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THE NATURE OF GOODNESS
BY
GEORGE HERBERT PALMER
Alford Professor of Philosophy
In Harvard University
[Illustration: Tout bien ou rien]
1903
A. F. P.
BONITATE SINGULARI MULTIS DILECTAE
VENUSTATE LITTERIS CONSILIIS PRAESTANTI
NUPER E DOMO ET GAUDIO MEO EREPTAE
PREFACE
The substance of these chapters was delivered as a course of lectures
at Harvard University, Dartmouth and Wellesley Colleges, Western
Reserve University, the University of California, and the Twentieth
Century Club of Boston. A part of the sixth chapter was used as an
address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard, and another
part before the Philosophical Union of Berkeley, California. Several
of these audiences have materially aided my work by their searching
criticisms, and all have helped to clear my thought and simplify its
expression. Since discussions necessarily so severe have been felt as
vital by companies so diverse, I venture to offer them here to a wider
audience.
Previously, in "The Field of Ethics," I marked out the place which
ethics occupies among the sciences. In this book the first problem of
ethics is examined. The two volumes will form, I hope, an easy yet
serious introduction to this gravest and most perpetual of studies.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE DOUBLE ASPECT OF GOODNESS
I. Difficulties of the investigation
II. Gains to be expected
III. Extrinsic goodness
IV. Imperfections of extrinsic goodness
V. Intrinsic goodness
VI. Relations of the two kinds
VII. Diagram