] To put the same truth in
other terms, things are good or bad only with respect to their effect
upon our conscious experience. [Footnote: I am fully aware of the
widespread current distaste for the word "consciousness," with its
idealistic associations. The term seems to me too useful to discard;
but I wish to point out that, as I use it, it involves no metaphysical
viewpoint, but is equally consonant with idealism or realism of any
sort.] Primitive man, indeed, imagines inanimate things as having
intrinsic goodness or badness, i.e., as feeling happy or unhappy,
benevolent or malignant. We still speak of a serene sky, an angry
storm cloud, a caressing breeze, and in a hundred ways read our
affective life into material objects. But we now recognize all these
ascriptions as cases of the pathetic fallacy, poetically significant but
literally untrue. Animism, which looms so large in primitive religion,
consists in thus objectifying into things the emotions they arouse
in us. In reality all of these affective qualities exist in us, not in the
outer objects; so far as our epithets have an objective truth they
describe not the content of the objects, but their function in our lives.
When we speak of delicious food, beautiful pictures, ugly colors, we
mean strictly that these objects are such as to arouse in us certain
peculiar pleasant or unpleasant feelings. So that apart from the
existence of consciousness there would be no goodness or badness
at all.
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