The Life of Reason, George Santayana [e novels to read .txt] 📗
- Author: George Santayana
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The same æsthetic bias appears in the moral sphere. Utilitarians have attempted to show that the human conscience commends precisely those actions which tend to secure general happiness and that the notions of justice and virtue prevailing in any age vary with its social economy and the prizes it is able to attain. And, if due allowance is made for the complexity of the subject, we may reasonably admit that the precepts of obligatory morality bear this relation to the general welfare; thus virtue means courage in a soldier, probity in a merchant, and chastity in a woman. But if we turn from the morality required of all to the type regarded as perfect and ideal, we find no such correspondence to the benefits involved. The selfish imagination intervenes here and attributes an absolute and irrational value to those figures that entertain it with the most absorbing and dreamful emotions. The character of Christ, for instance, which even the least orthodox among us are in the habit of holding up as a perfect model, is not the character of a benefactor but of a martyr, a spirit from a higher world lacerated in its passage through this uncomprehending and perverse existence, healing and forgiving out of sheer compassion, sustained by his inner affinities to the supernatural, and absolutely disenchanted with all earthly or political goods. Christ did not suffer, like Prometheus, for having bestowed or wished to bestow any earthly blessing: the only blessing he bequeathed was the image of himself upon the cross, whereby men might be comforted in their own sorrows, rebuked in their worldliness, driven to put their trust in the supernatural, and united, by their common indifference to the world, in one mystic brotherhood. As men learned these lessons, or were inwardly ready to learn them, they recognised more and more clearly in Jesus their heaven-sent redeemer, and in following their own conscience and desperate idealism into the desert or the cloister, in ignoring all civic virtues and allowing the wealth, art, and knowledge of the pagan world to decay, they began what they felt to be an imitation of Christ.
All natural impulses, all natural ideals, subsisted of course beneath this theoretic asceticism, writhed under its unearthly control, and broke out in frequent violent irruptions against it in the life of each man as well as in the course of history. Yet the image of Christ remained in men's hearts and retained its marvellous authority, so that even now, when so many who call themselves Christians, being pure children of nature, are without the least understanding of what Christianity came to do in the world, they still offer his person and words a sincere if inarticulate worship, trying to transform that sacrificial and crucified spirit, as much as their bungling fancy can, into a patron of Philistia Felix. Why this persistent adoration of a character that is the extreme negation of all that these good souls inwardly value and outwardly pursue? Because the image of Christ and the associations of his religion, apart from their original import, remain rooted in the mind: they remain the focus for such wayward emotions and mystic intuitions as their magnetism can still attract, and the value which this hallowed compound possesses in representation is transferred to its nominal object, and Christ is the conventional name for all the impulses of religion, no matter how opposite to the Christian.
Symbols, when their significance has been great, outlive their first significance. The image of Christ was a last refuge to the world; it was a consolation and a new ground for hope, from which no misfortune could drive the worshipper. Its value as an idea was therefore immense, as to the lover the idea of his untasted joys, or to the dying man the idea of health and invigorating sunshine. The votary can no more ask himself whether his deity, in its total operation, has really blessed him and deserved his praise than the lover can ask if his lady is worth pursuing or the expiring cripple whether it would be, in very truth, a benefit to be once more young and whole. That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions. Experience, by its passive weight of joy and sorrow, can neither inspire nor prevent enthusiasm; only a present ideal will avail to move the will and, if realised, to justify it. A saint's halo is an optical illusion; it glorifies his actions whatever their eventual influence in the world, because they seem to have, when rehearsed dramatically, some tenderness or rapture or miracle about them.
Thus it appears that the great figures of art or religion, together with all historic and imaginative ideals, advance insensibly on the values they represent. The image has more lustre than the original, and is often the more important and influential fact. Things are esteemed as they weigh in representation. A memorable thing, people say in their eulogies, little thinking to touch the ground of their praise. For things are called great because they are memorable, they are not remembered because they were great. The deepest pangs, the highest joys, the widest influences are lost to apperception in its haste, and if in some rational moment reconstructed and acknowledged, are soon forgotten again and cut off from living consideration. But the emptiest experience, even the most pernicious tendency, if embodied in a picturesque image, if reverberating in the mind with a pleasant echo, is idolised and enshrined. Fortunate indeed was Achilles that Homer sang of him, and fortunate the poets that make a public titillation out of their sorrows and ignorance. This imputed and posthumous fortune is the only happiness they have. The favours of memory are extended to those feeble realities and denied to the massive substance of daily experience. When life dies, when what was present becomes a memory, its ghost flits still among the living, feared or worshipped not for the experience it once possessed but for the aspect it now wears. Yet this injustice in representation, speculatively so offensive, is practically excusable; for it is in one sense right and useful that all things, whatever their original or inherent dignity, should be valued at each moment only by their present function and utility.
The error involved in attributing value to the past is naturally aggravated when values are to be assigned to the future. In the latter case imagination cannot be controlled by circumstantial evidence, and is consequently the only basis for judgment. But as the conception of a thing naturally evokes an emotion different from that involved in its presence, ideals of what is desirable for the future contain no warrant that the experience desired would, when actual, prove to be acceptable and good. An ideal carries no extrinsic assurance that its realisation would be a benefit. To convince ourselves that an ideal has rational authority and represents a better experience than the actual condition it is contrasted with, we must control the prophetic image by as many circumlocutions as possible. As in the case of fame, we must buttress or modify our spontaneous judgment with all the other judgments that the object envisaged can prompt: we must make our ideal harmonise with all experience rather than with a part only. The possible error remains even then; but a practical mind will always accept the risk of error when it has made every possible correction. A rational will is not a will that has reason for its basis or that possesses any other proof that its realisation would be possible or good than the oracle which a living will inspires and pronounces. The rationality possible to the will lies not in its source but in its method. An ideal cannot wait for its realisation to prove its validity. To deserve adhesion it needs only to be adequate as an ideal, that is, to express completely what the soul at present demands, and to do justice to all extant interests.
CHAPTER XI—SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEALReason's function is to embody the good, but the test of excellence is itself ideal; therefore before we can assure ourselves that reason has been manifested in any given case we must make out the reasonableness of the ideal that inspires us. And in general, before we can convince ourselves that a Life of Reason, or practice guided by science and directed toward spiritual goods, is at all worth having, we must make out the possibility and character of its ultimate end. Yet each ideal is its own justification; so that the only sense in which an ultimate end can be established and become a test of general progress is this: that a harmony and co-operation of impulses should be conceived, leading to the maximum satisfaction possible in the whole community of spirits affected by our action. Now, without considering for the present any concrete Utopia, such, for instance, as Plato's Republic or the heavenly beatitude described by theologians, we may inquire what formal qualities are imposed on the ideal by its nature and function and by the relation it bears to experience and to desire.
The ideal has the same relation to given demands that the reality has to given perceptions. In the face of the ideal, particular demands forfeit their authority and the goods to which a particular being may aspire cease to be absolute; nay, the satisfaction of desire comes to appear an indifferent or unholy thing when compared or opposed to the ideal to be realised. So, precisely, in perception, flying impressions come to be regarded as illusory when contrasted with a stable conception of reality. Yet of course flying impressions are the only material out of which that conception can be formed. Life itself is a flying impression, and had we no personal and instant experience, importuning us at each successive moment, we should have no occasion to ask for a reality at all, and no materials out of which to construct so gratuitous an idea. In the same way present demands are the only materials and occasions for any ideal: without demands the ideal would have no locus standi or foothold in the world, no power, no charm, and no prerogative. If the ideal can confront particular desires and put them to shame, that happens only because the ideal is the object of a more profound and voluminous desire and embodies the good which they blindly and perhaps deviously pursue. Demands could not be misdirected, goods sought could not be false, if the standard by which they are to be corrected were not constructed out of them. Otherwise each demand would render its object a detached, absolute, and unimpeachable good. But when each desire in turn has singed its wings and retired before some disillusion, reflection may set in to suggest residual satisfactions that may still be possible, or some shifting of the ground by which much of what was hoped for may yet be attained.
The force for this new trial is but
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