The Nature of Goodness

by George Herbert Palmer

I

In the last chapter I began to discuss the nature of goodness distinctively personal. This has its origin in the differing constitutions of persons and things. Into the making of a person four characteristics enter which are not needed in the formation of a thing. The most fundamental of these I examined. Persons and things are unlike in this, that each force which stirs within a self- conscious person is correlated with all his other forces. So great and central is this correlation that a person can say, "I have an experience," not—as, possibly, the brutes—"I am an experience." Yet although a person tends thus to be an organic whole, he did not begin his existence in conscious unity. Probably the early stages of our life are to be sought rather in the regions of unconsciousness. Rising out of unconscious conditions into reflex actions—those ingenious provisions for our security at times when we have no directing powers of our own—we gradually pass into conditions of consciousness, where we are able to seize the single experience and to be absorbed in it. Out of this emerges by degrees an apprehension of ourselves contrasted with our experiences. Even, however, when this self-consciousness is once established, it may on vivacious or morbid occasions be overthrown. It by no means attends all the events of our lives. Yet it marks all conduct that can be called good. Goodness which is distinctively personal must in some way express the formation and maintenance of a self-conscious life.

But more is needed. A person fashioned in the way described would be aware of himself, aware of his mental changes, perhaps aware of an objective order of things producing these changes, and still might have no real share himself in what was going on. We can at least imagine a being merely contemplative. He sits as a spectator at his own drama. Trains of associated ideas pass before his interested gaze; a multitude of transactions occur in his contemplated surroundings; but he is powerless to intervene. He passively beholds, and does nothing. If such a state of things can be imagined, and if something like it occasionally occurs in our experience, it does not represent our normal condition. Our life is no mere affair of vision. Self- consciousness counts as a factor. Through it changes arise both without and within. I accordingly entitle this fourth chapter Self- direction. In it I propose to consider how our life goes forth in action; for in fact wherever self-consciousness appears, there is developed also a centre of activity, and an activity of an altogether peculiar kind.

It is well known that in interpreting these facts of action the judgment of ethical writers is divided. Libertarians and determinists are here at issue. Into their controversy I do not desire to enter. I mean to attempt a brief summary of those facts relating to human action which are tolerably well agreed upon by writers of both schools. In these there are intricacies enough. To raise the hand, to wave it in the air, to lay it on the table again, would ordinarily be reckoned simple matters. Yet operations so simple as these I shall show pass through half a dozen steps, though they are ordinarily performed so swiftly that we do not notice their several parts. In life much is knitted together which cannot be understood without dissection. In such dissection I must now engage. As a good pedagogue I must discuss operations separately which in reality get all their meaning through being found together. Against the necessary distortions of such a method the reader must be on his guard.