GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

A THEORY OF GOOD OR VALUE 449
training and assisted by a good environment. Aristotle,
it will be remembered 1 , distinguished virtues of character
from virtues of intellect, and held that the former could be
inculcated by right training and fostered by a good environment.
Experience bears out his view. If a child is indulged
from its earliest year, permitted to gratify every whim and
encouraged to shirk every difficulty, when it reaches
maturity, it will be found deficient in powers ofwill and of
concentration. Our species has evolved by means of
struggle and endeavour. Those who are exempt from the
necessity for struggle, those who have no incentive to make
endeavours, will fail to develop the specifically human
qualities of will-power and resolution which struggle and
endeavour have engendered. Thus the failure to do the
right which we see, no less than die failure to see what is
right, may be in large part the result of faulty training
and bad environment.
But this answer, adequate so far as it goes, does not
take us very far. It only puts the problem further back.
For if faulty insight and deficient will power are due to
wrong training and bad environment, we have still to ask,
why is training wrong and why is environment bad?
For, clearly, those who are responsible for the training
and the environment, the educators and legislators and
rulers, who determine the character, mould the traditions
and set the standards of a community, must, if the character
is bad, the traditions misleading, and the standards low, be
themselves open to censure. They too must have failed to
see the Good or to pursue the Good which they saw.
Thus the same problem presents itself in another form,
why did they fail?
That Evil is Real and Objective. We come here to
the second answer to our first question, an answer which
bases itself upon the presence in the universe of evil. Evil
has not hitherto been mentioned in these pages. The reason
for this omission is that evil occupies a comparatively small
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1 See Chapter IV, pp. 105, 106.