Americans don’t have to go to the Orient to learn what this mysticism stuff is about. It’s been right here in America all along. In the Orient they dress it up with rituals and incense and pagodas and chants and, of course, huge organizational enterprises that bring in the equivalent of millions of dollars every year. American Indians haven’t done this. Their way is not to be organized at all. They don’t charge anything, they don’t make a big fuss, and that’s what makes people underrate them.
Phædrus remembered saying to Dusenberry just after that peyote meeting was over, The Hindu understanding is just a low-grade imitation of this! This is how it must have really been before all the clap-trap got started.
And he remembered that Franz Boas had said that in a primitive culture people speak only about actual experiences. They don’t discuss what is virtue, good, evil, beauty; the demands of their daily life, like those of our uneducated classes, don’t extend beyond the virtues shown on definite occasions by definite people, good or evil deeds of their fellow tribesman, and the beauty of a particular man, woman or object. They don’t talk about abstract ideas. But Boas said, The Dakota Indian considers goodness to be a noun rather than an adjective.
That was true, Phædrus thought, and that was very objective. But it was like an explorer noticing that there’s a huge vein of pure yellow metal emerging from the side of a cliff, jotting the fact down in his diary, and then never expanding on the subject because he’s only interested in facts and doesn’t want to get into evaluations or interpretations.
Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phædrus had been looking for. That was the homer, over the fence, that ended the ball game. Good as a noun rather than an adjective is all the Metaphysics of Quality is about. Of course, the ultimate Quality isn’t a noun or an adjective or anything else definable, but if you had to reduce the whole Metaphysics of Quality to a single sentence, that would be it.