not ready-made and final, but tentative and in process of growth. This perception they cultivate by constant observation of beautiful works, some more and some less, according to their genius and opportunities; and thus they are always coming to see, though they never see perfectly, just as I said was the case in the matter of the Good."

"But," objected Parry, "what proof is there that there is any standard at all in such matters?"

"There is no proof," I replied, "except the perception itself; and that is sufficient proof to those who have it. And to some slight extent, no doubt, all men have it; only many do not care to develop it; and so, feeling in themselves that they have no standard of judgment in art, they suppose that all others are like themselves; and that there really is no standard and no knowledge possible in such matters. And it is the same with Good; if a man will not choose to cultivate his inner sense, and to train it to clear and ever clearer perception, he will either never believe that there is any knowledge of Good, or any meaning at all in the word; or else, since all men feel the need of an end for action, he will have recourse to a fixed dogma, taken up by accident and clung to with obstinate desperation, without any root in his true inner nature; and to him all discussion about Good will seem to be mere folly, since he will believe either that he possesses it already or that it cannot be possessed at all.

Or If he ask after the method of discovering it, he will be unable to understand it, because he does not choose to develop the necessary experience; and so he will go through life for ever unconvinced, arguing often and angrily, but always with no result, while all the time the knowledge he denies is lying hidden within him, if only he had the patience and faith to seek it there. But without that, there is no possibility of convincing him; and it will be wiser altogether to leave him alone. This, whether you call it a method or no, is the only idea I can form as to the possibility of discovering what is Beautiful and Good."

There was silence for a few moments, and then Wilson said:

"Do you mean to imply, on your hypothesis, that we all are always seeking Good?"

"No," I said; "whatever I may think on that point, I have not committed myself. It is enough for my purpose if we admit that we have the faculty of seeking Good, supposing we choose to do so."

"And also the faculty of seeking Bad?"

"Possibly; I do not p.r.o.nounce upon that."