The Meaning of Good; A Dialogue (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ...it are also the people who get it. That is so, is it not?" He agreed. "But now," I continued, "we come to the point of dispute. For besides this Good of our own, we have also, according to the theory, to consider a Good in which we have no share, that of those who are to be born in some indefinite future. And to this remote and alien Good we have even, on occasion, to sacrifice our own." "Certainly," he said, "all good citizens will think so." H "I believe," I admitted, "that they will. And yet, how strange it seems For consider it in this way. Imagine that the successive generations can somehow be viewed as contemporaneous--being projected, as it were, from the plane of time into that of space." "It's rather hard," he said, "to imagine that." "Well, but try, for the sake of argument; and consider what we shall have. We shall have a society divided into two classes, composed, the one of all the generations who, if they followed one another in time, would precede the first millenarian one; the other of all the millenarian generations themselves. And of these two classes the first would be perpetually engaged in working for the second, sacrificing to it, if need be, on occasion, all its own Good, but without any hope or prospect of ever entering itself into that other Good which is the monopoly of the other class, but to the production of which its own efforts are directed. What should we say of such a society? Should we not say that it was founded on injustice and inequality, and all those other phrases with which we are wont to denounce a system of serfdom or slavery?" "But," he objected, "your projection of time into space has falsified the whole situation. For in fact the millenarian generation would not come into being until the others had...