Page:An introduction to ethics.djvu/19

 Now, when we have before us the results of such sciences as these, when we know the answers they have given to their questions, a further question still remains to be asked. We must ask, What is the value of these answers? What is the good of their results? What is the value of the physiologist's researches? What is the good of knowing the distance of the Earth from the Sun? This kind of question with regard to the value or good of their investigations is not usually asked by the particular sciences themselves. Yet it is a question of fundamental importance.

This sort of question is one of the first that the child asks. The child is forward to ask, What is the good of this? What is the good of that? In its school-work it asks, What is the good of grammar, what is the good of decimals, what is the good of learning dates? and so on. One of the child's stoutest objections is, "I don't see the good of it." The child is anxious to know the value of the actions he is made to do and the knowledge he is made to acquire. His questions are often disconcerting, and we find it difficult to give any satisfactory answer. "What's the good of going to Church?" "What's the good of poetry?" "What's the good of finding the South Pole?"

The more complex civilisation grows, the more difficult it becomes to explain or to understand the good or value of the actions that men perform, the aims they set before themselves, and the knowledge