The Life of Reason, George Santayana [e novels to read .txt] 📗
- Author: George Santayana
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The case would not be different with fables, were their basis and meaning remembered. But fables, when hypostatised, forget that they, too, were transitive symbols and boast to reveal an undiscoverable reality. A dogmatic myth is in this sorry plight: that the more evidence it can find to support it the more it abrogates its metaphysical pretensions, while the more it insists on its absolute truth the less relevance it has to experience and the less meaning. To try to support fabulous dogmas by evidence is tantamount to acknowledging that they are merely scientific hypotheses, instruments of discourse, and methods of expression. But in that case their truth would no longer be supposed to lie in the fact that somewhere beyond the range of human observation they descended bodily to the plane of flying existence, and were actually enacted there. They would have ceased to resemble the society of Olympus, which to prove itself real would need to verify itself, since only the gods and those mortals admitted to their conclave could know for a fact that that celestial gathering existed. On the contrary, a speculation that could be supported by evidence would be one that might be made good without itself descending to the plane of immediacy, but would be sufficiently verified when diffuse facts fall out as it had led us to expect. The myth in such a case would have become transparent again and relevant to experience, which could continually serve to support or to correct it. Even if somewhat overloaded and poetical, it would be in essence a scientific theory. It would no longer terminate in itself; it would point forward, leading the thinker that used it to eventual facts of experience, facts which his poetic wisdom would have prepared him to meet and to use.
If I say, for instance, that Punishment, limping in one leg, patiently follows every criminal, the myth is obvious and innocent enough. It reveals nothing, but, what is far better, it means something. I have expressed a truth of experience and pointed vaguely to the course which events may be expected to take under given circumstances. The expression, though mythical in form, is scientific in effect, because it tends to surround a given phenomenon (the crime) with objects on its own plane—other passions and sensations to follow upon it. What would be truly mythical would be to stop at the figure of speech and maintain, by way of revealed dogma, that a lame goddess of vindictive mind actually follows every wicked man, her sword poised in mid-air. Sinking into that reverie, and trembling at its painted truth, I should be passing to the undiscoverable and forgetting the hard blows actually awaiting me in the world. Fable, detaining the mind too long in the mesh of expression, would have become metaphysical dogma. I should have connected the given fact with imagined facts, which even if by chance real—for such a goddess may, for all we know, actually float in the fourth dimension—are quite supernumerary in my world, and never, by any possibility, can become parts or extensions of the experience they are thought to explain. The gods are demonstrable only as hypotheses, but as hypotheses they are not gods.
The same distinction is sometimes expressed by saying that science deals only with objects of possible experience. But this expression is unfortunate, because everything thinkable, no matter how mythical and supernatural or how far beyond the range of mortal senses, is an object of possible experience. Tritons and sea-horses might observe one another and might feel themselves live. The thoughts and decrees said to occupy the divine mind from all eternity would certainly be phenomena there; they would be experienced things. Were fables really as metaphysical and visionary as they pretend to be, were they not all the while and in essence mere symbols for natural situations, they would be nothing but reports about other alleged parts of experience. A real Triton, a real Creator, a real heaven would obviously be objects open to properly equipped senses and seats of much vivid experience. But a Triton after all has something to do with the Ægean and other earthly waters; a Creator has something to do with the origin of man and of his habitat; heaven has something to do with the motives and rewards of moral action. This relevance to given experience and its objects is what cuts those myths off from their blameless and gratuitous rôle of reporting experiences that might be going on merrily enough somewhere else in the universe. In calling them myths and denying that what they describe falls within the purview of science, we do not assert that, absolutely taken, they could not be objects of a possible experience. What we mean is rather that no matter how long we searched the sea waves, in which it is the essence of our Tritons to disport themselves, we should never find Tritons there; and that if we traced back the history of man and nature we should find them always passing by natural generation out of slightly different earlier forms and never appearing suddenly, at the fiat of a vehement Jehovah swimming about in a chaos; and finally that if we considered critically our motives and our ideals, we should find them springing from and directed upon a natural life and its functions, and not at all on a disembodied and timeless ecstasy. Those myths, then, while they intrinsically refer to facts in the given world, describe those facts in incongruous terms. They are symbols, not extensions, for the experience we know.
A chief characteristic of science, then, is that in supplementing given facts it supplements them by adding other facts belonging to the same sphere, and eventually discoverable by tracing the given object in its own plane through its continuous transformations. Science expands speculatively, by the aid of merely instrumental hypotheses, objects given in perception until they compose a congruous, self-supporting world, all parts of which might be observed consecutively. What a scientific hypothesis interpolates among the given facts—the atomic structure of things, for instance—might come in time under the direct fire of attention, fixed more scrupulously, longer, or with better instruments upon those facts themselves. Otherwise the hypothesis that assumed that structure would be simply false, just as a hypothesis that the interior of the earth is full of molten fire would be false if on inspection nothing were found there but solid rock. Science does not merely prolong a habit of inference; it verifies and solves the inference by reaching the fact inferred.
The contrast with myth at this point is very interesting; for in myth the facts are themselves made vehicles, and knowledge is felt to terminate in an independent existence on a higher or deeper level than any immediate fact; and this circumstance is what makes myth impossible to verify and, except by laughter, to disprove. If I attributed the stars' shining to the diligence of angels who lighted their lamps at sunset, lest the upper reaches of the world should grow dangerous for travellers, and if I made my romance elaborate and ingenious enough, I might possibly find that the stars' appearance and disappearance could continue to be interpreted in that way. My myth might always suggest itself afresh and might be perennially appropriate. But it would never descend, with its charming figures, into the company of its evidences. It would never prove that what it terminated in was a fact, as in my metaphysical faith I had deputed and asserted it to be. The angels would remain notional, while my intent was to have them exist; so that the more earnestly I held to my fable the more grievously should I be deceived. For even if seraphic choirs existed in plenty on their own emotional or musical plane of being, it would not have been their hands—if they had hands—that would have lighted the stars I saw; and this, after all, was the gist and starting-point of my whole fable and its sole witness in my world. A myth might by chance be a revelation, did what it talks of have an actual existence somewhere else in the universe; but it would need to be a revelation in order to be true at all, and would then be true only in an undeserved and spurious fashion. Any representative and provable validity which it might possess would assimulate it to science and reduce it to a mere vehicle and instrument for human discourse. It would evaporate as soon as the prophecies it made were fulfilled, and it would claim no being and no worship on its own account. Science might accordingly be called a myth conscious of its essential ideality, reduced to its fighting weight and valued only for its significance.
A symptom of the divergence between myth and science may be found in the contrary emotions which they involve. Since in myth we interpret experience in order to interpret it, in order to delight ourselves by turning it poetically into the language and prosody of our own life, the emotion we feel when we succeed is artistic; myth has a dramatic charm. Since in science, on the contrary, we employ notional machinery, in itself perhaps indifferent enough, in order to arrive at eventual facts and to conceive the aspect which given things would actually wear from a different point of view in space or time, the emotion we feel when we succeed is that of security and intellectual dominion; science has a rational value. To see better what we now see, to see by anticipation what we should see actually under other conditions, is wonderfully to satisfy curiosity and to enlighten conduct. At the same time, scientific thinking involves no less inward excitement than dramatic fiction does. It summons before us an even larger number of objects in their fatal direction upon our interests. Were science adequate it would indeed absorb those passions which now, since they must be satisfied somehow, have to be satisfied by dramatic myths. To imagine how things might have been would be neither interesting nor possible if we knew fully how things are. All pertinent dramatic emotion, joyous or tragic, would then inhere in practical knowledge. As it is, however, science abstracts from the more musical overtones of things in order to trace the gross and basal processes within them; so that the pursuit of science seems comparatively dry and laborious, except where at moments the vista opens through to the ultimate or leads back to the immediate. Then, perhaps, we recognise that in science we are surveying all it concerns us to know, and in so doing are becoming all that it profits us to be. Mere amusement in thought as in sportive action is tedious and illiberal: it marks a temperament so imperfectly educated that it prefers idle to significant play and a flimsy to a solid idea.
The fact that science follows the subject-matter in its own movement involves a further consequence: science
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