ABSTRACT
From this excursus let us return to our proper task, the attempt to outline a morality which will change its values as circum stances alter, a morality free from occultism, absolutes, and arbitrariness, a morality which will explain, as no morality has yet explained, the place and value of the arts in human affairs. What is good or valuable, we have said, is the exercise of impulses and the satisfaction of their appetencies. When we say that anything is good we mean that it satisfies, and by a good experience we mean one in which the impulses which make it are fulfilled and successful, adding as the necessary qualification that their exercise and satisfaction shall not interfere in any way with more important impulses. Importance we have seen to be a complicated matter, and which impulses are more important than others can only be discovered by an extensive enquiry into what actually happens. The problem of morality then, the problem of how we are to obtain the greatest possible value from life, becomes a problem of organization, both in the individual life and in the adjustment of individual lives to one another, and is delivered from all non-psychological ideas, from absolute goods and immediate convictions, which incidentally help greatly to give unnecessary stiffness and fixity to obsolescent codes. Without system, needless to say, value vanishes, since in a state of chaos important and trivial impulses alike are frustrated.[58] {44} [59]
