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SECTION III Good as an Ideal 1. The Good as Systematized Unity and Transformation of Natural Goods WHAT THE EMPIRICIST is insisting upon is that the moral good is akin to, must grow out of, the natural satisfaction of life. The ideal good is simply getting as much as possible ofthe natural goods, satisfactions . Or, if you drop the quantitative idea, the ideal good is to get the best arrangement or harmony ofthe natural good, to make the most of life. And what life is we find in our experience. The transcendental theory insists upon the fact that the ideal good is different from and unlike the natural goods or satisfactions. It is something unique, involving the separation and even rejection of all these natural goods. The man who would have the ideal good must be willing to sacrifice, to suffer, to surrender all these natural goods and devote himself simply to this ideal good: the perfection of his own character, the attainment of virtue. Asceticism and some forms ofStoicism went to the point of insisting upon the rejection of natural good, holding that while they were naturally good they were morally evil. Whether it went to that extreme form or not, there is still the statement that the natural good is not the ideal good except as the ideal good somehow controls and adopts it, or somehow transforms it. All goods, then, are nonmoral except as the ideal good takes them up into itself. Goods might be immoral in so far as they came into conflict with the ideal good, as they tended to motivate a man on their own account. Kant says that the goods or values suggested by a man's natural desires and wants are in themselves nonmoral, but if they supply a man with his motive for action they are also immoral. The motive must be supplied from the sense of duty or ideal good. It certainly is a common idea that pleasure is misleading, that natural satisfactions are, upon the whole, in the nature of temptations. 42 Logic of Ethics 43 Puritanism is a typical example of that tendency in nontechnical thought. My hypothesis is that the ideal is evoked with reference to the nonsatisfaction of the actual experience and that its object or function is to transform the defects in the experienced good until they form a harmonious unity. That conception differs from the strict empirical theory in that it realizes that the ideal good is not an abstraction from the natural good but comes up because of the negative element, the element of failure and defect in these presented goods; and that it therefore involves a positive transformation ofthem so that the quality of the presented goods is transformed through the application to them and operation upon them of the ideal. In other words the function of the ideal is to transform obstacles into means. The ideal is whatever will enable the presented obstacles to function as means. When I say that is the business of the ideal it supposes that there are two things, the ideal and the business. But, whatever it is, that is the ideal. Whatever affects a transformation of the conditions so as to bring them into unity or harmony is good. And anything (though it may arouse all the emotional conglomerates which the ideal possesses) which does not perform this function is no ideal. The difference between that and the idea ofthe transcendentalist is the insistence upon the idea that the ideal by its very nature must exercise its transforming function with reference to some set ofdefinite conditions. And therefore, while it does not grow out ofwhat is experienced in that external way that the empiricist insists upon, then it must grow out of the sum total experience that these values grow out of, and its business is with these. The ideal is anything but the unattainable. An ideal which is unattainable is no ideal at all. The ideal is simply that which will transform nonattained into attained, and that is the specific question. The ideal is not a Utopia but a working plan or method ofdealing with a concrete group ofconditions which as now experienced awaken dissatisfaction. There is here correlativity. The growth is a literally correlative, correspondent growth. A vague, indefinite statement of present conditions is met by a vague ideal ofa future possible good. That vague ideal operates by concentrating attention upon those present conditions, defining them, making them clear and more objective, putting...

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