By comparing the meanings of a word in different connections, and observing what they have in common, we learn its essential significance. Material objects we are accustomed to designate as good or bad according as they are well or ill adapted to achieve prescribed ends. The good knife is one which will cut; the good gun is one which will carry far and true; and so on. So of inanimate actions, and so, also, of living things and actions. A good jump is a jump which, remoter ends ignored, well achieves the immediate purpose of a jump; and a stroke at billiards is called good when the movements are skilfully adjusted to the requirements. So too our use of the words good and bad with respect to conduct under its ethical aspects has regard to the efficiency or non-efficiency of the adjustments of acts to ends. This last truth is, through the entanglements of social relations, by which men's actions often simultaneously affect the welfares of self, of offspring, and of fellow-citizens, somewhat disguised. Nevertheless, when we disentangle the three orders of ends, and consider each separately, it becomes clear that the conduct which achieves each kind of end is regarded as relatively good; and conduct which fails to achieve it is regarded as relatively bad. The goodness ascribed to a man of business, as such, is measured by the activity and ability with which he buys and sells to advantage, and may coexist with a hard treatment of dependents which is reprobated. The ethical judgments we pass on such self-regarding acts are ordinarily little emphasized; partly because the promptings of the self-regarding desires, generally strong enough, do not need moral enforcement, and partly because the promptings of the other-regarding desires, less strong, do need moral enforcement. With regard to the second class of adjustments of acts to ends, which subserve the rearing of offspring, we no longer find any obscurity in the application of the words good and bad to them, according as they are efficient or inefficient. And most emphatic are the application of the words, in this sense, throughout the third division of conduct comprising the deeds by which men affect one another. Always, then, acts are good or bad, according as they are well or ill-adapted to ends. That is, good is the name we apply to the relatively more evolved conduct; and bad is the name we apply to that which is relatively less evolved; for we have seen that "evolution, tending ever towards self-preservation, reaches its limits when individual life is the greatest, both in length and breadth; and we now see that, leaving other ends aside, we regard as good the conduct furthering self-preservation, and as bad the conduct tending to self-destruction." With increasing power of maintaining individual life goes increasing power of perpetuating the species by fostering progeny; and the establishment of an associated state both makes possible and