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.