The Life of Reason, George Santayana [e novels to read .txt] 📗
- Author: George Santayana
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[A] This distinction, in one sense, is Platonic: but Plato's Reason was distinguished from understanding (which dealt with phenomenal experience) because it was a moral faculty defining those values and meanings which in Platonic nomenclature took the title of reality. The German Reason was only imagination, substituting a dialectical or poetic history of the world for its natural development. German idealism, accordingly, was not, like Plato's, a moral philosophy hypostasised but a false physics adored.
[B] This natural order and affinity is something imputed to the ultimate object of thought—the reality—by the last act of judgment assuming its own truth. It is, of course, not observable by consciousness before the first experiment in comprehension has been made; the act of comprehension which first imposes on the sensuous material some subjective category is the first to arrive at the notion of an objective order. The historian, however, has a well-tried and mature conception of the natural order arrived at after many such experiments in comprehension. From the vantage-ground of this latest hypothesis, he surveys the attempts others have made to understand events and compares them with the objective order which he believes himself to have discovered. This observation is made here lest the reader should confuse the natural order, imagined to exist before any application of human categories, with the last conception of that order attained by the philosopher. The latter is but faith, the former is faith's ideal object.
[C] For the sake of simplicity only such ideas as precede conceptions of things have been mentioned here. After things are discovered, however, they may be used as terms in a second ideal synthesis and a concretion in discourse on a higher plane may be composed out of sustained concretions in existence. Proper names are such secondary concretions in discourse. "Venice" is a term covering many successive aspects and conditions, not distinguished in fancy, belonging to an object existing continuously in space and time. Each of these states of Venice constitutes a natural object, a concretion in existence, and is again analysable into a mass of fused but recognisable qualities—light, motion, beauty—each of which was an original concretion in discourse, a primordial term in experience. A quality is recognised by its own idea or permanent nature, a thing by its constituent qualities, and an embodied spirit by fusion into an ideal essence of the constant characters possessed by a thing. To raise natural objects into historic entities it is necessary to repeat upon a higher plane that concretion in discourse by which sensations were raised to ideas. When familiar objects attain this ideal character they have become poetical and achieved a sort of personality. They then possess a spiritual status. Thus sensuous experience is solidified into logical terms, these into ideas of things, and these, recast and smelted again in imagination, into forms of spirit.
CHAPTER VIII—ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEASThose who look back upon the history of opinion for many centuries commonly feel, by a vague but profound instinct, that certain consecrated doctrines have an inherent dignity and spirituality, while other speculative tendencies and other vocabularies seem wedded to all that is ignoble and shallow. So fundamental is this moral tone in philosophy that people are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true. They may avow, in reflective moments, that they may be in error, seeing that thinkers of no less repute have maintained opposite opinions, but they are commonly absolutely sure that if their own views could be generally accepted, it would be a boon to mankind, that in fact the moral interests of the race are bound up, not with discovering what may chance to be true, but with discovering the truth to have a particular complexion. This predominant trust in moral judgments is in some cases conscious and avowed, so that philosophers invite the world to embrace tenets for which no evidence is offered but that they chime in with current aspirations or traditional bias. Thus the substance of things hoped for becomes, even in philosophy, the evidence of things not seen.
Such faith is indeed profoundly human and has accompanied the mind in all its gropings and discoveries; preference being the primary principle of discrimination and attention. Reason in her earliest manifestations already discovered her affinities and incapacities, and loaded the ideas she framed with friendliness or hostility. It is not strange that her latest constructions should inherit this relation to the will; and we shall see that the moral tone and affinity of metaphysical systems corresponds exactly with the primary function belonging to that type of idea on which they are based. Idealistic systems, still cultivating concretions in discourse, study the first conditions of knowledge and the last interests of life; materialistic systems, still emphasising concretions in existence, describe causal relations, and the habits of nature. Thus the spiritual value of various philosophies rests in the last instance on the kind of good which originally attached the mind to that habit and plane of ideation.
We have said that perceptions must be recognised before they can be associated by contiguity, and that consequently the fusion of temporally diffused experiences must precede their local fusion into material objects. It might be urged in opposition to this statement that concrete objects can be recognised in practice before their general qualities have been distinguished in discourse. Recognition may be instinctive, that is, based on the repetition of a felt reaction or emotion, rather than on any memory of a former occasion on which the same perception occurred. Such an objection seems to be well grounded, for it is instinctive adjustments and suggested action that give cognitive value to sensation and endow it with that transitive force which makes it consciously representative of what is past, future, or absent. If practical instinct did not stretch what is given into what is meant, reason could never recognise the datum for a copy of an ideal object.
This description of the case involves an application or extension of our theory rather than an argument against it. For where recognition is instinctive and a familiar action is performed with absent-minded confidence and without attending to the indications that justify that action, there is in an eminent degree a qualitative concretion in experience. Present impressions are merged so completely in structural survivals of the past that instead of arousing any ideas distinct enough to be objectified they merely stimulate the inner sense, remain imbedded in the general feeling of motion or life, and constitute in fact a heightened sentiment of pure vitality and freedom. For the lowest and vaguest of concretions in discourse are the ideas of self and of an embosoming external being, with the felt continuity of both; what Fichte would call the Ego, the Non-Ego, and Life. Where no particular events are recognised there is still a feeling of continuous existence. We trail after us from our whole past some sense of the continuous energy and movement both of our passionate fancies and of the phantasmagoria capriciously at work beyond. An ignorant mind believes itself omniscient and omnipotent; those impulses in itself which really represent the inertia and unspent momentum of its last dream it regards as the creative forces of nature.
The first lines of cleavage and the first recognisable bulks at which attention is arrested are in truth those shadowy Fichtean divisions: such are the rude beginnings of logical architecture. In its inability to descry anything definite and fixed, for want of an acquired empirical background and a distinct memory, the mind flounders forward in a dream full of prophecies and wayward identifications. The world possesses as yet in its regard only the superficial forms that appear in revery, it has no hidden machinery, no third dimension in which unobserved and perpetual operations are going on. Its only terms, in a word, are concretions in discourse, ideas combined in their æsthetic and logical harmonies, not in their habitual and efficacious conjunctions. The disorder of such experience is still a spontaneous disorder; it has not discovered how calculable are its unpremeditated shocks. The cataclysms that occur seem to have only ideal grounds and only dramatic meaning. Though the dream may have its terrors and degenerate at moments into a nightmare, it has still infinite plasticity and buoyancy. What perceptions are retained merge in those haunting and friendly presences, they have an intelligible and congenial character because they appear as parts and effluences of an inner fiction, evolving according to the barbaric prosody of an almost infant mind.
This is the fairy-land of idealism where only the miraculous seems a matter of course and every hint of what is purely natural is disregarded, for the truly natural still seems artificial, dead, and remote. New and disconcerting facts, which intrude themselves inopportunely into the story, chill the currents of spontaneous imagination and are rejected as long as possible for being alien and perverse. Perceptions, on the contrary, which can be attached to the old presences as confirmations or corollaries, become at once parts of the warp and woof of what we call ourselves. They seem of the very substance of spirit, obeying a vital momentum and flowing from the inmost principle of being; and they are so much akin to human presumptions that they pass for manifestations of necessary truth. Thus the demonstrations of geometry being but the intent explication of a long-consolidated ideal concretion which we call space, are welcomed by the mind as in a sense familiar and as revelations of a truth implicit in the soul, so that Plato could plausibly take them for recollections of prenatal wisdom. But a rocket that bursts into sparks of a dozen colours, even if expected, is expected with anxiety and observed with surprise; it assaults the senses at an incalculable moment with a sensation individual and new. The exciting tension and lively stimulus may please in their way, yet the badge of the accidental and unmeaning adheres to the thing. It is a trivial experience and one quickly forgotten. The shock is superficial and were it repeated would soon fatigue. We should retire with relief into darkness and silence, to our permanent and rational thoughts.
It is a remarkable fact, which may easily be misinterpreted, that while all the benefits and pleasures of life seem to be associated with external things, and all certain knowledge seems to describe material laws, yet a deified nature has generally inspired a religion of melancholy. Why should the only intelligible philosophy seem to defeat reason and the chief means of benefiting mankind seem to blast our best hopes? Whence this profound aversion to so beautiful and fruitful a universe? Whence this persistent search for invisible regions and powers and for metaphysical explanations that can explain nothing, while nature's voice without and within man cries aloud to him to look,
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