A further point of possible misconception in our diagram is the number
of factors represented. As here shown, these are but four. They might
better be forty. The more richly functional a thing or person is, the
greater its goodness. Poverty of powers is everywhere a form of evil.
For how can there be largeness of organization where there is little
to organize? Or what is the use of organization except as a mode of
furnishing the smoothest and most compact expression to powers? Wealth
and order are accordingly everywhere the double traits of goodness,
and a chief test of the worth of any organism will be the diversity of
the powers it includes. Throughout my discussion I have tried to help
the reader to keep this twofold goodness in mind by the use of such
phrases as "fullness of organization."
Yet it must be confessed that between the two elements of goodness
there is a kind of opposition, needful though both are for each other.
Order has in it much that is repressive; and wealth--in the sense of
fecundity of powers--is, especially at its beginning, apt to be
disorderly. When a new power springs into being, it is usually chaotic
or rebellious. It has something else to attend to besides bringing
itself into accord with what already exists. There is violence in it,
a lack of sobriety, and only by degrees does it find its place in the
scheme of things. This is most observable in living beings, because it
is chiefly they who acquire new powers. But there are traces of it
even among things. A chemical acid and base meeting, are pretty
careless of everything except the attainment of their own action.
Human beings are born, and for some time remain, clamorous, obliging
the world around to attend more to them than they to it. There is ever
a confusion in exuberant life which bewilders the onlooker, even while
he admits that life had better be.
The deep opposition between these contrasted sides of goodness is
mirrored in the conflicting moral ideals of conservatism and
radicalism, of socialism and individualism, which have never been
absent from the societies of men, nor even, I believe, from those of
animals. Conservatism insists on unity and order; radicalism on
wealthy life, diversified powers, particular independence. Either,
left to itself, would crush society, one by emptying it of initiative,
the other by splitting it into a company of warring atoms. Ordinarily
each is dimly aware of its need of an opponent, yet does not on that
account denounce him the less, or less eagerly struggle to expel him
from provinces asserted to be its own.
By temperament certain classes of the community are naturally disposed
to become champions of the one or the other of these supplemental
ideals. Artists, for the most part, incline to the ideal of abounding
life, exult in each novel manifestation which it can be made to
assume, and scoff at order as Philistinism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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