But there is a radically different sense of the words “good” and “bad”; namely, that in which we say that a thing is good for this or that.  This is the kind of goodness the things about us have; they are good for the production of intrinsic goodness (as we are using that phrase), which is always (so far as we know) something produced in living organisms. [Footnote:  We also occasionally speak of things as being “good for” something else when that something else is not a good or a means to a good (see preceding footnote); as, “sunshine is good for weeds.”  But as applied to evils, the phrase “good for” more often means “good to abolish”; as, “hellebore is good for weeds.”  These usages illustrate the ambiguity of all our common ethical terms.  To consider them here would be, however, needlessly confusing.  The two senses of the term “good” mentioned in the text are the only senses we need to bear in mind for the purposes of ethics.] 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. [Footnote:  The neo-realists would prefer to say, perhaps, “apart from the existence of organisms,”] and this may be an exacter phrase; we from previous page [Footnote:  pleasures and pains that remain out of connection with that interrelated stream of experience to which we usually limit the term “consciousness.”  On the other hand, may it not be that God, and angels, or other disembodied beings, have consciousness, and intrinsic goodness, without having organisms?  Of course, for all we know, the world about us may be chock full of pleasures and pains.  But for practical purposes, and so far as our morality is concerned, either the statement in the text or the suggested equivalent is true.  The point is, that the foundation of morality is in us—­whether you call us in the last analysis consciousnesses or organisms]