76. “The good people”; palliatory with reference to the fairies or witches.
77. Good gracious! good Peter! good God!; exclamatory, possibly signifying the presence of something that is unexpected, which may be either welcome or otherwise.
78. Good folk; used in a jocular or depreciatory sense.
79. Goody good; mildly depreciatory of trustful simplicity.
CHAPTER IV
THE ACTION-PATTERNS IMPLIED BY THE WORD “BAD,” WITH A NOTE ON THE PHYSIOLOGY OF “EVIL”
“It is noteworthy that there has never been a problem of good, but always a problem of evil. Man takes the good in his life for granted, while he bewails the presence of evil in all its forms. May not reality be of such a character that evil is as natural as good?”
R. W. Sellars, “The Next Step in Religion,” pp. 153-5.
Good and bad, or good and evil, have from the most ancient times been held to be diametrical and thoroughgoing opposites of each other. In the system of Zoroaster this antithesis is metaphorically projected into the remotest heavens, where Mazda, the God of Light, whose deeds were goodness itself, endlessly strove to annihilate Angra, the tireless perpetrator of deceit. The Christian mythologists, in a characteristic imitation of pagan creeds, loved to imagine a final Day of Judgment, when the mild, spotless followers of the Lamb were to be rewarded by an eternal separation from the sooty henchmen of Satan. Similar conceptions, though none of them nearly so poetic, have tinged the thought of every subsequent era. Most of us are familiar with Milton’s fabulous version of the theology of the Middle Ages, in which God the Father is depicted as struggling against the powers of darkness, not, however, by sending irresistible cohorts to besiege and conquer Hell, but rather by counteracting their insidious propaganda in the playground of Adam’s Eden. Indeed, one has but to learn to read the simplest literature in any language to realize how much of what is called thinking consists simply in devising contrasts and antitheses. It is the orator’s chief tour de force, the historian’s commonplace, the dramatist’s all-important method of producing a plot, and, in fact, without it, no literature would seem to give an adequate picture of the realities of human life. Small wonder then, that in the philosophy of Empedocles, the world-view of Zoroaster, and the theology of Christendom, this stereotyped way of thinking, originating in and generated by the physics and physiology of man’s musculature, should be manifest; or that the common man should so readily and persistently hold to the diametrical opposition between good and bad, and right and wrong. The law of reciprocal innervation, being implicit in the body’s architecture, is necessarily a basic formula for man’s thought.
Even though this be admitted, it guides us only a little ways through the tangle of ethical problems. In the first place, no such dramatic portrayal as, for example, that of Zoroaster,—whatever theatrical agonies it might provoke,—has either reduced the sum of the world’s distresses, or furnished the least insight into the nature of the supposed opposites of goodness. For that matter, indeed, very little knowledge of this character has arisen out of ethical debate or speculation. The assumptions have been many, the facts few; and usually, whenever this discrepancy has been realized, overdrafts have been written on the phantom bank of theory with the vain hope that by this means ethical solvency could be attained. In the second place, it has scarcely occurred to any one to ask whether there was not some other way of looking at the ethical problem than in this duplex manner, for if an irreconcilable opposition in the field of ethics is assumed as a fundamental principle, nothing but an eternal deadlock can result in the conclusion. Now the empirical fact is that man’s muscles (the functions of which determine his thoughts), can do other things than oppose and counteract each other, for every day of our lives we see these other motor activities manifested. However, our traditional ethical theory would have it that the dilemma is inescapable,—that things are either good or bad, or actions either right or wrong, and people either virtuous or vicious, and that there is no middle ground, or possibility of reconciliation. Mark, however, that only in serious pathological cases do we observe a complete rigidity of the body due to chronic muscular antagonisms. Is it not therefore a valid inference that the mental rigidity of most adherents to the bi-polar theory in ethics is likewise a pathological sign, and, if so, are we not driven to the conclusion that man’s traditional ethical notions are symptoms of physiological malfunctioning?
Important as all this is, however, it cannot turn us aside from our interest in finding out just to what an extent the word “bad” is a real antonym to the word “good,” especially since knowledge of this sort is first necessary before we can employ the method of science in the service of the problems of human conduct. Let us, then, resume our original search.