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The Life of Reason by George Santayana

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THE LIFE OF REASON

The Phases of Human Progress

In Five Volumes

by

GEORGE SANTAYANA

he gar noy enhergeia zohe

Dover Publication, Inc.
New York







CONTENTS

Volume I. REASON IN COMMON SENSE

Volume II. REASON IN SOCIETY

Volume III. REASON IN RELIGION

Volume IV. REASON IN ART

Volume V. REASON IN SCIENCE






REASON IN COMMON SENSE

Volume One of "The Life of Reason"

GEORGE SANTAYANA

he gar noy enhergeia zohe



This Dover edition, first published in 1980, is an
unabridged republication of volume one of _The
Life of Reason; or the Phases of Human Progress_,
originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons in
1905. This volume contains the general introduction
to the entire five-volume series.




CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTECEDENTS Pages 1-32
Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection
creates.--Efficacious reflection is reason.--The Life of Reason a
name for all practical thought and all action justified by its
fruits in consciousness.--- It is the sum of Art.--It has a natural
basis which makes it definable.--Modern philosophy not
helpful.--Positivism no positive ideal.--Christian philosophy
mythical: it misrepresents facts and conditions.--Liberal theology
a superstitious attitude toward a natural world.--The Greeks
thought straight in both physics and morals.--Heraclitus and the
immediate.--Democritus and the naturally intelligible.--Socrates
and the autonomy of mind.--Plato gave the ideal its full
expression.--Aristotle supplied its natural basis.--Philosophy thus
complete, yet in need of restatement.--Plato's myths in lieu of
physics.--Aristotle's final causes.--Modern science can avoid such
expedients.--Transcendentalism true but inconsequential.--Verbal
ethics.--Spinoza and the Life of Reason.--Modern and classic
sources of inspiration


REASON IN COMMON SENSE

CHAPTER I--THE BIRTH OF REASON Pages 35-47
Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible with
a chosen good.--Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent,
indifferent.--In experience order is relative to interests which
determine the moral status of all powers.--The discovered
conditions of reason not its beginning.--The flux first.--Life the
fixation of interests.--Primary dualities.--First
gropings.--Instinct the nucleus of reason.--Better and worse the
fundamental categories


CHAPTER II--FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS Pages 48-63
Dreams before thoughts.--The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by
physical forces.--Internal order supervenes.--Intrinsic pleasure in
existence.--Pleasure a good, but not pursued or remembered unless
it suffuses an object.--Subhuman delights.--Animal living.--Causes
at last discerned.--Attention guided by bodily impulse


CHAPTER III--THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS Pages 64-83
Nature man's home.--Difficulties in conceiving
nature.--Transcendental qualms.--Thought an aspect of life and
transitive.--Perception cumulative and synthetic.--No identical
agent needed.--Example of the sun.--His primitive divinity.--Causes
and essences contrasted.--Voracity of intellect.--Can the
transcendent be known?--Can the immediate be meant?--Is thought a
bridge from sensation to sensation?--_Mens naturaliter
platonica_.--Identity and independence predicated of things


CHAPTER IV--ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY Pages 84-117
Psychology as a solvent.--Misconceived role of intelligence.--All
criticism dogmatic.--A choice of hypotheses.--Critics disguised
enthusiasts.--Hume's gratuitous scepticism.--Kant's substitute for
knowledge.--False subjectivity attributed to reason.--Chimerical
reconstruction.--The Critique a work on mental
architecture.--Incoherences.--Nature the true system of
conditions.--Artificial pathos in subjectivism.--Berkeley's
algebra of perception.--Horror of physics.--Puerility in
morals.--Truism and sophism.--Reality is the practical made
intelligible.--Vain "realities" and trustworthy "fictions"


CHAPTER V--NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED Pages 118-136
Man's feeble grasp of nature.--Its unity ideal and discoverable
only by steady thought.--Mind the erratic residue of
existence.--Ghostly character of mind.--Hypostasis and criticism
both need control.--Comparative constancy in objects and in
ideas.--Spirit and sense defined by their relation to
nature.--Vague notions of nature involve vague notions of
spirit.--Sense and spirit the life of nature, which science
redistributes but does not deny


CHAPTER VI--DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS Pages 137-160
Another background for current experience may be found in alien
minds.--Two usual accounts of this conception criticised: analogy
between bodies, and dramatic dialogue in the soul.--Subject and
object empirical, not transcendental, terms.--Objects originally
soaked in secondary and tertiary qualities.--Tertiary qualities
transposed.--Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities of
perceived body--"Pathetic fallacy" normal, yet ordinarily
fallacious.--Case where it is not a fallacy.--Knowledge succeeds
only by accident.--Limits of insight.--Perception of
character.--Conduct divined, consciousness ignored.--Consciousness
untrustworthy.--Metaphorical mind.--Summary


CHAPTER VII--CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE Pages 161-183
So-called abstract qualities primary.--General qualities prior to
particular things.--Universals are concretions in
discourse.--Similar reactions, merged in one habit of reproduction,
yield an idea.--Ideas are ideal.--So-called abstractions complete
facts.--Things concretions of concretions.--Ideas prior in the
order of knowledge, things in the order of nature.--Aristotle's
compromise.--Empirical bias in favour of contiguity.--Artificial
divorce of logic from practice.--Their mutual
involution.--Rationalistic suicide.--Complementary character of
essence and existence


CHAPTER VIII--ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS Pages 184-204
Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical
principle.--Concretions in discourse express instinctive
reactions.--Idealism rudimentary.--Naturalism sad.--The soul akin
to the eternal and ideal.--Her inexperience.--Platonism
spontaneous.--Its essential fidelity to the ideal.--Equal rights of
empiricism.--Logic dependent on fact for its importance, and for
its subsistence.--Reason and docility.--Applicable thought and
clarified experience


CHAPTER IX--HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL Pages 205-235
Functional relations of mind and body.--They form one natural
life.--Artifices involved in separating them.--Consciousness
expresses vital equilibrium and docility.--Its worthlessness as a
cause and value as an expression.--Thought's march automatic and
thereby implicated in events.--Contemplative essence of
action.--Mechanical efficacy alien to thought's
essence.--Consciousness transcendental and transcendent.--It is the
seat of value.--Apparent utility of pain.--Its real impotence.---
Preformations involved.--Its untoward significance.--Perfect
function not unconscious.--Inchoate ethics.--Thought the entelechy
of being.--Its exuberance


CHAPTER X--THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION Pages 236-255
Honesty in hedonism.--Necessary qualifications.--The will must
judge.--Injustice inherent in representation.--AEsthetic and
speculative cruelty.--Imputed values: their inconstancy.--Methods
of control.--Example of fame.--Disproportionate interest in the
aesthetic.--Irrational religious allegiance.--Pathetic
idealisations.--Inevitable impulsiveness in prophecy.--The test a
controlled present ideal


CHAPTER XI--SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL Pages 256-268
The ultimate end a resultant.--Demands the substance of
ideals.--Discipline of the will.--Demands made practical and
consistent.--The ideal natural.--Need of unity and
finality.--Ideals of nothing.--Darwin on moral sense.--Conscience
and reason compared.--Reason imposes no new sacrifice.--Natural
goods attainable and compatible in principle.--Harmony the formal
and intrinsic demand of reason


CHAPTER XII--FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE Pages 269-291
Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed.--Contrary
currents of opinion.--Pantheism.--Instability in existences does
not dethrone their ideals.--Absolutist philosophy human and
halting.--All science a deliverance of momentary thought.--All
criticism likewise.--Origins inessential.--Ideals functional.--They
are transferable to similar beings.--Authority internal.--Reason
autonomous.--Its distribution.--Natural selection of minds.--Living
stability.--Continuity necessary to progress.--Limits of variation.
Spirit a heritage.--Perfectibility.--Nature and human
nature.--Human nature formulated.--Its concrete description
reserved for the sequel




Introduction to "The Life of Reason"


[Sidenote: Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.]

Whatever forces may govern human life, if they are to be recognised by
man, must betray themselves in human experience. Progress in science or
religion, no less than in morals and art, is a dramatic episode in man's
career, a welcome variation in his habit and state of mind; although
this variation may often regard or propitiate things external,
adjustment to which may be important for his welfare. The importance of
these external things, as well as their existence, he can establish only
by the function and utility which a recognition of them may have in his
life. The entire history of progress is a moral drama, a tale man might
unfold in a great autobiography, could his myriad heads and countless
scintillas of consciousness conspire, like the seventy Alexandrian
sages, in a single version of the truth committed to each for
interpretation. What themes would prevail in such an examination of
heart? In what order and with what emphasis would they be recounted? In
which of its adventures would the human race, reviewing its whole
experience, acknowledge a progress and a gain? To answer these
questions, as they may be answered speculatively and provisionally by an
individual, is the purpose of the following work.

[Sidenote: Efficacious reflection is reason.]

A philosopher could hardly have a higher ambition than to make himself a
mouth-piece for the memory and judgment of his race. Yet the most casual
consideration of affairs already involves an attempt to do the same
thing. Reflection is pregnant from the beginning with all the principles
of synthesis and valuation needed in the most comprehensive criticism.
So soon as man ceases to be wholly immersed in sense, he looks before
and after, he regrets and desires; and the moments in which prospect or
retrospect takes place constitute the reflective or representative part
of his life, in contrast to the unmitigated flux of sensations in which
nothing ulterior is regarded. Representation, however, can hardly remain
idle and merely speculative. To the ideal function of envisaging the
absent, memory and reflection will add (since they exist and constitute
a new complication in being) the practical function of modifying the
future. Vital impulse, however, when it is modified by reflection and
veers in sympathy with judgments pronounced on the past, is properly
called reason. Man's rational life consists in those moments in which
reflection not only occurs but proves efficacious. What is absent then
works in the present, and values are imputed where they cannot be felt.
Such representation is so far from being merely speculative that its
presence alone can raise bodily change to the dignity of action.
Reflection gathers experiences together and perceives their relative
worth; which is as much as to say that it expresses a new attitude of
will in the presence of a world better understood and turned to some
purpose. The limits of reflection mark those of concerted and rational
action; they circumscribe the field of cumulative experience, or, what
is the same thing, of profitable living.

[Sidenote: The Life of Reason a name for all practical thought and all
action justified by its fruits in consciousness.]

Thus if we use the word life in a eulogistic sense to designate the
happy maintenance against the world of some definite ideal interest, we
may say with Aristotle that life is reason in operation. The _Life of
Reason_ will then be a name for that part of experience which perceives
and pursues ideals--all conduct so controlled and all sense so
interpreted as to perfect natural happiness.

Without reason, as without memory, there might still be pleasures and
pains in existence. To increase those pleasures and reduce those pains
would be to introduce an improvement into the sentient world, as if a
devil suddenly died in hell or in heaven a new angel were created. Since
the beings, however, in which these values would reside, would, by
hypothesis, know nothing of one another, and since the betterment would
take place unprayed-for and unnoticed, it could hardly be called a
progress; and certainly not a progress in man, since man, without the
ideal continuity given by memory and reason, would have no moral being.
In human progress, therefore, reason is not a casual instrument, having
its sole value in its service to sense; such a betterment in sentience
would not be progress unless it were a progress in reason, and the
increasing pleasure revealed some object that could please; for without
a picture of the situation from which a heightened vitality might flow,
the improvement could be neither remembered nor measured nor desired.
The Life of Reason is accordingly neither a mere means nor a mere
incident in human progress; it is the total and embodied progress
itself, in which the pleasures of sense are included in so far as they
can be intelligently enjoyed and pursued. To recount man's rational
moments would be to take an inventory of all his goods; for he is not
himself (as we say with unconscious accuracy) in the others. If he ever
appropriates them in recollection or prophecy, it is only on the ground
of some physical relation which they may have to his being.

Reason is as old as man and as prevalent as human nature; for we should
not recognise an animal to be human unless his instincts were to some
degree conscious of their ends and rendered his ideas in that measure
relevant to conduct. Many sensations, or even a whole world of dreams,
do not amount to intelligence until the images in the mind begin to
represent in some way, however symbolic, the forces and realities
confronted in action. There may well be intense consciousness in the
total absence of rationality. Such consciousness is suggested in dreams,
in madness, and may be found, for all we know, in the depths of
universal nature. Minds peopled only by desultory visions and lusts
would not have the dignity of human souls even if they seemed to pursue
certain objects unerringly; for that pursuit would not be illumined by
any vision of its goal. Reason and humanity begin with the union of
instinct and ideation, when instinct becomes enlightened, establishes
values in its objects, and is turned from a process into an art, while
at the same time consciousness becomes practical and cognitive,
beginning to contain some symbol or record of the co-ordinate realities
among which it arises.

Reason accordingly requires the fusion of two types of life, commonly
led in the world in well-nigh total separation, one a life of impulse
expressed in affairs and social passions, the other a life of reflection
expressed in religion, science, and the imitative arts. In the Life of
Reason, if it were brought to perfection, intelligence would be at once
the universal method of practice and its continual reward. All
reflection would then be applicable in action and all action fruitful in
happiness. Though this be an ideal, yet everyone gives it from time to
time a partial embodiment when he practises useful arts, when his
passions happily lead him to enlightenment, or when his fancy breeds
visions pertinent to his ultimate good. Everyone leads the Life of
Reason in so far as he finds a steady light behind the world's glitter
and a clear residuum of joy beneath pleasure or success. No experience
not to be repented of falls without its sphere. Every solution to a
doubt, in so far as it is not a new error, every practical achievement
not neutralised by a second maladjustment consequent upon it, every
consolation not the seed of another greater sorrow, may be gathered
together and built into this edifice. The Life of Reason is the happy
marriage of two elements--impulse and ideation--which if wholly divorced
would reduce man to a brute or to a maniac. The rational animal is
generated by the union of these two monsters. He is constituted by ideas
which have ceased to be visionary and actions which have ceased to be
vain.

[Sidenote: It is the sum of Art.]

Thus the Life of Reason is another name for what, in the widest sense of
the word, might be called Art. Operations become arts when their purpose
is conscious and their method teachable. In perfect art the whole idea
is creative and exists only to be embodied, while every part of the
product is rational and gives delightful expression to that idea. Like
art, again, the Life of Reason is not a power but a result, the
spontaneous expression of liberal genius in a favouring environment.
Both art and reason have natural sources and meet with natural checks;
but when a process is turned successfully into an art, so that its
issues have value and the ideas that accompany it become practical and
cognitive, reflection, finding little that it cannot in some way justify
and understand, begins to boast that it directs and has created the
world in which it finds itself so much at home. Thus if art could extend
its sphere to include every activity in nature, reason, being everywhere
exemplified, might easily think itself omnipotent. This ideal, far as it
is from actual realisation, has so dazzled men, that in their religion
and mythical philosophy they have often spoken as if it were already
actual and efficient. This anticipation amounts, when taken seriously,
to a confusion of purposes with facts and of functions with causes, a
confusion which in the interests of wisdom and progress it is important
to avoid; but these speculative fables, when we take them for what they
are--poetic expressions of the ideal--help us to see how deeply rooted
this ideal is in man's mind, and afford us a standard by which to
measure his approaches to the rational perfection of which he dreams.
For the Life of Reason, being the sphere of all human art, is man's
imitation of divinity.

[Sidenote: It has a natural basis which makes it definable.]

To study such an ideal, dimly expressed though it be in human existence,
is no prophetic or visionary undertaking. Every genuine ideal has a
natural basis; anyone may understand and safely interpret it who is
attentive to the life from which it springs. To decipher the Life of
Reason nothing is needed but an analytic spirit and a judicious love of
man, a love quick to distinguish success from failure in his great and
confused experiment of living. The historian of reason should not be a
romantic poet, vibrating impotently to every impulse he finds afoot,
without a criterion of excellence or a vision of perfection. Ideals are
free, but they are neither more numerous nor more variable than the
living natures that generate them. Ideals are legitimate, and each
initially envisages a genuine and innocent good; but they are not
realisable together, nor even singly when they have no deep roots in the
world. Neither is the philosopher compelled by his somewhat judicial
office to be a satirist or censor, without sympathy for those tentative
and ingenuous passions out of which, after all, his own standards must
arise. He is the chronicler of human progress, and to measure that
progress he should be equally attentive to the impulses that give it
direction and to the circumstances amid which it stumbles toward its
natural goal.

[Sidenote: Modern philosophy not helpful.]

There is unfortunately no school of modern philosophy to which a
critique of human progress can well be attached. Almost every school,
indeed, can furnish something useful to the critic, sometimes a physical
theory, sometimes a piece of logical analysis. We shall need to borrow
from current science and speculation the picture they draw of man's
conditions and environment, his history and mental habits. These may
furnish a theatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hint
of its plot and meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the
mind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour,
as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of
catastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the
naturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from
the outside, and the processes of Nature make them forget her uses.
Bacon indeed had prized science for adding to the comforts of life, a
function still commemorated by positivists in their eloquent moments.
Habitually, however, when they utter the word progress it is, in their
mouths, a synonym for inevitable change, or at best for change in that
direction which they conceive to be on the whole predominant. If they
combine with physical speculation some elements of morals, these are
usually purely formal, to the effect that happiness is to be pursued
(probably, alas! because to do so is a psychological law); but what
happiness consists in we gather only from casual observations or by
putting together their national prejudices and party saws.

[Sidenote: Positivism no positive ideal.]

The truth is that even this radical school, emancipated as it thinks
itself, is suffering from the after-effects of supernaturalism. Like
children escaped from school, they find their whole happiness in
freedom. They are proud of what they have rejected, as if a great wit
were required to do so; but they do not know what they want. If you
astonish them by demanding what is their positive ideal, further than
that there should be a great many people and that they should be all
alike, they will say at first that what ought to be is obvious, and
later they will submit the matter to a majority vote. They have
discarded the machinery in which their ancestors embodied the ideal;
they have not perceived that those symbols stood for the Life of Reason
and gave fantastic and embarrassed expression to what, in itself, is
pure humanity; and they have thus remained entangled in the colossal
error that ideals are something adventitious and unmeaning, not having a
soil in mortal life nor a possible fulfilment there.

[Sidenote: Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and
conditions.]

The profound and pathetic ideas which inspired Christianity were
attached in the beginning to ancient myths and soon crystallised into
many new ones. The mythical manner pervades Christian philosophy; but
myth succeeds in expressing ideal life only by misrepresenting its
history and conditions. This method was indeed not original with the
Fathers; they borrowed it from Plato, who appealed to parables himself
in an open and harmless fashion, yet with disastrous consequences to his
school. Nor was he the first; for the instinct to regard poetic
fictions as revelations of supernatural facts is as old as the soul's
primitive incapacity to distinguish dreams from waking perceptions, sign
from thing signified, and inner emotions from external powers. Such
confusions, though in a way they obey moral forces, make a rational
estimate of things impossible. To misrepresent the conditions and
consequences of action is no merely speculative error; it involves a
false emphasis in character and an artificial balance and co-ordination
among human pursuits. When ideals are hypostasised into powers alleged
to provide for their own expression, the Life of Reason cannot be
conceived; in theory its field of operation is pre-empted and its
function gone, while in practice its inner impulses are turned awry by
artificial stimulation and repression.

The Patristic systems, though weak in their foundations, were
extraordinarily wise and comprehensive in their working out; and while
they inverted life they preserved it. Dogma added to the universe
fabulous perspectives; it interpolated also innumerable incidents and
powers which gave a new dimension to experience. Yet the old world
remained standing in its strange setting, like the Pantheon in modern
Rome; and, what is more important, the natural springs of human action
were still acknowledged, and if a supernatural discipline was imposed,
it was only because experience and faith had disclosed a situation in
which the pursuit of earthly happiness seemed hopeless. Nature was not
destroyed by its novel appendages, nor did reason die in the cloister:
it hibernated there, and could come back to its own in due season, only
a little dazed and weakened by its long confinement. Such, at least, is
the situation in Catholic regions, where the Patristic philosophy has
not appreciably varied. Among Protestants Christian dogma has taken a
new and ambiguous direction, which has at once minimised its disturbing
effect in practice and isolated its primary illusion. The symptoms have
been cured and the disease driven in.

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