A moral code like Aristotle’s, which we may fairly regard as the rational prototype of all humanistic codes, consists of an inventory of good and bad appetites and of good and bad satisfactions. All conventional moralizing, which does not rest on the sheer fiat of public opinion, custom, or God, assumes the existence of some such inventory of permissible desires and permissible fulfilments. But what [p168] does the making of such inventories mean? It means that good and evil are believed to be objective qualities of the natural world like weight, dimension, and motion, that certain desires are inherently good, certain others are inherently bad, and that the same is true of the different objects of desire. But this is nothing but what is known as the pathetic fallacy. For surely each desire and each object as such, taken separately without relation to anything else, is as innocent and as neutral as the forces that move the planets. The categories of good and evil would not apply if there were no sentient being to experience good and evil. In such a world no object would be any better or any worse than any other object; nobody talks about good and bad electrons. All electrons are morally alike because no sentient being can tell them apart. Nor would the categories of good and evil apply to a world in which each impulse was in a vacuum of its own. In such a world all our impulses would be like our digestive tracts on a day when we do not know we have a stomach. If our impulses did not impinge upon each other and upon objects there would be no problem of good and evil. Therefore the quality of good and evil lies not in impulses as such, nor in objects as such, but in the relationship between impulses and objects. Therefore the making of inventories is fundamentally misleading. There is another fallacy which is closely associated with this one. We make lists of our impulses. A standard list which is much used comprises the following: flight, repulsion, curiosity, pugnacity, self-abasement, self-assertion, parental, reproductive, gregarious, acquisitive, constructive. [p169] Whether this is a good list or not is neither here nor there. Through the ages men have been making such lists in the fond belief that they were analyzing the human character. No doubt these terms describe something; we all recognize that these words are the names of impulses that move us. But if we consider them further, we must also recognize that these impulses do not move all persons the same way, nor any one person the same way at all times in his life and under all circumstances.