It follows from that, that the good life is
the life that most richly gathers and winnows and prepares experience
and renders it available for the race, that contributes most effectively
to the collective growth.
This is in general terms my idea of Good. So soon as one passes from
general terms to the question of individual good, one encounters
individuality; for everyone in the differing quality and measure of
their personality and powers and possibilities, good and right must be
different. We are all engaged, each contributing from his or her own
standpoint, in the collective synthesis; whatever one can best do, one
must do that; in whatever manner one can best help the synthesis, one
must exert oneself; the setting apart of oneself, secrecy, the service
of secret and personal ends, is the waste of life and the essential
quality of Sin.
That is the general expression for right living as I conceive it.
3.3. SOCIALISM.
In the study of what is Good, it is very convenient to make a rough
division of our subject into general and particular. There are first the
interests and problems that affect us all collectively, in which we have
a common concern and from which no one may legitimately seek exemption;
of these interests and problems we may fairly say every man should do so
and so, or so and so, or the law should be so and so, or so and so; and
secondly there are those other problems in which individual difference
and the interplay of one or two individualities is predominant.
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