dom they give that name to the sum of all
evils. A good, absolute in the sense of being divorced from all natural
demand and all possible satisfaction, would be as remote as possible
from goodness: to call it good is mere disloyalty to morals, brought
about by some fantastic or dialectical passion. In excellence there is
an essential bias, an opposition to the possible opposite; this bias
expresses a mechanical impulse, a situation that has stirred the senses
and the will. Impulse makes value possible; and the value becomes actual
when the impulse issues in processes that give it satisfaction and have
a conscious worth. Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the
sanction of character.[D]

That thought is nature's concomitant expression or entelechy, never one
of her instruments, is a truth long ago divined by the more judicious
thinkers, like Aristotle and Spinoza; but it has not met with general
acceptance or even consideration. It is obstructed by superficial
empiricism, which associates the better-known aspects of events directly
together, without considering what mechanical bonds may secretly unite
them; it is obstructed also by the traditional mythical idealism, intent
as this philosophy is on proving nature to be the expression of
something ulterior and non-natural and on hugging the fatal
misconception that ideals and eventual goods are creative and miraculous
forces, without perceiving that it thereby renders goods and ideals
perfectly senseless; for how can anything be a good at all to which some
existing nature is not already directed? It may therefore be worth
while, before leaving this phase of the subject, to consider one or two
prejudices which might make it sound paradoxical to say, as we propose,
that ideals are ideal and nature natural.

[Sidenote: Apparent utility of pain]

[Sidenote: Its real impotence.]

Of all forms of consciousness the one apparently most useful is pain,
which is also the one most immersed in matter and most opposite to
ideality and excellence. Its utility lies in the warning it gives: in
trying to escape pain we escape destruction. That we desire to escape
pain is certain; its very definition can hardly go beyond the statement
that pain is that element of feeling which we seek to abolish on account
of its intrinsic quality. That this desire, however, should know how to
initiate remedial action is a notion contrary to experience and in
itself unthinkable. If pain co