The Life of Reason, George Santayana [e novels to read .txt] 📗
- Author: George Santayana
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What scientific psychology has to attempt—for little has been accomplished—may be reduced to this: To develop physiology and anthropology until the mechanism of life becomes clear, at least in its general method, and then to determine, by experiment and by well-sifted testimony, what conscious sublimation each of those material situations attains, if indeed it attains any. There will always remain, no doubt, many a region where the machinery of nature is too fine for us to trace or eludes us by involving agencies that we lack senses to perceive. In these regions where science is denied we shall have to be satisfied with landscape-painting. The more obvious results and superficial harmonies perceived in those regions will receive names and physics will be arrested at natural history. Where these unexplained facts are mental it will not be hard to do more systematically what common sense has done already, and to attach them, as we attach love or patriotism, to the natural crises that subtend them.
This placing of mental facts is made easy by the mental facts themselves, since the connection of mind with nature is double, and even when the derivation of a feeling is obscure we have but to study its meaning, allowing it to tell us what it is interested in, for a roundabout path to lead us safely back to its natural basis. It is superfluous to ask a third person what circumstances produce hunger: hunger will lead you unmistakably enough to its point of origin, and its extreme interest in food will not suffer you long to believe that want of nourishment has nothing to do with its cause. And it is not otherwise with higher emotions and ideas. Nothing but sophistry can put us in doubt about what conscience represents; for conscience does not say, square the circle, extinguish mankind so as to stop its sufferings, or steal so as to benefit your heirs. It says, Thou shalt not kill, and it also says, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt. So that conscience, by its import and incidence, clearly enough declares what it springs from—a social tradition; and what it represents—the interests, real or imaginary, of the community in which you were reared.
Where psychology depends on literature, where both its units and its method are poetical, there can be no talk of science. We may as justly, or as absurdly, speak of the spirit of an age or of a religion as of a man's character or a river's god. Particulars in illustration may have good historic warrant, but the unities superimposed are ideal. Such metaphors may be very useful, for a man may ordinarily be trusted to continue his practices and a river its beneficent or disastrous floods; and since those rhetorical forms have no existence in nature we may continue to frame them as may be most convenient for discourse.
When psychology is a science, then, it describes the flying consciousness that accompanies bodily life. It is the science of feeling or absolute appearance, taken exactly as it seems or feels. Does such a psychology, we may be tempted to ask, constitute scientific knowledge of reality? Is it at last the true metaphysics? This question would have to be answered in the negative, yet not without some previous discriminations. There is honesty in the conviction that sentience is a sort of absolute; it is something which certainly exists. The first Cartesian axiom applies to it, and to feel, even doubtfully, that feeling existed would be to posit its existence. The science that describes sentience describes at least a part of existence. Yet this self-grounding of consciousness is a suspicious circumstance: it renders it in one sense the typical reality and in another sense perhaps the sorriest illusion.
"Reality" is an ambiguous term. If we mean by it the immediate, then sentience would be a part if not the whole of reality; for what we mean by sentience or consciousness is the immediate in so far as we contain it, and whatever self-grounded existence there may be elsewhere can be conceived by us only mythically and on that analogy, as if it were an extension or variation of sentience. Psychology would then be knowledge of reality, for even when consciousness contains elaborate thoughts that might be full of illusions, psychology takes them only as so much feeling, and in that capacity they are real enough. At the same time, while our science terminates upon mere feeling, it can neither discover nor describe that feeling except in terms of something quite different; and the only part of psychology that perhaps penetrates to brute sentience is the part that is not scientific. The knowledge that science reaches about absolute states of mind is relative knowledge; these states of mind are approached from without and are defined by their surrounding conditions and by their ideal objects. They are known by being enveloped in processes of which they themselves are not aware. Apart from this setting, the only feeling known is that which is endured. After the fact, or before, or from any other point of vantage, it cannot be directly revealed; at best it may be divined and re-enacted. Even this possible repetition would not constitute knowledge unless the imaginative reproduction were identified with or attributed to some natural fact; so that an adventitious element would always attach to any recognised feeling, to any feeling reported to another mind. It could not be known at all unless something were known about it, so that it might not pass, as otherwise it would, for a mere ingredient of present sentience.
It is precisely by virtue of this adventitious element that the re-enacted feeling takes its place in nature and becomes an object of knowledge. Science furnishes this setting; the jewel—precious or false—must be supplied by imagination. Romance, dramatic myth, is the only instrument for knowing this sort of "reality." A flying moment, if at all understood or underpinned, or if seen in its context, would be not known absolutely as it had been felt, but would be known scientifically and as it lay in nature. But dramatic insight, striving to pierce through the machinery of the world and to attain and repeat what dreams may be going on at its core, is no science; and the very notion that the dreams are internal, that they make the interior or substance of bodies, is a crude materialistic fancy. Body, on the contrary, is the substance or instrument of mind, and has to be looked for beneath it. The mind is itself ethereal and plays about the body as music about a violin, or rather as the sense of a page about the print and paper. To look for it within is not to understand what we are looking for.
Knowledge of the immediate elsewhere is accordingly visionary in its method, and furthermore, if, by a fortunate chance, it be true in fact, it is true only of what in itself is but appearance; for the immediate, while absolutely real in its stress or presence, is indefinitely ignorant and false in its deliverance. It knows itself, but in the worst sense of the word knowledge; for it knows nothing of what is true about it, nothing of its relations and conditions. To pierce to this blind "reality" or psychic flux, which is nothing but flying appearance, we must rely on fortune, or an accidental harmony between imitative fancy in us now and original sentience elsewhere. It is accordingly at least misleading to give the name of "reality" to this appearance, which is entirely lost and inconsequential in its being, without trace of its own status, and consequently approachable or knowable only by divination, as a dream might call to another dream.
It is preferable to give a more Platonic meaning to the word and to let "reality" designate not what is merely felt diffusely but what is true about those feelings. Then dramatic fancy, psychology of the sympathetic sort, would not be able to reach reality at all. On the other hand scientific psychology, together with all other sciences, would have reality for its object; for it would disclose what really was true about sentient moments, without stopping particularly to sink abstractedly into their inner quality or private semblance. It would approach and describe the immediate as a sentient factor in a natural situation, and show us to what extent that situation was represented in that feeling. This representation, by which the dignity and interest of pure sentience would be measured, might be either pictorial or virtual; that is, a conscious moment might represent the environing world either scientifically, by understanding its structure, or practically, by instinctive readiness to meet it.
What, for instance, is the reality of Napoleon? Is it what a telepathic poet, a complete Browning, might reconstruct? Is it Napoleon's life-long soliloquy? Or to get at the reality should we have to add, as scientific psychology would, the conditions under which he lived, and their relation to his casual feelings? Obviously if Napoleon's thoughts had had no reference to the world we should not be able to recover them; or if by chance such thoughts fell some day to our share, we should attribute them to our own mental luxuriance, without suspecting that they had ever visited another genius. Our knowledge of his life, even where it is imaginative, depends upon scientific knowledge for its projection; and his fame and immortality depend on the degree to which his thoughts, being rooted in the structure of the world and pertinent to it, can be rationally reproduced in others and attributed to him. Napoleon's consciousness might perhaps be more justly identified with the truth or reality of him than could that of most people, because he seems to have been unusually cognisant of his environment and master of the forces at work in it and in himself. He understood his causes and function, and knew that he had arisen, like all the rest of history, and that he stood for the transmissible force and authority of greater things. Such a consciousness can be known in proportion as we, too, possess knowledge, and is worth the pains; something which could not be said of the absolute sentience of Dick or Harry, which has only material being, brute existence, without relevance to anything nor understanding of itself.
The circumstances, open to science, which surround consciousness are thus real attributes of a man by which he is truly known and distinguished. Appearances are the qualities of reality, else realities would be without place, time, character, or interrelation. In knowing that Napoleon was a Corsican, a short man with a fine countenance, we know appearances only; but these appearances are true of the reality. And if the presumable inner appearances, Napoleon's long soliloquy, were separated from the others, those inner appearances would not belong to Napoleon nor have any home in the knowable world. That which physics, with its concomitant psychology, might discover in a man is the sum of what is true about him, seeing that a man is a concretion in existence, the fragment of a world, and not a definition. Appearances define the constituent elements of his reality, which could not be better known than through their means.
[E] Aristotle called the soul the first entelechy of such a body. This first entelechy is what we should call life, since it is possessed by a man asleep. The French I know but do not use is in its first entelechy; the French
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