The definition we are discussing, then, is not true--indeed it is hardly intelligible--if we take it in the one-sided way in which it is usually announced. The demand for adaptation does not proceed exclusively from environment, surroundings, circumstance. The stone, the tree, the man, conforms these to itself as truly as it is conformed to them. There is mutual adaptation. Undoubtedly this is implied in the definition, and the petty employment of it which I have been attacking would be rejected also by its wiser defenders. But when its meaning is thus filled out, its vagueness rendered clear, and the mutual influence which is implied becomes clearly announced, the definition turns into the one which I have offered. Goodness is the expression of the largest organization. Its aim is everywhere to bring object and environment into fullest cooperation. We have seen how in any organic relationship every part is both means and end. Goodness tends toward organism; and so far as it obtains, each member of the universe receives its own appropriate expansion and dignity. The present definition merely states the great truth of organization with too objective an emphasis; as that which found the satisfaction of desire to be the ground of goodness over-emphasized the subjective side. The one is too legal, the other too aesthetic. Yet each calls attention to an important and supplementary factor in the formation of goodness. VII In closing these dull defining chapters, in which I have tried to sum up the notion of goodness in general--a conception so thin and empty that it is equally applicable to things and persons--it may be well to gather together in a single group the several definitions we have reached. Intrinsic goodness expresses the fulfillment of function in the construction of an organism. By an organism is meant such an assemblage of active and differing parts that in it each part both aids and is aided by all the others. Extrinsic goodness is found when an object employs an already constituted wholeness to further the wholeness of others. A part is good when it furnishes that and that only which may add value to other parts. A greater good is one more largely contributory to the organism as its end. A higher good is one more fully expressive of that end. Probably, too, it will be found convenient to set down here a couple of other definitions which will hereafter be explained and employed. A good act is the expression of selfhood as service. By an ideal we mean a mental picture of a better state of existence than we feel has actually been reached. REFERENCES ON MISCONCEPTIONS OF GOODNESS Alexander's Moral Order and Progress, bk. iii. ch. i. Section 10. Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii. bk. i. ch. i. Section 2. Mackenzie's Manual of Ethics, ch. v. Section 13 & ch. vii. Section 2. Janet's Theory of Morals, ch. iii. Dewey's Outlines of Ethics, Section lxvii. Spencer's Principles of Ethics, pt. i. ch. 3. III