The Realms Of Being Santayana Pdf Converter
This article needs additional citations for. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.Find sources: – ( January 2014) The Realms of Being (1942) is the last major work by Spanish-American. Along with and, it is his most notable work; the first two works concentrate primarily on and respectively, whereas The Realms of Being is mainly a work in the field of.Santayana builds on his Skepticism and Animal Faith, which he described as a sort of precursor to 'a new system of philosophy', that would be developed fully in the present work. He defines four realms of being; The Realm of Essence, The Realm of Matter, The Realm of Truth, and The Realm of Spirit. Contents.Realms The Realm of Essence The Realm of Essence, in Santayana's view, has a type of primacy over the other realms.
To him, essence is anything that is or has a character—this includes thoughts, imaginings, derivations of logic, and material objects. Nothing can be experienced but through these essences, and they 'are the only things people ever see, and the last they notice.' Essence is awareness, it is different from knowledge or from faith, which he defines later.The Realm of Matter is the objective, material stuff of the universe. Staying true to his, Santayana holds matter as the 'primordial existential flux' and believes it can be, at least in some sense, known. His conception of matter is similar to 's substance; matter has no purpose, but constitutes the limitations of what can be.
Humans can know matter only from a distance, symbolically:Matter is in fact referred to by Santayana as a “metaphor” only, producing one of the more provocative aspects of his philosophy: science is no less literary than poetry in representing matter in that it must express its truths at a remove, through the lens of human bias. — -Internet Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThus, while Santayana reveres and deeply respects science (and believes it useful for everyday experiences), he does not deify it in the way many other philosophers of the 20th century have, and he limits it to a fallible approximation of truth.The Realm of Truth The Realm of Truth was thought of well after Santayana had thought of his other three realms; he envisions it as a sort of subdivision of the Realm of Essence.
Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.Whatever forces may govern human life, if they are to be recognised byman, must betray themselves in human experience. Progress in science orreligion, no less than in morals and art, is a dramatic episode in man'scareer, a welcome variation in his habit and state of mind; although thisvariation may often regard or propitiate things external, adjustment towhich may be important for his welfare. The importance of these externalthings, as well as their existence, he can establish only by the functionand utility which a recognition of them may have in his life. The entirehistory of progress is a moral drama, a tale man might unfold in a greatautobiography, could his myriad heads and countless scintillas ofconsciousness conspire, like the seventy Alexandrian sages, in a singleversion of the truth committed to each for interpretation.
What themeswould prevail in such an examination of heart? In what order and with whatemphasis would they be recounted? In which of its adventures would thehuman race, reviewing its whole experience, acknowledge a progress and again?
To answer these questions, as they may be answered speculatively andprovisionally by an individual, is the purpose of the following work. Efficacious reflection is reason.A philosopher could hardly have a higher ambition than to make himself amouth-piece for the memory and judgment of his race. Yet the most casualconsideration of affairs already involves an attempt to do the same thing.Reflection is pregnant from the beginning with all the principles ofsynthesis and valuation needed in the most comprehensive criticism. Sosoon as man ceases to be wholly immersed in sense, he looks before andafter, he regrets and desires; and the moments in which prospect orretrospect takes place constitute the reflective or representative part ofhis life, in contrast to the unmitigated flux of sensations in whichnothing ulterior is regarded.
Representation, however, can hardly remainidle and merely speculative. To the ideal function of envisaging theabsent, memory and reflection will add (since they exist and constitute anew complication in being) the practical function of modifying the future.Vital impulse, however, when it is modified by reflection and veers insympathy with judgments pronounced on the past, is properly called reason.Man's rational life consists in those moments in which reflection not onlyoccurs but proves efficacious. What is absent then works in the present,and values are imputed where they cannot be felt. Such representation isso far from being merely speculative that its presence alone can raisebodily change to the dignity of action. Reflection gathers experiencestogether and perceives their relative worth; which is as much as to saythat it expresses a new attitude of will in the presence of a world betterunderstood and turned to some purpose. The limits of reflection mark thoseof concerted and rational action; they circumscribe the field ofcumulative experience, or, what is the same thing, of profitable living. The Life of Reason a name for all practical thought and all actionjustified by its fruits in consciousness.Thus if we use the word life in a eulogistic sense to designate the happymaintenance against the world of some definite ideal interest, we may saywith Aristotle that life is reason in operation.
The Life of Reasonwill then be a name for that part of experience which perceives andpursues ideals—all conduct so controlled and all sense sointerpreted as to perfect natural happiness.Without reason, as without memory, there might still be pleasures andpains in existence. To increase those pleasures and reduce those painswould be to introduce an improvement into the sentient world, as if adevil suddenly died in hell or in heaven a new angel were created. Sincethe beings, however, in which these values would reside, would, byhypothesis, know nothing of one another, and since the betterment wouldtake place unprayed-for and unnoticed, it could hardly be called aprogress; and certainly not a progress in man, since man, without theideal continuity given by memory and reason, would have no moral being. Inhuman progress, therefore, reason is not a casual instrument, having itssole value in its service to sense; such a betterment in sentience wouldnot be progress unless it were a progress in reason, and the increasingpleasure revealed some object that could please; for without a picture ofthe situation from which a heightened vitality might flow, the improvementcould be neither remembered nor measured nor desired.
The Life of Reasonis accordingly neither a mere means nor a mere incident in human progress;it is the total and embodied progress itself, in which the pleasures ofsense are included in so far as they can be intelligently enjoyed andpursued. To recount man's rational moments would be to take an inventoryof all his goods; for he is not himself (as we say with unconsciousaccuracy) in the others. If he ever appropriates them in recollection orprophecy, it is only on the ground of some physical relation which theymay have to his being.Reason is as old as man and as prevalent as human nature; for we shouldnot recognise an animal to be human unless his instincts were to somedegree conscious of their ends and rendered his ideas in that measurerelevant to conduct. Many sensations, or even a whole world of dreams, donot amount to intelligence until the images in the mind begin to representin some way, however symbolic, the forces and realities confronted inaction. There may well be intense consciousness in the total absence ofrationality. Such consciousness is suggested in dreams, in madness, andmay be found, for all we know, in the depths of universal nature.
Mindspeopled only by desultory visions and lusts would not have the dignity ofhuman souls even if they seemed to pursue certain objects unerringly; forthat pursuit would not be illumined by any vision of its goal. It is the sum of Art.Thus the Life of Reason is another name for what, in the widest sense ofthe word, might be called Art. Operations become arts when their purposeis conscious and their method teachable. In perfect art the whole idea iscreative and exists only to be embodied, while every part of the productis rational and gives delightful expression to that idea.
Like art, again,the Life of Reason is not a power but a result, the spontaneous expressionof liberal genius in a favouring environment. Both art and reason havenatural sources and meet with natural checks; but when a process is turnedsuccessfully into an art, so that its issues have value and the ideas thataccompany it become practical and cognitive, reflection, finding littlethat it cannot in some way justify and understand, begins to boast that itdirects and has created the world in which it finds itself so much athome. Thus if art could extend its sphere to include every activity innature, reason, being everywhere exemplified, might easily think itselfomnipotent. This ideal, far as it is from actual realisation, has sodazzled men, that in their religion and mythical philosophy they haveoften spoken as if it were already actual and efficient.
This anticipationamounts, when taken seriously, to a confusion of purposes with facts andof functions with causes, a confusion which in the interests of wisdom andprogress it is important to avoid; but these speculative fables, when wetake them for what they are—poetic expressions of the ideal—helpus to see how deeply rooted this ideal is in man's mind, and afford us astandard by which to measure his approaches to the rational perfection ofwhich he dreams. For the Life of Reason, being the sphere of all humanart, is man's imitation of divinity. 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 anatural basis; anyone may understand and safely interpret it who isattentive to the life from which it springs. To decipher the Life ofReason nothing is needed but an analytic spirit and a judicious love ofman, a love quick to distinguish success from failure in his great andconfused experiment of living. The historian of reason should not be aromantic poet, vibrating impotently to every impulse he finds afoot,without a criterion of excellence or a vision of perfection. Ideals arefree, but they are neither more numerous nor more variable than the livingnatures that generate them. Ideals are legitimate, and each initiallyenvisages a genuine and innocent good; but they are not realisabletogether, nor even singly when they have no deep roots in the world.Neither is the philosopher compelled by his somewhat judicial office to bea satirist or censor, without sympathy for those tentative and ingenuouspassions out of which, after all, his own standards must arise. He is thechronicler of human progress, and to measure that progress he should beequally attentive to the impulses that give it direction and to thecircumstances amid which it stumbles toward its natural goal.
Modern philosophy not helpful.There is unfortunately no school of modern philosophy to which a critiqueof human progress can well be attached. Almost every school, indeed, canfurnish something useful to the critic, sometimes a physical theory,sometimes a piece of logical analysis. We shall need to borrow fromcurrent science and speculation the picture they draw of man's conditionsand environment, his history and mental habits. These may furnish atheatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hint of its plotand meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind. One-halfthe learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as Don Quixotedid his helmet; deputing it, after a series of catastrophes, to be at lastsound and invulnerable.
The other half, the naturalists who have studiedpsychology and evolution, look at life from the outside, and the processesof Nature make them forget her uses. Bacon indeed had prized science foradding to the comforts of life, a function still commemorated bypositivists in their eloquent moments.
Habitually, however, when theyutter the word progress it is, in their mouths, a synonym for inevitablechange, or at best for change in that direction which they conceive to beon the whole predominant. If they combine with physical speculation someelements of morals, these are usually purely formal, to the effect thathappiness is to be pursued (probably, alas!
Because to do so is apsychological law); but what happiness consists in we gather only fromcasual observations or by putting together their national prejudices andparty saws. Positivism no positive ideal.The truth is that even this radical school, emancipated as it thinksitself, is suffering from the after-effects of supernaturalism. Likechildren escaped from school, they find their whole happiness in freedom.They are proud of what they have rejected, as if a great wit were requiredto do so; but they do not know what they want. If you astonish them bydemanding what is their positive ideal, further than that there should bea great many people and that they should be all alike, they will say atfirst that what ought to be is obvious, and later they will submit thematter to a majority vote. They have discarded the machinery in whichtheir ancestors embodied the ideal; they have not perceived that thosesymbols stood for the Life of Reason and gave fantastic and embarrassedexpression to what, in itself, is pure humanity; and they have thusremained entangled in the colossal error that ideals are somethingadventitious and unmeaning, not having a soil in mortal life nor apossible fulfilment there.
Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and conditions.The profound and pathetic ideas which inspired Christianity were attachedin the beginning to ancient myths and soon crystallised into many newones. The mythical manner pervades Christian philosophy; but myth succeedsin expressing ideal life only by misrepresenting its history andconditions. This method was indeed not original with the Fathers; theyborrowed it from Plato, who appealed to parables himself in an open andharmless fashion, yet with disastrous consequences to his school. Nor washe the first; for the instinct to regard poetic fictions as revelations ofsupernatural facts is as old as the soul's primitive incapacity todistinguish dreams from waking perceptions, sign from thing signified, andinner emotions from external powers.
Such confusions, though in a way theyobey moral forces, make a rational estimate of things impossible. Tomisrepresent the conditions and consequences of action is no merelyspeculative error; it involves a false emphasis in character and anartificial balance and co-ordination among human pursuits. When ideals arehypostasised into powers alleged to provide for their own expression, theLife of Reason cannot be conceived; in theory its field of operation ispre-empted and its function gone, while in practice its inner impulses areturned awry by artificial stimulation and repression.The Patristic systems, though weak in their foundations, wereextraordinarily wise and comprehensive in their working out; and whilethey inverted life they preserved it. Dogma added to the universe fabulousperspectives; it interpolated also innumerable incidents and powers whichgave a new dimension to experience. Yet the old world remained standing inits strange setting, like the Pantheon in modern Rome; and, what is moreimportant, the natural springs of human action were still acknowledged,and if a supernatural discipline was imposed, it was only becauseexperience and faith had disclosed a situation in which the pursuit ofearthly happiness seemed hopeless.
Nature was not destroyed by its novelappendages, nor did reason die in the cloister: it hibernated there, andcould come back to its own in due season, only a little dazed and weakenedby its long confinement. Such, at least, is the situation in Catholicregions, where the Patristic philosophy has not appreciably varied. AmongProtestants Christian dogma has taken a new and ambiguous direction, whichhas at once minimised its disturbing effect in practice and isolated itsprimary illusion. The symptoms have been cured and the disease driven in. Liberal theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural world.The tenets of Protestant bodies are notoriously varied and on principlesubject to change.
There is hardly a combination of tradition andspontaneity which has not been tried in some quarter. If we think,however, of broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears that inProtestantism myth, without disappearing, has changed its relation toreality: instead of being an extension to the natural world myth hasbecome its substratum. Religion no longer reveals divine personalities,future rewards, and tenderer Elysian consolations; nor does it seriouslypropose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a purgatory to be shortenedby prescribed devotions. It merely gives the real world an ideal statusand teaches men to accept a natural life on supernatural grounds. Theconsequence is that the most pious can give an unvarnished description ofthings. Even immortality and the idea of God are submitted, in liberalcircles, to scientific treatment.
On the other hand, it would be hard toconceive a more inveterate obsession than that which keeps the attitude ofthese same minds inappropriate to the objects they envisage. They haveaccepted natural conditions; they will not accept natural ideals. The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals.In Greek philosophy the situation is far more auspicious. The ancients leda rational life and envisaged the various spheres of speculation as menmight whose central interests were rational.
In physics they leaped atonce to the conception of a dynamic unity and general evolution, thusgiving that background to human life which shrewd observation would alwayshave descried, and which modern science has laboriously rediscovered. Twogreat systems offered, in two legitimate directions, what are doubtlessthe final and radical accounts of physical being.
Heraclitus, describingthe immediate, found it to be in constant and pervasive change: nosubstances, no forms, no identities could be arrested there, but as in thehuman soul, so in nature, all was instability, contradiction,reconstruction, and oblivion. This remains the empirical fact; and we needbut to rescind the artificial division which Descartes has taught us tomake between nature and life, to feel again the absolute aptness ofHeraclitus's expressions. These were thought obscure only because theywere so disconcertingly penetrating and direct. The immediate is whatnobody sees, because convention and reflection turn existence, as soon asthey can, into ideas; a man who discloses the immediate seems profound,yet his depth is nothing but innocence recovered and a sort ofintellectual abstention. Mysticism, scepticism, and transcendentalism haveall in their various ways tried to fall back on the immediate; but none ofthem has been ingenuous enough. Each has added some myth, or sophistry, ordelusive artifice to its direct observation.
Heraclitus remains the honestprophet of immediacy: a mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a scepticwho does not rely for his results on conventions unwittingly adopted, atranscendentalist without false pretensions or incongruous dogmas. Heraclitus and the immediate.The immediate is not, however, a good subject for discourse, and theexpounders of Heraclitus were not unnaturally blamed for monotony. Allthey could do was to iterate their master's maxim, and declare everythingto be in flux. In suggesting laws of recurrence and a reason in which whatis common to many might be expressed, Heraclitus had opened the door intoanother region: had he passed through, his philosophy would have beengreatly modified, for permanent forms would have forced themselves on hisattention no less than shifting materials. Such a Heraclitus would haveanticipated Plato; but the time for such a synthesis had not yet arrived. Democritus and the naturally intelligible.At the opposite pole from immediacy lies intelligibility. To reducephenomena to constant elements, as similar and simple as possible, and toconceive their union and separation to obey constant laws, is what anatural philosopher will inevitably do so soon as his interest is notmerely to utter experience but to understand it.
Democritus brought thisscientific ideal to its ultimate expression. By including psychicexistence in his atomic system, he indicated a problem which naturalscience has since practically abandoned but which it may some day becompelled to take up. The atoms of Democritus seem to us gross, even forchemistry, and their quality would have to undergo great transformation ifthey were to support intelligibly psychic being as well; but that verygrossness and false simplicity had its merits, and science must be forever grateful to the man who at its inception could so clearly formulateits mechanical ideal. That the world is not so intelligible as we couldwish is not to be wondered at. In other respects also it fails to respondto our ideals; yet our hope must be to find it more propitious to theintellect as well as to all the arts in proportion as we learn better howto live in it.The atoms of what we call hydrogen or oxygen may well turn out to beworlds, as the stars are which make atoms for astronomy.
Their innerorganisation might be negligible on our rude plane of being; did itdisclose itself, however, it would be intelligible in its turn only ifconstant parts and constant laws were discernible within each system. Sothat while atomism at a given level may not be a final or metaphysicaltruth, it will describe, on every level, the practical and efficaciousstructure of the world. We owe to Democritus this ideal of practicalintelligibility; and he is accordingly an eternal spokesman of reason.
Hissystem, long buried with other glories of the world, has been partlyrevived; and although it cannot be verified in haste, for it represents anultimate ideal, every advance in science reconstitutes it in someparticular. Mechanism is not one principle of explanation among others.
Innatural philosophy, where to explain means to discover origins,transmutations, and laws, mechanism is explanation itself.Heraclitus had the good fortune of having his physics absorbed by Plato.It is a pity that Democritus' physics was not absorbed by Aristotle. Forwith the flux observed, and mechanism conceived to explain it, the theoryof existence is complete; and had a complete physical theory beenincorporated into the Socratic philosophy, wisdom would have lacked noneof its parts. Democritus, however, appeared too late, when ideal sciencehad overrun the whole field and initiated a verbal and dialecticalphysics; so that Aristotle, for all his scientific temper and studies,built his natural philosophy on a lamentable misunderstanding, andcondemned thought to confusion for two thousand years. Socrates and the autonomy of mind.If the happy freedom of the Greeks from religious dogma made them thefirst natural philosophers, their happy political freedom made them thefirst moralists. It was no accident that Socrates walked the Athenianagora; it was no petty patriotism that made him shrink from any otherscene.
His science had its roots there, in the personal independence,intellectual vivacity, and clever dialectic of his countrymen. Idealscience lives in discourse; it consists in the active exercise of reason,in signification, appreciation, intent, and self-expression. Its sum totalis to know oneself, not as psychology or anthropology might describe aman, but to know, as the saying is, one's own mind. Nor is he who knowshis own mind forbidden to change it; the dialectician has nothing to dowith future possibilities or with the opinion of anyone but the manaddressed. This kind of truth is but adequate veracity; its only object isits own intent.
Having developed in the spirit the consciousness of itsmeanings and purposes, Socrates rescued logic and ethics for ever fromauthority. With his friends the Sophists, he made man the measure of allthings, after bidding him measure himself, as they neglected to do, by hisown ideal. That brave humanity which had first raised its head in Hellasand had endowed so many things in heaven and earth, where everything washitherto monstrous, with proportion and use, so that man's works mightjustify themselves to his mind, now found in Socrates its precisedefinition; and it was naturally where the Life of Reason had been longcultivated that it came finally to be conceived. Plato gave the ideal its full expression.Socrates had, however, a plebeian strain in his humanity, and hisutilitarianism, at least in its expression, hardly did justice to whatgives utility to life. His condemnation for atheism—if we choose totake it symbolically—was not altogether unjust: the gods of Greecewere not honoured explicitly enough in his philosophy.
Human good appearedthere in its principle; you would not set a pilot to mend shoes, becauseyou knew your own purpose; but what purposes a civilised soul mightharbour, and in what highest shapes the good might appear, was a problemthat seems not to have attracted his genius. It was reserved to Plato tobring the Socratic ethics to its sublimest expression and to elicit fromthe depths of the Greek conscience those ancestral ideals which hadinspired its legislators and been embodied in its sacred civic traditions.The owl of Minerva flew, as Hegel says, in the dusk of evening; and it washorror at the abandonment of all creative virtues that brought Plato toconceive them so sharply and to preach them in so sad a tone. It was afterall but the love of beauty that made him censure the poets; for like atrue Greek and a true lover he wished to see beauty flourish in the realworld.
It was love of freedom that made him harsh to his ideal citizens,that they might be strong enough to preserve the liberal life. And when hebroke away from political preoccupations and turned to the inner life, hisinterpretations proved the absolute sufficiency of the Socratic method;and he left nothing pertinent unsaid on ideal love and ideal immortality. Aristotle supplied its natural basis.Beyond this point no rendering of the Life of Reason has ever beencarried, Aristotle improved the detail, and gave breadth and precision tomany a part. If Plato possessed greater imaginative splendour and moreenthusiasm in austerity, Aristotle had perfect sobriety and adequacy, withgreater fidelity to the common sentiments of his race. Plato, by virtue ofhis scope and plasticity, together with a certain prophetic zeal, outranat times the limits of the Hellenic and the rational; he saw human virtueso surrounded and oppressed by physical dangers that he wished to give itmythical sanctions, and his fondness for transmigration and netherpunishments was somewhat more than playful.
If as a work of imaginationhis philosophy holds the first place, Aristotle's has the decisiveadvantage of being the unalloyed expression of reason. In Aristotle theconception of human nature is perfectly sound; everything ideal has anatural basis and everything natural an ideal development. His ethics,when thoroughly digested and weighed, especially when the meagre outlinesare filled in with Plato's more discursive expositions, will seemtherefore entirely final. The Life of Reason finds there its classicexplication. Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of restatement.As it is improbable that there will soon be another people so free frompreoccupations, so gifted, and so fortunate as the Greeks, or capable inconsequence of so well exemplifying humanity, so also it is improbablethat a philosopher will soon arise with Aristotle's scope, judgment, orauthority, one knowing so well how to be both reasonable and exalted. Itmight seem vain, therefore, to try to do afresh what has been done beforewith unapproachable success; and instead of writing inferior things atgreat length about the Life of Reason, it might be simpler to read and topropagate what Aristotle wrote with such immortal justness and masterlybrevity. But times change; and though the principles of reason remain thesame the facts of human life and of human conscience alter.
A newbackground, a new basis of application, appears for logic, and it may beuseful to restate old truths in new words, the better to prove theireternal validity. Aristotle is, in his morals, Greek, concise, andelementary. As a Greek, he mixes with the ideal argument illustrations,appreciations, and conceptions which are not inseparable from its essence.In themselves, no doubt, these accessories are better than what in moderntimes would be substituted for them, being less sophisticated and of anobler stamp; but to our eyes they disguise what is profound and universalin natural morality by embodying it in images which do not belong to ourlife. Our direst struggles and the last sanctions of our morality do notappear in them.
The pagan world, because its maturity was simpler than ourcrudeness, seems childish to us. We do not find there our sins andholiness, our love, charity, and honour.The Greek too would not find in our world the things he valued most,things to which he surrendered himself, perhaps, with a more constantself-sacrifice—piety, country, friendship, and beauty; and he mightadd that his ideals were rational and he could attain them, while ours areextravagant and have been missed. Yet even if we acknowledged his greatergood fortune, it would be impossible for us to go back and become likehim. To make the attempt would show no sense of reality and little senseof humour. We must dress in our own clothes, if we do not wish tosubstitute a masquerade for practical existence. What we can adopt fromGreek morals is only the abstract principle of their development; theirfoundation in all the extant forces of human nature and their efforttoward establishing a perfect harmony among them.
These forces themselveshave perceptibly changed, at least in their relative power. Thus we aremore conscious of wounds to stanch and wrongs to fight against, and lessof goods to attain. The movement of conscience has veered; the centre ofgravity lies in another part of the character.Another circumstance that invites a restatement of rational ethics is theimpressive illustration of their principle which subsequent history hasafforded. Mankind has been making extraordinary experiments of whichAristotle could not dream; and their result is calculated to clarify evenhis philosophy. For in some respects it needed experiments andclarification. He had been led into a systematic fusion of dialectic withphysics, and of this fusion all pretentious modern philosophy is theaggravated extension.
Socrates' pupils could not abandon his idealprinciples, yet they could not bear to abstain from physics altogether;they therefore made a mock physics in moral terms, out of which theologywas afterward developed. Plato, standing nearer to Socrates and being nonaturalist by disposition, never carried the fatal experiment beyond themythical stage.
He accordingly remained the purer moralist, much asAristotle's judgment may be preferred in many particulars. Their relativeposition may be roughly indicated by saying that Plato had no physics andthat Aristotle's physics was false; so that ideal science in the onesuffered from want of environment and control, while in the other itsuffered from misuse in a sphere where it had no application. Plato's myths in lieu of physics.What had happened was briefly this: Plato, having studied many sorts ofphilosophy and being a bold and universal genius, was not satisfied toleave all physical questions pending, as his master had done. He adopted,accordingly, Heraclitus's doctrine of the immediate, which he now calledthe realm of phenomena; for what exists at any instant, if you arrest andname it, turns out to have been an embodiment of some logical essence,such as discourse might define; in every fact some idea makes itsappearance, and such an apparition of the ideal is a phenomenon. Moreover,another philosophy had made a deep impression on Plato's mind and hadhelped to develop Socratic definitions: Parmenides had called the conceptof pure Being the only reality; and to satisfy the strong dialectic bywhich this doctrine was supported and at the same time to bridge theinfinite chasm between one formless substance and many appearancesirrelevant to it, Plato substituted the many Socratic ideas, all of whichwere relevant to appearance, for the one concept of Parmenides.
The ideasthus acquired what is called metaphysical subsistence; for they stood inthe place of the Eleatic Absolute, and at the same time were the realitiesthat phenomena manifested.The technique of this combination is much to be admired; but the feat istechnical and adds nothing to the significance of what Plato has to say onany concrete subject. This barren triumph was, however, fruitful inmisunderstandings. The characters and values a thing possessed were nowconceived to subsist apart from it, and might even have preceded it andcaused its existence; a mechanism composed of values and definitions couldthus be placed behind phenomena to constitute a substantial physicalworld. Such a dream could not be taken seriously, until good sense waswholly lost and a bevy of magic spirits could be imagined peopling theinfinite and yet carrying on the business of earth. Aristotle rejected themetaphysical subsistence of ideas, but thought they might still beessences operative in nature, if only they were identified with the lifeor form of particular things. The dream thus lost its frank wildness, butnone of its inherent incongruity: for the sense in which characters andvalues make a thing what it is, is purely dialectical. They give it itsstatus in the ideal world; but the appearance of these characters andvalues here and now is what needs explanation in physics, an explanationwhich can be furnished, of course, only by the physical concatenation anddistribution of causes.
Aristotle's final causes. Modern science can avoid such expedients.Aristotle himself did not fail to Aristotle's make this necessarydistinction between efficient cause and formal essence; but as his sciencewas only natural history, and mechanism had no plausibility in his eyes,the efficiency of the cause was always due, in his view, to its idealquality; as in heredity the father's human character, not his physicalstructure, might seem to warrant the son's humanity. Every ideal, beforeit could be embodied, had to pre-exist in some other embodiment; but aswhen the ultimate purpose of the cosmos is considered it seems to liebeyond any given embodiment, the highest ideal must somehow existdisembodied. It must pre-exist, thought Aristotle, in order to supply, byway of magic attraction, a physical cause for perpetual movement in theworld.It must be confessed, in justice to this consummate philosopher, who isnot less masterly in the use of knowledge than unhappy in divination, thatthe transformation of the highest good into a physical power is merelyincidental with him, and due to a want of faith (at that time excusable)in mechanism and evolution.
Aristotle's deity is always a moral ideal andevery detail in its definition is based on discrimination between thebetter and the worse. No accommodation to the ways of nature is hereallowed to cloud the kingdom of heaven; this deity is not condemned to dowhatever happens nor to absorb whatever exists. It is mythical only in itsphysical application; in moral philosophy it remains a legitimateconception.Truth certainly exists, if existence be not too mean an attribute for thateternal realm which is tenanted by ideals; but truth is repugnant tophysical or psychical being. Moreover, truth may very well be identifiedwith an impassible intellect, which should do nothing but possess alltruth, with no point of view, no animal warmth, and no transitive process.Such an intellect and truth are expressions having a differentmetaphorical background and connotation, but, when thought out, anidentical import. They both attempt to evoke that ideal standard whichhuman thought proposes to itself.
This function is their effectiveessence. It insures their eternal fixity, and this property surely endowsthem with a very genuine and sublime reality. What is fantastic is onlythe dynamic function attributed to them by Aristotle, which obliges themto inhabit some fabulous extension to the physical world. Even thisphysical efficacy, however, is spiritualised as much as possible, sincedeity is said to move the cosmos only as an object of love or an object ofknowledge may move the mind. Such efficacy is imputed to a hypostasisedend, but evidently resides in fact in the functioning and impulsive spiritthat conceives and pursues an ideal, endowing it with whatever attractionit may seem to have.
The absolute intellect described by Aristotleremains, therefore, as pertinent to the Life of Reason as Plato's idea ofthe good. Though less comprehensive (for it abstracts from all animalinterests, from all passion and mortality), it is more adequate anddistinct in the region it dominates. It expresses sublimely the goal ofspeculative thinking; which is none other than to live as much as may bein the eternal and to absorb and be absorbed in the truth.The rest of ancient philosophy belongs to the decadence and rests inphysics on eclecticism and in morals on despair. That creative breathwhich had stirred the founders and legislators of Greece no longerinspired their descendants. Helpless to control the course of events, theytook refuge in abstention or in conformity, and their ethics became amatter of private economy and sentiment, no longer aspiring to mould thestate or give any positive aim to existence. The time was approaching whenboth speculation and morals were to regard the other world; reason hadabdicated the throne, and religion, after that brief interregnum, resumedit for long ages.
Transcendentalism true but inconsequential.Such are the threads which tradition puts into the hands of an observerwho at the present time might attempt to knit the Life of Reason ideallytogether. The problem is to unite a trustworthy conception of theconditions under which man lives with an adequate conception of hisinterests. Both conceptions, fortunately, lie before us. Heraclitus andDemocritus, in systems easily seen to be complementary, gave long ago apicture of nature such as all later observation, down to our own day, hasdone nothing but fill out and confirm. Psychology and physics still repeattheir ideas, often with richer detail, but never with a more radical orprophetic glance. Nor does the transcendental philosophy, in spite of itsself-esteem, add anything essential.
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It was a thing taken for granted inancient and scholastic philosophy that a being dwelling, like man, in theimmediate, whose moments are in flux, needed constructive reason tointerpret his experience and paint in his unstable consciousness somesymbolic picture of the world. To have reverted to this constructiveprocess and studied its stages is an interesting achievement; but theconstruction is already made by common-sense and science, and it wasvisionary insolence in the Germans to propose to make that constructionotherwise.
Retrospective self-consciousness is dearly bought if itinhibits the intellect and embarrasses the inferences which, in itsspontaneous operation, it has known perfectly how to make. In the heat ofscientific theorising or dialectical argument it is sometimes salutary tobe reminded that we are men thinking; but, after all, it is no news. Weknow that life is a dream, and how should thinking be more?
Yet thethinking must go on, and the only vital question is to what practical orpoetic conceptions it is able to lead us. Verbal ethics.Similarly the Socratic philosophy affords a noble and genuine account ofwhat goods may be realised by living. Modern theory has not done so muchto help us here, however, as it has in physics.
It seldom occurs to modernmoralists that theirs is the science of all good and the art of itsattainment; they think only of some set of categorical precepts or sometheory of moral sentiments, abstracting altogether from the idealsreigning in society, in science, and in art. They deal with the secondaryquestion What ought I to do? Without having answered the primary question,What ought to be? They attach morals to religion rather than to politics,and this religion unhappily long ago ceased to be wisdom expressed infancy in order to become superstition overlaid with reasoning. They divideman into compartments and the less they leave in the one labelled 'morality'the more sublime they think their morality is; and sometimes pedantry andscholasticism are carried so far that nothing but an abstract sense ofduty remains in the broad region which should contain all human goods. Spinoza and the Life of Reason.Such trivial sanctimony in morals is doubtless due to artificial viewsabout the conditions of welfare; the basis is laid in authority ratherthan in human nature, and the goal in salvation rather than in happiness.One great modern philosopher, however, was free from these preconceptions,and might have reconstituted the Life of Reason had he had a sufficientinterest in culture.
Spinoza brought man back into nature, and made himthe nucleus of all moral values, showing how he may recognise hisenvironment and how he may master it. But Spinoza's sympathy with mankindfell short of imagination; any noble political or poetical ideal eludedhim.
Everything impassioned seemed to him insane, everything humannecessarily petty. Man was to be a pious tame animal, with the starsshining above his head. Instead of imagination Spinoza cultivatedmysticism, which is indeed an alternative. A prophet in speculation, heremained a levite in sentiment. Little or nothing would need to be changedin his system if the Life of Reason, in its higher ranges, were to begrafted upon it; but such affiliation is not necessary, and it is renderedunnatural by the lack of sweep and generosity in Spinoza's practicalideals. Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible with achosen good.Whether Chaos or Order lay at the beginning of things is a question oncemuch debated in the schools but afterward long in abeyance, not so muchbecause it had been solved as because one party had been silenced bysocial pressure.
The question is bound to recur in an age when observationand dialectic again freely confront each other. Naturalists look back tochaos since they observe everything growing from seeds and shifting itscharacter in regeneration. The order now established in the world may betraced back to a situation in which it did not appear. Dialecticians, onthe other hand, refute this presumption by urging that every collocationof things must have been preceded by another collocation in itself no lessdefinite and precise; and further that some principle of transition orcontinuity must always have obtained, else successive states would standin no relation to one another, notably not in the relation of cause andeffect, expressed in a natural law, which is presupposed in this instance.Potentialities are dispositions, and a disposition involves an order, asdoes also the passage from any specific potentiality into act. Thus theworld, we are told, must always have possessed a structure.The two views may perhaps be reconciled if we take each with aqualification.
Chaos doubtless has existed and will return—nay, itreigns now, very likely, in the remoter and inmost parts of the universe—ifby chaos we understand a nature containing none of the objects we are wontto distinguish, a nature such that human life and human thought would beimpossible in its bosom; but this nature must be presumed to have anorder, an order directly importing, if the tendency of its movement betaken into account, all the complexities and beauties, all the sense andreason which exist now. Order is accordingly continual; but only whenorder means not a specific arrangement, favourable to a given form oflife, but any arrangement whatsoever. The process by which an arrangementwhich is essentially unstable gradually shifts cannot be said to aim atevery stage which at any moment it involves.
For the process passesbeyond. It presently abolishes all the forms which may have arrestedattention and generated love; its initial energy defeats every purposewhich we may fondly attribute to it. Nor is it here necessary to remindourselves that to call results their own causes is always preposterous;for in this case even the mythical sense which might be attached to suchlanguage is inapplicable. Here the process, taken in the gross, does not,even by mechanical necessity, support the value which is supposed to guideit.
That value is realised for a moment only; so that if we impute toCronos any intent to beget his children we must also impute to him anintent to devour them. Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent, indifferent.Of course the various states of the world, when we survey themretrospectively, constitute another and now static order called historictruth. To this absolute and impotent order every detail is essential. Ifwe wished to abuse language so much as to speak of will in an 'Absolute'where change is excluded, so that nothing can be or be conceived beyondit, we might say that the Absolute willed everything that ever exists, andthat the eternal order terminated in every fact indiscriminately; but suchlanguage involves an after-image of motion and life, of preparation, risk,and subsequent accomplishment, adventures all pre-supposing refractorymaterials and excluded from eternal truth by its very essence. The onlyfunction those traditional metaphors have is to shield confusion andsentimentality. Because Jehovah once fought for the Jews, we need notcontinue to say that the truth is solicitous about us, when it is only wethat are fighting to attain it. The universe can wish particular thingsonly in so far as particular beings wish them; only in its relativecapacity can it find things good, and only in its relative capacity can itbe good for anything.The efficacious or physical order which exists at any moment in the worldand out of which the next moment's order is developed, may accordingly betermed a relative chaos: a chaos, because the values suggested andsupported by the second moment could not have belon.