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

A THEORY OF GOOD OR VALUE 453
generalization about the nature of things. If it were in fact
the case that the meaning of evil and the meaning of X
always applied to the same things,
and that there was no
case of the one applying and not the other, then one would
have hit upon an important truth, and it would be an
important truth just because we should already have a
definite (though unanalysable) meaning for the word evil
in our minds, which we could compare with the known
meaning of X and recognize
to be identical with it. In
other words the proposition "evil is X", whether right
or wrong, is a significant and not merely a verbal proposition.
It is not a statement to the effect that two words are
being used in the same sense. Hence though the proposition
may in fact be true, it does not give us the meaning of the
word evil, and it does not do this for the reason that there
is no word X such that the meaning of it is identical with
that of the word evil.
It follows that statements like "evil is disobedience to
the will of God", or "evil is absence of good",
are not
dictionary definitions like the definition of a quadrilateral,
but are affirmations about the things that are evil. This,
indeed, seems in any event probable from the number of
different and incompatible definitions of evil that have in
fact been suggested. There have never been two incom-
patible definitions of the word "quadrilateral".
That Evil is Not the Deprivation or Opposite of Good.
(iv) A word may be added with regard to the particular
definition of evil as "the absence of", or "the deprivation
of", or "the limitation of good," a view which, for reasons
already given, is often put forward on theological grounds.
On this view, whatever is, is good; starting from this
assumption philosophers have endeavoured to prove that
the world is all good. Spinoza, for example, says "by
reality and perfection I mean the same thing", Now this
view, in so far as it asserts that evil consists not in the existence
of something which is bad, but only in the non-existence
of something which is good, equates the meaning of