Even now it is preserver of what it produced; by it the Intellectual Beings have their Intellection and the living their life;it breathes Intellect in breathes Life in and, where life is impossible, existence.
24.But ourselves- how does it touch us?
We may recall what we have said of the nature of the light shining from it into Intellectual-Principle and so by participation into the soul.But for the moment let us leave that aside and put another question:
Does The Good hold that nature and name because some outside thing finds it desirable? May we put it that a thing desirable to one is good to that one and that what is desirable to all is to be recognised as The Good?
No doubt this universal questing would make the goodness evident but still there must be in the nature something to earn that name.
Further, is the questing determined by the hope of some acquisition or by sheer delight? If there is acquisition, what is it? If it is a matter of delight, why here rather than in something else?
The question comes to this: Is goodness in the appropriate or in something apart, and is The Good good as regards itself also or good only as possessed?
Any good is such, necessarily, not for itself but for something outside.
But to what nature is This good? There is a nature to which nothing is good.
And we must not overlook what some surly critic will surely bring up against us:
What's all this: you scatter praises here, there and everywhere:
Life is good, Intellectual-Principle is good: and yet The Good is above them; how then can Intellectual-Principle itself be good? Or what do we gain by seeing the Ideas themselves if we see only a particular Idea and nothing else [nothing "substantial"]? If we are happy here we may be deceived into thinking life a good when it is merely pleasant; but suppose our lot unhappy, why should we speak of good? Is mere personal existence good? What profit is there in it?
What is the advantage in existence over utter non-existence- unless goodness is to be founded upon our love of self? It is the deception rooted in the nature of things and our dread of dissolution that lead to all the "goods" of your positing.
25.It is in view, probably, of this difficulty that Plato, in the Philebus, makes pleasure an element in the Term; the good is not defined as a simplex or set in Intellectual-Principle alone; while he rightly refrains from identifying the good with the pleasant, yet he does not allow Intellectual-Principle, foreign to pleasure, to be The Good, since he sees no attractive power in it.He may also have had in mind that the good, to answer to its name, must be a thing of delight and that an object of pursuit must at least hold some pleasure for those that acquire and possess it, so that where there is no joy the good too is absent, further that pleasure, implying pursuit, cannot pertain to the First and that therefore good cannot.
All this was very well; there the enquiry was not as to the Primal Good but as to ours; the good dealt with in that passage pertains to very different beings and therefore is a different good; it is a good falling short of that higher; it is a mingled thing; we are to understand that good does not hold place in the One and Alone whose being is too great and different for that.
The good must, no doubt, be a thing pursued, not, however, good because it is pursued but pursued because it is good.
The solution, it would seem, lies in priority:
To the lowest of things the good is its immediate higher; each step represents the good to what stands lower so long as the movement does not tend awry but advances continuously towards the superior: thus there is a halt at the Ultimate, beyond which no ascent is possible: that is the First Good, the authentic, the supremely sovereign, the source of good to the rest of things.
Matter would have Forming-Idea for its good, since, were it conscious, it would welcome that; body would look to soul, without which it could not be or endure; soul must look to virtue; still higher stands Intellectual-Principle; above that again is the principle we call the Primal.Each of these progressive priors must have act upon those minors to which they are, respectively, the good: some will confer order and place, others life, others wisdom and the good life: Intellectual-Principle will draw upon the Authentic Good which we hold to be coterminous with it, both as being an Activity put forth from it and as even now taking light from it.
This good we will define later.
26.Any conscious being, if the good come to him, will know the good and affirm his possession of it.
But what if one be deceived?
In that case there must be some resemblance to account for the error: the good will be the original which the delusion counterfeited and whenever the true presents itself we turn from the spurious.
All the striving, all the pain, show that to everything something is a good: the lifeless finds its share in something outside itself; where there is life the longing for good sets up pursuit;the very dead are cared for and mourned for by the living; the living plan for their own good.The witness of attainment is betterment, cleaving to state, satisfaction, settlement, suspension of pursuit.Here pleasure shows itself inadequate; its choice does not hold; repeated, it is no longer the same; it demands endless novelty.The good, worthy of the name, can be no such tasting of the casual; anyone that takes this kind of thing for the good goes empty, carrying away nothing but an emotion which the good might have produced.No one could be content to take his pleasure thus in an emotion over a thing not possessed any more than over a child not there; I cannot think that those setting their good in bodily satisfactions find table-pleasure without the meal, or love-pleasure without intercourse with their chosen, or any pleasure where nothing is done.
27.But what is that whose entry supplies every such need?
Some Idea, we maintain.There is a Form to which Matter aspires:
to soul, moral excellence is this Form.