<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN>
<h1>THE LIFE OF REASON</h1>
<h3>The Phases of Human Progress</h3>
<h3>Volumes One Through Five</h3>
<h2>GEORGE SANTAYANA</h2>
<p style='text-align: center;'>hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê</p>
<p> </p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<h2>In Five Volumes</h2>
<h3><SPAN href="#Introduction">Introduction</SPAN> to Life of Reason</h3>
<h3><SPAN href="./vol1.html">Volume One</SPAN></h3>
<h3><SPAN href="./vol2.html">Volume Two</SPAN></h3>
<h3><SPAN href="./vol3.html">Volume Three</SPAN></h3>
<h3><SPAN href="./vol4.html">Volume Four</SPAN></h3>
<h3><SPAN href="./vol5.html">Volume Five</SPAN></h3>
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<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
<p><SPAN href="#Introduction"><b>Introduction to "The Life of Reason"</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTECEDENTS</p>
<p>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</p>
<h3>Volume One: <SPAN href="./vol1.html">Reason in Common Sense</SPAN></h3>
<p><SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_I_THE_BIRTH_OF_REASON"><b>CHAPTER I</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE BIRTH OF REASON</p>
<p>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 Pages <SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_I_THE_BIRTH_OF_REASON">35</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_II_FIRST_STEPS_AND_FIRST_FLUCTUATIONS">47</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_II_FIRST_STEPS_AND_FIRST_FLUCTUATIONS"><b>CHAPTER II </b></SPAN></p>
<p>FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS</p>
<p>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 Pages <SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_II_FIRST_STEPS_AND_FIRST_FLUCTUATIONS">48</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_III_THE_DISCOVERY_OF_NATURAL_OBJECTS">63</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_III_THE_DISCOVERY_OF_NATURAL_OBJECTS"><b>CHAPTER III</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS</p>
<p>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?—<i>Mens naturaliter</i>
<i>platonica</i>.—Identity and independence predicated of things Pages <SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_III_THE_DISCOVERY_OF_NATURAL_OBJECTS">64</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_IV_ON_SOME_CRITICS_OF_THIS_DISCOVERY">83</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_IV_ON_SOME_CRITICS_OF_THIS_DISCOVERY"><b>CHAPTER IV </b></SPAN></p>
<p>ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY</p>
<p>Psychology as a solvent.—Misconceived rôle 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" Pages <SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_IV_ON_SOME_CRITICS_OF_THIS_DISCOVERY">84</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_V_NATURE_UNIFIED_AND_MIND_DISCERNED">117</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_V_NATURE_UNIFIED_AND_MIND_DISCERNED"><b>CHAPTER V </b></SPAN></p>
<p>NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED</p>
<p>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 Pages <SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_V_NATURE_UNIFIED_AND_MIND_DISCERNED">118</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_VI_DISCOVERY_OF_FELLOW_MINDS">136</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_VI_DISCOVERY_OF_FELLOW_MINDS"><b>CHAPTER VI </b></SPAN></p>
<p>DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS</p>
<p>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 Pages <SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_VI_DISCOVERY_OF_FELLOW_MINDS">137</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_VII_CONCRETIONS_IN_DISCOURSE_AND_IN_EXISTENCE">160</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_VII_CONCRETIONS_IN_DISCOURSE_AND_IN_EXISTENCE"><b>CHAPTER VII </b></SPAN></p>
<p>CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE</p>
<p>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 Pages <SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_VII_CONCRETIONS_IN_DISCOURSE_AND_IN_EXISTENCE">161</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_VIII_ON_THE_RELATIVE_VALUE_OF_THINGS_AND_IDEAS">183</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_VIII_ON_THE_RELATIVE_VALUE_OF_THINGS_AND_IDEAS"><b>CHAPTER VIII</b></SPAN></p>
<p>ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS</p>
<p>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 Pages <SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_VIII_ON_THE_RELATIVE_VALUE_OF_THINGS_AND_IDEAS">184</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_IX_HOW_THOUGHT_IS_PRACTICAL">204</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_IX_HOW_THOUGHT_IS_PRACTICAL"><b>CHAPTER IX </b></SPAN></p>
<p>HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL</p>
<p>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 Pages <SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_IX_HOW_THOUGHT_IS_PRACTICAL">205</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_X_THE_MEASURE_OF_VALUES_IN_REFLECTION">235</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_X_THE_MEASURE_OF_VALUES_IN_REFLECTION"><b>CHAPTER X </b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION</p>
<p>Honesty in hedonism.—Necessary qualifications.—The will must
judge.—Injustice inherent in representation.—Æsthetic and
speculative cruelty.—Imputed values: their inconstancy.—Methods
of control.—Example of fame.—Disproportionate interest in the
æsthetic.—Irrational religious allegiance.—Pathetic
idealisations.—Inevitable impulsiveness in prophecy.—The test a
controlled present ideal Page <SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_X_THE_MEASURE_OF_VALUES_IN_REFLECTION">236</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_XI_SOME_ABSTRACT_CONDITIONS_OF_THE_IDEAL">255</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_XI_SOME_ABSTRACT_CONDITIONS_OF_THE_IDEAL"><b>CHAPTER XI</b></SPAN></p>
<p>SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL</p>
<p>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 Pages <SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_XI_SOME_ABSTRACT_CONDITIONS_OF_THE_IDEAL">256</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_XII_FLUX_AND_CONSTANCY_IN_HUMAN_NATURE">268</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_XII_FLUX_AND_CONSTANCY_IN_HUMAN_NATURE"><b>CHAPTER XII</b></SPAN></p>
<p>FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE</p>
<p>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 Pages <SPAN href="./vol1.html#CHAPTER_XII_FLUX_AND_CONSTANCY_IN_HUMAN_NATURE">269</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol1.html#endofv1">291</SPAN></p>
<h3>Volume Two: <SPAN href="./vol2.html">Reason in Society</SPAN></h3>
<p><SPAN href="./vol2.html#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I</b></SPAN></p>
<p>LOVE</p>
<p>Fluid existences have none but ideal goals.—Nutrition and
reproduction.—Priority of the latter.—Love celebrates the initial
triumph of form and is deeply ideal.—Difficulty in describing
love.—One-sided or inverted theories about it.—Sexual functions its
basis.—Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty.—Glory of
animal love.—Its degradation when instincts become numerous and
competitive.—Moral censure provoked.—The heart alienated from the
world.—Childish ideals.—Their light all focussed on the object of
love.—Three environments for love.—Subjectivity of the
passion.—Machinery regulating choice.—The choice
unstable.—Instinctive essence of love.—Its ideality.—Its universal
scope.—Its euthanasia. Pages <SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_3">3</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_34">34</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol2.html#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE FAMILY</p>
<p>The family arises spontaneously.—It harmonises natural
interests.—Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth.—The
naturally dull achieve intelligence.—It is more blessed to save than to
create.—Parental instinct regards childhood only.—Handing on the torch
of life.—Adventitious functions assumed by the family.—Inertia in
human nature.—Family tyrannies.—Difficulty in abstracting from the
family.—Possibility of substitutes.—Plato's heroic
communism.—Opposite modern tendencies.—Individualism in a sense
rational.—The family tamed.—Possible readjustments and
reversions.—The ideal includes generation.—Inner values already lodged
in this function.—Outward beneficence might be secured by experiment
Pages <SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_35">35</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_59">59</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol2.html#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III</b></SPAN></p>
<p>INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR</p>
<p>Patriarchal economy.—Origin of the state.—Three uses of
civilisation.—Its rationality contingent.—Sources of wealth.—Excess
of it possible.—Irrational industry.—Its jovial and ingenious
side.—Its tyranny.—An impossible remedy.—Basis of government.—How
rationality accrues.—Ferocious but useful despotisms.—Occasional
advantage of being conquered.—Origin of free governments.—Their
democratic tendencies.—Imperial peace.—Nominal and real status of
armies.—Their action irresponsible.—Pugnacity human.—Barrack-room
philosophy.—Military virtues.—They are splendid vices.—Absolute value
in strife.—Sport a civilised way of preserving it.—Who shall found the
universal commonwealth? Pages <SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_60">60</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_87">87</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol2.html#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL</p>
<p>Eminence, once existing, grows by its own operation.—Its causes natural
and its privileges just.—Advantage of inequality.—Fable of the belly
and the members.—Fallacy in it.—Theism expresses better the
aristocratic ideal.—A heaven with many mansions.—If God is defined as
the human ideal, apotheosis the only paradise.—When natures differ
perfections differ too.—Theory that stations actually correspond to
faculty.—Its falsity.—Feeble individuality the rule.—Sophistical
envy.—Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is.—Mutilation by
crowding.—A hint to optimists.—How aristocracies might do good.—Man
adds wrong to nature's injury.—Conditions of a just inequality Pages
<SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_88">88</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_113">113</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol2.html#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V</b></SPAN></p>
<p>DEMOCRACY</p>
<p>Democracy as an end and as a means.—Natural democracy leads to
monarchy.—Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege.—Ideals
and expedients.—Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, if
rational, would serve common interests.—People jealous of eminence.—It
is representative, but subject to decay.—Ancient citizenship a
privilege.—Modern democracy industrial.—Dangers to current
civilisation.—Is current civilisation a good?—Horrors of materialistic
democracy.—Timocracy or socialistic aristocracy.—The difficulty the
same as in all Socialism.—The masses would have to be plebeian in
position and patrician in feeling.—Organisation for ideal ends breeds
fanaticism.—Public spirit the life of democracy. Pages <SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_114">114</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_136">136</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol2.html#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI</b></SPAN></p>
<p>FREE SOCIETY</p>
<p>Primacy of nature over spirit.—All experience at bottom
liberal.—Social experience has its ideality too.—The self an
ideal.—Romantic egotism.—Vanity.—Ambiguities of fame.—Its possible
ideality.—Comradeship.—External conditions of friendship.—Identity in
sex required, and in age.—Constituents of friendship.—Personal
liking.—The refracting human medium for ideas.—Affection based on the
refraction.—The medium must also be transparent.—Common interests
indispensable.—Friendship between man and wife.—Between master and
disciple.—Conflict between ideal and natural allegiance.—Automatic
idealisation of heroes Pages <SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_137">137</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_159">159</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol2.html#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII</b></SPAN></p>
<p>PATRIOTISM</p>
<p>The creative social environment, since it eludes sense, must be
represented symbolically.—Ambiguous limits of a native country,
geographical and moral.—Sentimental and political patriotism.—The
earth and the race the first objects of rational loyalty.—Race, when
distinct, the greatest of distinctions.—"Pure" races may be moraliy
sterile.—True nationality direction on a definite ideal.—Country well
represented by domestic and civic religion.—Misleading identification
of country with government.—Sporting or belligerent
patriotism.—Exclusive patriotism rational only when the government
supported is universally beneficent.—Accidents of birth and training
affect the ideal.—They are conditions and may contribute
something.—They are not ends.—The symbol for country may be a man and
may become an idol.—Feudal representation sensitive but
partial.—Monarchical representation comprehensive but
treacherous.—Impersonal symbols no advantage.—Patriotism not
self-interest, save to the social man whose aims are ideal Pages <SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_160">160</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_183">183</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol2.html#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII</b></SPAN></p>
<p>IDEAL SOCIETY</p>
<p>The gregarious instinct all social instincts in suspense.—It gives rise
to conscience or sympathy with the public voice.—Guises of public
opinion.—Oracles and revelations.—The ideal a measure for all
existences and no existence itself.—Contrast between natural and
intellectual bonds.—Appeal from man to God, from real to ideal
society.—Significant symbols revert to the concrete.—Nature a symbol
for destiny.—Representative notions have also inherent
values.—Religion and science indirectly cognitive and directly
ideal.—Their opposite outlook.—In translating existence into human
terms they give human nature its highest exercise.—Science should be
mathematical and religion anthropomorphic.—Summary of this book Pages
<SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_184">184</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol2.html#Page_205">205</SPAN></p>
<h3>Volume Three: <SPAN href="./vol3.html">Reason in Religion</SPAN></h3>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I</b></SPAN></p>
<p>HOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON</p>
<p>Religion is certainly significant, but not literally true.—All religion
is positive and particular.—It aims at the Life of Reason, but largely
fails to attain it.—Its approach imaginative.—When its poetic method
is denied its value is jeopardised.—It precedes science rather than
hinders it.—It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human. Pages <SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_3">3</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_14">14</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II</b></SPAN></p>
<p>RATIONAL ELEMENTS IN SUPERSTITION</p>
<p>Felt causes not necessary causes.—Mechanism and dialectic ulterior
principles.—Early selection of categories.—Tentative rational
worlds.—Superstition a rudimentary philosophy.—A miracle, though
unexpected, more intelligible than a regular process.—Superstitions
come of haste to understand.—Inattention suffers them to
spread.—Genius may use them to convey an inarticulate wisdom. Pages
<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_15">15</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_27">27</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III</b></SPAN></p>
<p>MAGIC, SACRIFICE, AND PRAYER</p>
<p>Fear created the gods.—Need also contributed.—The real evidences of
God's existence.—Practice precedes theory in religion.—Pathetic,
tentative nature of religious practices.—Meanness and envy in the gods,
suggesting sacrifice.—Ritualistic arts.—Thank-offerings.—The
sacrifice of a contrite heart.—Prayer is not utilitarian in
essence.—Its supposed efficacy magical.—Theological puzzles.—A real
efficacy would be mechanical.—True uses of prayer.—It clarifies the
ideal.—It reconciles to the inevitable.—It fosters spiritual life by
conceiving it in its perfection.—Discipline and contemplation are their
own reward Pages <SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_28">28</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_48">48</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV</b></SPAN></p>
<p>MYTHOLOGY</p>
<p>Status of fable in the mind.—It requires genius.—It only half
deceives.—Its interpretative essence.—Contrast with
science.—Importance of the moral factor.—Its submergence.—Myth
justifies magic.—Myths might be metaphysical.—They appear ready made,
like parts of the social fabric.—They perplex the
conscience.—Incipient myth in the Vedas.—Natural suggestions soon
exhausted.—They will be carried out in abstract fancy.—They may become
moral ideals.—The Sun-god moralised.—The leaven of religion is moral
idealism Pages <SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_49">49</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_68">68</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE HEBRAIC TRADITION</p>
<p>Phases of Hebraism.—Israel's tribal monotheism.—Problems
involved.—The prophets put new wine in old bottles.—Inspiration and
authority.—Beginnings of the Church.—Bigotry turned into a
principle.—Penance accepted.—Christianity combines optimism and
asceticism.—Reason smothered between the two.—Religion made an
institution Pages <SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_69">69</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_82">82</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE CHRISTIAN EPIC</p>
<p>The essence of the good not adventitious but expressive.—A universal
religion must interpret the whole world.—Double appeal of
Christianity.—Hebrew metaphors become Greek myths.—Hebrew philosophy
of history identified with Platonic cosmology.—The resulting orthodox
system.—The brief drama of things.—Mythology is a language and must be
understood to convey something by symbols Pages <SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_83">83</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_98">98</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII</b></SPAN></p>
<p>PAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY</p>
<p>Need of paganising Christianity.—Catholic piety more human than the
liturgy.—Natural pieties.—Refuge taken in the supernatural.—The
episodes of life consecrated mystically.—Paganism chastened, Hebraism
liberalised.—The system post-rational and founded on despair.—External
conversion of the barbarians.—Expression of the northern genius within
Catholicism,—Internal discrepancies between the two.—Tradition and
instinct at odds in Protestantism.—The Protestant spirit remote from
that of the gospel.—Obstacles to humanism.—The Reformation and
counter-reformation.—Protestantism an expression of character.—It has
the spirit of life and of courage, but the voice of inexperience.—Its
emancipation from Christianity Pages <SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_99">99</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_126">126</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII</b></SPAN></p>
<p>CONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH</p>
<p>Myth should dissolve with the advance of science.—But myth is confused
with the moral values it expresses.—Neo-Platonic revision.—It made
mythical entities of abstractions.—Hypostasis ruins ideals.—The Stoic
revision.—The ideal surrendered before the physical.—Parallel
movements in Christianity.—Hebraism, if philosophical, must be
pantheistic.—Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals.—Truly
divine action limited to what makes for the good.—Need of an opposing
principle.—The standard of value is human.—Hope for happiness makes
belief in God Pages <SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_127">127</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_147">147</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE</p>
<p>Suspense between hope and disillusion.—Superficial solution.—But from
what shall we be redeemed?—Typical attitude of St. Augustine.—He
achieves Platonism.—He identifies it with Christianity.—God the
good.—Primary and secondary religion.—Ambiguous efficacy of the good
in Plato.—Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job.—The
Manicheans.—All things good by nature.—The doctrine of creation
demands that of the fall.—Original sin.—Forced abandonment of the
ideal.—The problem among the Protestants.—Pantheism accepted.—Plainer
scorn for the ideal.—The price of mythology is superstition. Pages
<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_148">148</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_177">177</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_X"><b>CHAPTER X</b></SPAN></p>
<p>PIETY</p>
<p>The core of religion not theoretical.—Loyalty to the sources of our
being.—The pious Æneas.—An ideal background required.—Piety accepts
natural conditions and present tasks.—The leadership of instinct is
normal.—Embodiment essential to spirit.—Piety to the gods takes form
from current ideals.—The religion of humanity.—Cosmic piety Pages
<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_178">178</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_192">192</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_XI"><b>CHAPTER XI</b></SPAN></p>
<p>SPIRITUALITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS</p>
<p>To be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal.—Spirituality
natural.—Primitive consciousness may be spiritual.—Spirit crossed by
instrumentalities.—One foe of the spirit is worldliness.—The case for
and against pleasure.—Upshot of worldly wisdom.—Two supposed escapes
from vanity: fanaticism and mysticism.—Both are irrational.—Is there a
third course?—Yes, for experience has intrinsic, inalienable
values.—For these the religious imagination must supply an ideal
standard Pages <SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_193">193</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_213">213</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_XII"><b>CHAPTER XII</b></SPAN></p>
<p>CHARITY</p>
<p>Possible tyranny of reason.—Everything has its rights.—Primary and
secondary morality.—Uncharitable pagan justice is not just.—The doom
of ancient republics.—Rational charity.—Its limits.—Its mythical
supports.—There is intelligence in charity.—Buddhist and Christian
forms of it.—Apparent division of the spiritual and the natural Pages
<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_214">214</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_228">228</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_XIII"><b>CHAPTER XIII</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE</p>
<p>The length of life a subject for natural science.—"Psychical"
phenomena.—Hypertrophies of sense.—These possibilities affect physical
existence only.—Moral grounds for the doctrine.—The necessary
assumption of a future.—An assumption no evidence.—A solipsistic
argument.—Absoluteness and immortality transferred to the gods.—Or to
a divine principle in all beings.—In neither case is the individual
immortal.—Possible forms of survival.—Arguments from retribution and
need of opportunity.—Ignoble temper of both.—False optimistic
postulate involved.—Transition to ideality Pages <SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_229">229</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_250">250</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_XIV"><b>CHAPTER XIV</b></SPAN></p>
<p>IDEAL IMMORTALITY</p>
<p>Olympian immortality the first ideal.—Its indirect attainment by
reproduction.—Moral acceptance of this compromise.—Even vicarious
immortality intrinsically impossible.—Intellectual victory over
change.—The glory of it.—Reason makes man's divinity and his
immortality.—It is the locus of all truths.—Epicurean immortality,
through the truth of existence.—Logical immortality, through objects of
thought.—Ethical immortality, through types of excellence Pages <SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_251">251</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_273">273</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol3.html#CHAPTER_XV"><b>CHAPTER XV</b></SPAN></p>
<p>CONCLUSION</p>
<p>The failure of magic and of mythology.—Their imaginative value.—Piety
and spirituality justified.—Mysticism a primordial state of
feeling.—It may recur at any stage of culture.—Form gives substance
its life and value. Pages <SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_274">274</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol3.html#Page_279">279</SPAN></p>
<h3>Volume Four: <SPAN href="./vol4.html">Reason in Art</SPAN></h3>
<p><SPAN href="./vol4.html#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE</p>
<p>Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.—Art is plastic
instinct conscious of its aims.—It is automatic.—So are the ideas it
expresses.—We are said to control whatever obeys us.—Utility is a
result.—The useful naturally stable.—Intelligence is docility.—Art is
reason propagating itself.—Beauty an incident in rational art,
inseparable from the others. Pages <SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_3">3</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_17">17</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol4.html#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II</b></SPAN></p>
<p>RATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART</p>
<p>Utility is ultimately ideal.—Work wasted and chances missed.—Ideals
must be interpreted, not prescribed.—The aim of industry is to live
well.—Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature.—Servile arts may
grow spontaneous or their products may be renounced.—Art starts from
two potentialities: its material and its problem.—Each must be definite
and congruous with the other.—A sophism exposed.—Industry prepares
matter for the liberal arts.—Each partakes of the other. Pages <SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_18">18</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_33">33</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol4.html#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III</b></SPAN></p>
<p>EMERGENCE OF FINE ART</p>
<p>Art is spontaneous action made stable by success.—It combines utility
and automatism.—Automatism fundamental and irresponsible.—It is tamed
by contact with the world.—The dance.—Functions of gesture.—Automatic
music. Pages <SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_34">34</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_43">43</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol4.html#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV</b></SPAN></p>
<p>MUSIC</p>
<p>Music is a world apart.—It justifies itself.—It is vital and
transient.—Its physical affinities.—Physiology of music.—Limits of
musical sensibility.—The value of music is relative to them.—Wonders
of musical structure.—Its inherent emotions.—In growing specific they
remain unearthly.—They merge with common emotions, and express such as
find no object in nature.—Music lends elementary feelings an
intellectual communicable form.—All essences are in themselves good,
even the passions.—Each impulse calls for a possible congenial
world.—Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings.—Music may do
so.—Instability the soul of matter.—- Peace the triumph of
spirit.—Refinement is true strength. Pages <SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_44">44</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_67">67</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol4.html#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V</b></SPAN></p>
<p>SPEECH AND SIGNIFICATION</p>
<p>Sounds well fitted to be symbols.—Language has a structure independent
of things.—Words, remaining identical, serve to identify things that
change.—Language the dialectical garment of facts.—Words are wise
men's counters.—Nominalism right in psychology and realism in
logic.—Literature moves between the extremes of music and
denotation.—Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may have
affinity.—Syntax positively representative.—Yet it vitiates what it
represents.—Difficulty in subduing a living medium.—Language
foreshortens experience.—It is a perpetual mythology.—It may be apt or
inapt, with equal richness.—Absolute language a possible but foolish
art Pages <SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_68">68</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_86">86</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol4.html#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI</b></SPAN></p>
<p>POETRY AND PROSE</p>
<p>Force of primary expressions.—Its exclusiveness and
narrowness.—Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm.—Inspiration
irresponsible.—Plato's discriminating view.—Explosive and pregnant
expression.—Natural history of inspiration.—Expressions to be
understood must be recreated, and so changed.—Expressions may be recast
perversely, humourously, or sublimely.—The nature of prose.—It is more
advanced and responsible than poetry.—Maturity brings love of
practical truth.—Pure prose would tend to efface itself.—Form alone,
or substance alone, may be poetical.—Poetry has its place in the
medium.—It is the best medium possible.—Might it not convey what it is
best to know?—A rational poetry would exclude much now thought
poetical.—All apperception modifies its object.—Reason has its own
bias and method.—Rational poetry would envelop exact knowledge in
ultimate emotions.—An illustration.—Volume can be found in scope
better than in suggestion Pages <SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_87">87</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_115">115</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol4.html#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII</b></SPAN></p>
<p>PLASTIC CONSTRUCTION</p>
<p>Automatic expression often leaves traces in the outer world.—Such
effects fruitful.—Magic authority of man's first creations.—Art brings
relief from idolatry.—Inertia in technique.—Inertia in
appreciation.—Adventitious effects appreciated first.—Approach to
beauty through useful structure.—Failure of adapted styles.—Not all
structure beautiful, nor all beauty structural.—Structures designed for
display.—Appeal made by decoration.—Its natural rights.—Its alliance
with structure in Greek architecture.—Relations of the two in Gothic
art.—The result here romantic.—The mediæval artist.—Representation
introduced.—Transition to illustration. Pages <SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_116">116</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_143">143</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol4.html#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII</b></SPAN></p>
<p>PLASTIC REPRESENTATION</p>
<p>Psychology of imitation.—Sustained sensation involves
reproduction.—Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a new
material.—Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge.—How the
artist is inspired and irresponsible.—Need of knowing and loving the
subject rendered.—Public interests determine the subject of art, and
the subject the medium.—Reproduction by acting ephemeral.—demands of
sculpture.—It is essentially obsolete.—When men see groups and
backgrounds they are natural painters.—Evolution of painting.—Sensuous
and dramatic adequacy approached.—Essence of landscape-painting.—Its
threatened dissolution.—Reversion to pure decorative design.—Sensuous
values are primordial and so indispensable Pages <SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_144">144</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_165">165</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol4.html#CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX</b></SPAN></p>
<p>JUSTIFICATION OF ART</p>
<p>Art is subject to moral censorship.—Its initial or specific excellence
is not enough.—All satisfactions, however hurtful, have an initial
worth.—But, on the whole, artistic activity is innocent.—It is
liberal, and typical of perfect activity.—The ideal, when incarnate,
becomes subject to civil society.—Plato's strictures: he exaggerates
the effect of myths.—His deeper moral objections.—Their
lightness.—Importance of æsthetic alternatives.—The importance of
æsthetic goods varies with temperaments.—The æsthetic temperament
requires tutelage.—Aesthetic values everywhere interfused.—They are
primordial.—To superpose them adventitiously is to destroy them.—They
flow naturally from perfect function.—Even inhibited functions, when
they fall into a new rhythm, yield new beauties.—He who loves beauty
must chasten it Pages <SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_166">166</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_190">190</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol4.html#CHAPTER_X"><b>CHAPTER X</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE CRITERION OF TASTE</p>
<p>Dogmatism is inevitable but may be enlightened.—Taste gains in
authority as it is more and more widely based.—Different æsthetic
endowments may be compared in quantity or force.—Authority of vital
over verbal judgments.—Tastes differ also in purity or
consistency.—They differ, finally, in pertinence, and in width of
appeal.—Art may grow classic by idealising the familiar, or by
reporting the ultimate.—Good taste demands that art should be rational,
<i>i.e.</i>, harmonious with all other interests.—A mere "work of art" a
baseless artifice.—Human uses give to works of art their highest
expression and charm.—The sad values of appearance.—They need to be
made prophetic of practical goods, which in turn would be suffused with
beauty Pages <SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_191">191</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_215">215</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol4.html#CHAPTER_XI"><b>CHAPTER XI</b></SPAN></p>
<p>ART AND HAPPINESS</p>
<p>Aesthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones, which in turn would be
suffused with beauty, yet prototypes of true perfections.—Pros and cons
of detached indulgences.—The happy imagination is one initially in line
with things, and brought always closer to them by experience.—Reason is
the principle of both art and happiness.—Only a rational society can
have sure and perfect arts.—Why art is now empty and
unstable.—Anomalous character of the irrational artist.—True art
measures and completes happiness. Pages <SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_216">216</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol4.html#Page_230">230</SPAN></p>
<h3>Volume Five: <SPAN href="./vol5.html">Reason in Science</SPAN></h3>
<p><SPAN href="./vol5.html#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I</b></SPAN></p>
<p>TYPES AND AIMS OF SCIENCE</p>
<p>Science still young.—Its miscarriage in Greece.—Its timid reappearance
in modern times.—Distinction between science and myth.—Platonic status
of hypothesis.—Meaning of verification.—Possible validity of
myths.—Any dreamed-of thing might be experienced.—But science follows
the movement of its subject-matter.—Moral value of science.—Its
continuity with common knowledge.—Its intellectual essence.—Unity of
science.—In existence, judged by reflection, there is a margin of
waste.—Sciences converge from different points of origin.—Two chief
kinds of science, physics and dialectic.—Their mutual
implication.—Their coöperation.—No science <i>a priori</i>.—Role of
criticism. Pages <SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_3">3</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_38">38</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol5.html#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II</b></SPAN></p>
<p>HISTORY</p>
<p>History an artificial memory.—Second sight requires control.—Nature
the theme common to various memories.—Growth of legend.—No history
without documents.—The aim is truth.—Indirect methods of attaining
it.—Historical research a part of physics.—Verification here
indirect.—Futile ideal to survey all facts.—Historical theory.—It is
arbitrary.—A moral critique of the past is possible.—How it might be
just.—Transition to historical romance.—Possibility of genuine
epics.—Literal truth abandoned.—History exists to be transcended.—Its
great rôle. Pages <SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_39">39</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_68">68</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol5.html#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III</b></SPAN></p>
<p>MECHANISM</p>
<p>Recurrent forms in nature.—Their discovery makes the flux
calculable.—Looser principles tried first.—Mechanism for the most part
hidden.—Yet presumably pervasive.—Inadequacy of consciousness.—Its
articulation inferior to that of its objects.—Science consequently
retarded, and speculation rendered necessary.—Dissatisfaction with
mechanism partly natural, and partly artificial.—Biassed judgments
inspired by moral inertia.—Positive emotions proper to
materialism.—The material world not dead nor ugly, nor especially
cruel.—Mechanism to be judged by its fruits Pages <SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_69">69</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_94">94</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol5.html#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV</b></SPAN></p>
<p>HESITATIONS IN METHOD</p>
<p>Mechanism restricted to one-half of existence.—Men of science not
speculative.—Confusion in semi-moral subjects.—"Physic of metaphysic
begs defence."—Evolution by mechanism.—Evolution by ideal
attraction.—If species are evolved they cannot guide
evolution.—Intrusion of optimism.—Evolution according to Hegel.—The
conservative interpretation.—The radical one.—Megalomania.—Chaos in
the theory of mind.—Origin of self-consciousness.—The notion of
spirit.—The notion of sense.—Competition between the two.—The rise of
scepticism Pages <SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_95">95</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_125">125</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol5.html#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V</b></SPAN></p>
<p>PSYCHOLOGY</p>
<p>Mind reading not science.—Experience a reconstruction.—The honest art
of education.—Arbitrary readings of the mind.—Human nature appealed to
rather than described.—Dialectic in psychology.—Spinoza on the
passions.—A principle of estimation cannot govern events.—Scientific
psychology a part of biology.—Confused attempt to detach the psychic
element.—Differentia of the psychic.—Approach to irrelevant
sentience.—Perception represents things in their practical relation to
the body.—Mind the existence in which form becomes actual.—Attempt at
idealistic physics.—Association not efficient.—- It describes
coincidences.—Understanding is based on instinct and expressed in
dialectic.—Suggestion a fancy name for automatism, and will
another.—Double attachment of mind to nature.—Is the subject-matter of
psychology absolute being?—Sentience is representable only in
fancy.—The conditions and objects of sentience, which are not
sentience, are also real.—Mind knowable and important in so far as it
represents other things Pages <SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_126">126</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_166">166</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol5.html#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE NATURE OF INTENT</p>
<p>Dialectic better than physics.—Maladjustments to nature render physics
conspicuous and unpleasant.—Physics should be largely virtual, and
dialectic explicit.—Intent is vital and indescribable.—It is analogous
to flux in existence.—It expresses natural life.—- It has a material
basis.—It is necessarily relevant to earth.—The basis of intent
becomes appreciable in language.—Intent starts from a datum, and is
carried by a feeling.—It demands conventional expression.—A fable
about matter and form Pages <SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_167">167</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_186">186</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol5.html#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII</b></SPAN></p>
<p>DIALECTIC</p>
<p>Dialectic elaborates given forms.—Forms are abstracted from existence
by intent.—Confusion comes of imperfect abstraction, or ambiguous
intent.—The fact that mathematics applies to existence is
empirical.—Its moral value is therefore contingent.—Quantity submits
easily to dialectical treatment—Constancy and progress in
intent.—Intent determines the functional essence of objects.—Also the
scope of ideals.—Double status of mathematics.—Practical rôle of
dialectic.—Hegel's satire on dialectic.—Dialectic expresses a given
intent.—Its empire is ideal and autonomous Pages <SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_187">187</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_209">209</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol5.html#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII</b></SPAN></p>
<p>PRERATIONAL MORALITY</p>
<p>Empirical alloy in dialectic.—Arrested rationality in morals.—Its
emotional and practical power.—Moral science is an application of
dialectic, not a part of anthropology.—Estimation the soul of
philosophy.—Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable.—A choice
of proverbs.—Their various representative value.—Conflict of partial
moralities.—The Greek ideal.—Imaginative exuberance and political
discipline.—Sterility of Greek example.—Prerational morality among the
Jews.—The development of conscience.—Need of Hebraic devotion to Greek
aims.—Prerational morality marks an acquisition but offers no programme
Pages <SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_210">210</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_232">232</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol5.html#CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX</b></SPAN></p>
<p>RATIONAL ETHICS</p>
<p>Moral passions represent private interests.—Common ideal interests may
supervene.—To this extent there is rational society.—A rational
morality not attainable, but its principle clear.—It is the logic of an
autonomous will.—Socrates' science.—Its opposition to sophistry and
moral anarchy.—Its vitality.—Genuine altruism is natural
self-expression.—Reason expresses impulses, but impulses reduced to
harmony.—Self-love artificial.—The sanction of reason is
happiness.—Moral science impeded by its chaotic data, and its
unrecognised scope.—Fallacy in democratic hedonism.—Sympathy a
conditional duty.—All life, and hence right life, finite and
particular. Pages <SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_233">233</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_261">261</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol5.html#CHAPTER_X"><b>CHAPTER X</b></SPAN></p>
<p>POST-RATIONAL MORALITY</p>
<p>Socratic ethics retrospective.—Rise of disillusioned moralities.—The
illusion subsisting in them.—Epicurean refuge in pleasure.—Stoic
recourse to conformity.—Conformity the core of Islam, enveloped in
arbitrary doctrines.—The latter alone lend it practical force.—Moral
ambiguity in pantheism.—Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires a
mythology.—A supernatural world made by the Platonist out of
dialectic.—The Hebraic cry for redemption.—The two factors meet in
Christianity.—Consequent electicism.—The negation of naturalism never
complete.—Spontaneous values rehabilitated.—A witness out of
India.—Dignity of post-rational morality.—Absurdities nevertheless
involved.—The soul of positivism in all ideals.—Moribund dreams and
perennial realities. Pages <SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_262">262</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_300">300</SPAN></p>
<p><SPAN href="./vol5.html#CHAPTER_XI"><b>CHAPTER XI</b></SPAN></p>
<p>THE VALIDITY OF SCIENCE</p>
<p>Various modes of revising science.—Science its own best
critic.—Obstruction by alien traditions.—Needless anxiety for moral
interests.—Science an imaginative and practical art.—Arrière-pensée in
transcendentalism.—Its romantic sincerity.—Its constructive
impotence.—Its dependence on common-sense.—Its futility.—Ideal
science is self-justified.—Physical science is presupposed in
scepticism.—It recurs in all understanding of perception.—Science
contains all trustworthy knowledge.—It suffices for the Life of Reason
Pages <SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_301">301</SPAN>-<SPAN href="./vol5.html#Page_318">320</SPAN></p>
<hr style="width: 65%;" />
<h2><SPAN name="Introduction" id="Introduction" />Introduction to "The Life of Reason"</h2>
<div class="sidenote">Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Efficacious reflection is reason.</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="sidenote">The Life of Reason a name for all practical thought and all
action justified by its fruits in consciousness.</div>
<p>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 <i>Life of
Reason</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="sidenote">It is the sum of Art.</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="sidenote">It has a natural basis which makes it definable.</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Modern philosophy not helpful.</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Positivism no positive ideal.</div>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and
conditions.</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Liberal theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural
world.</div>
<p>The tenets of Protestant bodies are notoriously varied and on principle
subject to change. There is hardly a combination of tradition and
spontaneity which has not been tried in some quarter. If we think,
however, of broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears that in
Protestantism myth, without disappearing, has changed its relation to
reality: instead of being an extension to the natural world myth has
become its substratum. Religion no longer reveals divine personalities,
future rewards, and tenderer Elysian consolations; nor does it seriously
propose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a purgatory to be
shortened by prescribed devotions. It merely gives the real world an
ideal status and teaches men to accept a natural life on supernatural
grounds. The consequence is that the most pious can give an unvarnished
description of things. Even immortality and the idea of God are
submitted, in liberal circles, to scientific treatment. On the other
hand, it would be hard to conceive a more inveterate obsession than that
which keeps the attitude of these same minds inappropriate to the
objects they envisage. They have accepted natural conditions; they will
not accept natural ideals. The Life of Reason has no existence for them,
because, although its field is clear, they will not tolerate any human
or finite standard of value, and will not suffer extant interests, which
can alone guide them in action or judgment, to define the worth of life.</p>
<p>The after-effects of Hebraism are here contrary to its foundations; for
the Jews loved the world so much that they brought themselves, in order
to win and enjoy it, to an intense concentration of purpose; but this
effort and discipline, which had of course been mythically sanctioned,
not only failed of its object, but grew far too absolute and sublime to
think its object could ever have been earthly; and the supernatural
machinery which was to have secured prosperity, while that still
enticed, now had to furnish some worthier object for the passion it had
artificially fostered. Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort
when you have forgotten your aim.</p>
<p>An earnestness which is out of proportion to any knowledge or love of
real things, which is therefore dark and inward and thinks itself deeper
than the earth's foundations—such an earnestness, until culture turns
it into intelligent interests, will naturally breed a new mythology. It
will try to place some world of Afrites and shadowy giants behind the
constellations, which it finds too distinct and constant to be its
companions or supporters; and it will assign to itself vague and
infinite tasks, for which it is doubtless better equipped than for those
which the earth now sets before it. Even these, however, since they are
parts of an infinite whole, the mystic may (histrionically, perhaps, yet
zealously) undertake; but as his eye will be perpetually fixed on
something invisible beyond, and nothing will be done for its own sake or
enjoyed in its own fugitive presence, there will be little art and
little joy in existence. All will be a tossing servitude and illiberal
mist, where the parts will have no final values and the whole no
pertinent direction.</p>
<div class="sidenote">The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals.</div>
<p>In Greek philosophy the situation is far more auspicious. The ancients
led a rational life and envisaged the various spheres of speculation as
men might whose central interests were rational. In physics they leaped
at once to the conception of a dynamic unity and general evolution, thus
giving that background to human life which shrewd observation would
always have descried, and which modern science has laboriously
rediscovered. Two great systems offered, in two legitimate directions,
what are doubtless the final and radical accounts of physical being.
Heraclitus, describing the immediate, found it to be in constant and
pervasive change: no substances, no forms, no identities could be
arrested there, but as in the human soul, so in nature, all was
instability, contradiction, reconstruction, and oblivion. This remains
the empirical fact; and we need but to rescind the artificial division
which Descartes has taught us to make between nature and life, to feel
again the absolute aptness of Heraclitus's expressions. These were
thought obscure only because they were so disconcertingly penetrating
and direct. The immediate is what nobody sees, because convention and
reflection turn existence, as soon as they can, into ideas; a man who
discloses the immediate seems profound, yet his depth is nothing but
innocence recovered and a sort of intellectual abstention. Mysticism,
scepticism, and transcendentalism have all in their various ways tried
to fall back on the immediate; but none of them has been ingenuous
enough. Each has added some myth, or sophistry, or delusive artifice to
its direct observation. Heraclitus remains the honest prophet of
immediacy: a mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a sceptic who does
not rely for his results on conventions unwittingly adopted, a
transcendentalist without false pretensions or incongruous dogmas.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Heraclitus and the immediate.</div>
<p>The immediate is not, however, a good subject for discourse, and the
expounders of Heraclitus were not unnaturally blamed for monotony. All
they could do was to iterate their master's maxim, and declare
everything to be in flux. In suggesting laws of recurrence and a reason
in which what is common to many might be expressed, Heraclitus had
opened the door into another region: had he passed through, his
philosophy would have been greatly modified, for permanent forms would
have forced themselves on his attention no less than shifting materials.
Such a Heraclitus would have anticipated Plato; but the time for such a
synthesis had not yet arrived.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Democritus and the naturally intelligible.</div>
<p>At the opposite pole from immediacy lies intelligibility. To reduce
phenomena to constant elements, as similar and simple as possible, and
to conceive their union and separation to obey constant laws, is what a
natural philosopher will inevitably do so soon as his interest is not
merely to utter experience but to understand it. Democritus brought this
scientific ideal to its ultimate expression. By including psychic
existence in his atomic system, he indicated a problem which natural
science has since practically abandoned but which it may some day be
compelled to take up. The atoms of Democritus seem to us gross, even for
chemistry, and their quality would have to undergo great transformation
if they were to support intelligibly psychic being as well; but that
very grossness and false simplicity had its merits, and science must be
for ever grateful to the man who at its inception could so clearly
formulate its mechanical ideal. That the world is not so intelligible
as we could wish is not to be wondered at. In other respects also it
fails to respond to our ideals; yet our hope must be to find it more
propitious to the intellect as well as to all the arts in proportion as
we learn better how to live in it.</p>
<p>The atoms of what we call hydrogen or oxygen may well turn out to be
worlds, as the stars are which make atoms for astronomy. Their inner
organisation might be negligible on our rude plane of being; did it
disclose itself, however, it would be intelligible in its turn only if
constant parts and constant laws were discernible within each system. So
that while atomism at a given level may not be a final or metaphysical
truth, it will describe, on every level, the practical and efficacious
structure of the world. We owe to Democritus this ideal of practical
intelligibility; and he is accordingly an eternal spokesman of reason.
His system, long buried with other glories of the world, has been partly
revived; and although it cannot be verified in haste, for it represents
an ultimate ideal, every advance in science reconstitutes it in some
particular. Mechanism is not one principle of explanation among others.
In natural philosophy, where to explain means to discover origins,
transmutations, and laws, mechanism is explanation itself.</p>
<p>Heraclitus had the good fortune of having his physics absorbed by Plato.
It is a pity that Democritus' physics was not absorbed by Aristotle. For
with the flux observed, and mechanism conceived to explain it, the
theory of existence is complete; and had a complete physical theory been
incorporated into the Socratic philosophy, wisdom would have lacked none
of its parts. Democritus, however, appeared too late, when ideal science
had overrun the whole field and initiated a verbal and dialectical
physics; so that Aristotle, for all his scientific temper and studies,
built his natural philosophy on a lamentable misunderstanding, and
condemned thought to confusion for two thousand years.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Socrates and the autonomy of mind.</div>
<p>If the happy freedom of the Greeks from religious dogma made them the
first natural philosophers, their happy political freedom made them the
first moralists. It was no accident that Socrates walked the Athenian
agora; it was no petty patriotism that made him shrink from any other
scene. His science had its roots there, in the personal independence,
intellectual vivacity, and clever dialectic of his countrymen. Ideal
science lives in discourse; it consists in the active exercise of
reason, in signification, appreciation, intent, and self-expression. Its
sum total is to know oneself, not as psychology or anthropology might
describe a man, but to know, as the saying is, one's own mind. Nor is he
who knows his own mind forbidden to change it; the dialectician has
nothing to do with future possibilities or with the opinion of anyone
but the man addressed. This kind of truth is but adequate veracity; its
only object is its own intent. Having developed in the spirit the
consciousness of its meanings and purposes, Socrates rescued logic and
ethics for ever from authority. With his friends the Sophists, he made
man the measure of all things, after bidding him measure himself, as
they neglected to do, by his own ideal. That brave humanity which had
first raised its head in Hellas and had endowed so many things in heaven
and earth, where everything was hitherto monstrous, with proportion and
use, so that man's works might justify themselves to his mind, now found
in Socrates its precise definition; and it was naturally where the Life
of Reason had been long cultivated that it came finally to be conceived.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Plato gave the ideal its full expression.</div>
<p>Socrates had, however, a plebeian strain in his humanity, and his
utilitarianism, at least in its expression, hardly did justice to what
gives utility to life. His condemnation for atheism—if we choose to
take it symbolically—was not altogether unjust: the gods of Greece were
not honoured explicitly enough in his philosophy. Human good appeared
there in its principle; you would not set a pilot to mend shoes, because
you knew your own purpose; but what purposes a civilised soul might
harbour, and in what highest shapes the good might appear, was a problem
that seems not to have attracted his genius. It was reserved to Plato to
bring the Socratic ethics to its sublimest expression and to elicit from
the depths of the Greek conscience those ancestral ideals which had
inspired 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 was horror at the abandonment of all creative virtues
that brought Plato to conceive them so sharply and to preach them in so
sad a tone. It was after all but the love of beauty that made him
censure the poets; for like a true Greek and a true lover he wished to
see beauty flourish in the real world. 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 he broke away from political
preoccupations and turned to the inner life, his interpretations proved
the absolute sufficiency of the Socratic method; and he left nothing
pertinent unsaid on ideal love and ideal immortality.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Aristotle supplied its natural basis.</div>
<p>Beyond this point no rendering of the Life of Reason has ever been
carried, Aristotle improved the detail, and gave breadth and precision
to many a part. If Plato possessed greater imaginative splendour and
more enthusiasm in austerity, Aristotle had perfect sobriety and
adequacy, with greater fidelity to the common sentiments of his race.
Plato, by virtue of his scope and plasticity, together with a certain
prophetic zeal, outran at times the limits of the Hellenic and the
rational; he saw human virtue so surrounded and oppressed by physical
dangers that he wished to give it mythical sanctions, and his fondness
for transmigration and nether punishments was somewhat more than
playful. If as a work of imagination his philosophy holds the first
place, Aristotle's has the decisive advantage of being the unalloyed
expression of reason. In Aristotle the conception of human nature is
perfectly sound; everything ideal has a natural basis and everything
natural an ideal development. His ethics, when thoroughly digested and
weighed, especially when the meagre outlines are filled in with Plato's
more discursive expositions, will seem therefore entirely final. The
Life of Reason finds there its classic explication.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of restatement.</div>
<p>As it is improbable that there will soon be another people so free from
preoccupations, so gifted, and so fortunate as the Greeks, or capable in
consequence of so well exemplifying humanity, so also it is improbable
that a philosopher will soon arise with Aristotle's scope, judgment, or
authority, one knowing so well how to be both reasonable and exalted. It
might seem vain, therefore, to try to do afresh what has been done
before with unapproachable success; and instead of writing inferior
things at great length about the Life of Reason, it might be simpler to
read and to propagate what Aristotle wrote with such immortal justness
and masterly brevity. But times change; and though the principles of
reason remain the same the facts of human life and of human conscience
alter. A new background, a new basis of application, appears for logic,
and it may be useful to restate old truths in new words, the better to
prove their eternal validity. Aristotle is, in his morals, Greek,
concise, and elementary. 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 modern times would be substituted for them, being less
sophisticated and of a nobler stamp; but to our eyes they disguise what
is profound and universal in natural morality by embodying it in images
which do not belong to our life. Our direst struggles and the last
sanctions of our morality do not appear in them. The pagan world,
because its maturity was simpler than our crudeness, seems childish to
us. We do not find there our sins and holiness, our love, charity, and
honour.</p>
<p>The Greek too would not find in our world the things he valued most,
things to which he surrendered himself, perhaps, with a more constant
self-sacrifice—piety, country, friendship, and beauty; and he might add
that his ideals were rational and he could attain them, while ours are
extravagant and have been missed. Yet even if we acknowledged his
greater good fortune, it would be impossible for us to go back and
become like him. To make the attempt would show no sense of reality and
little sense of humour. We must dress in our own clothes, if we do not
wish to substitute a masquerade for practical existence. What we can
adopt from Greek morals is only the abstract principle of their
development; their foundation in all the extant forces of human nature
and their effort toward establishing a perfect harmony among them. These
forces themselves have perceptibly changed, at least in their relative
power. Thus we are more conscious of wounds to stanch and wrongs to
fight against, and less of goods to attain. The movement of conscience
has veered; the centre of gravity lies in another part of the character.</p>
<p>Another circumstance that invites a restatement of rational ethics is
the impressive illustration of their principle which subsequent history
has afforded. Mankind has been making extraordinary experiments of which
Aristotle could not dream; and their result is calculated to clarify
even his philosophy. For in some respects it needed experiments and
clarification. He had been led into a systematic fusion of dialectic
with physics, and of this fusion all pretentious modern philosophy is
the aggravated extension. Socrates' pupils could not abandon his ideal
principles, yet they could not bear to abstain from physics altogether;
they therefore made a mock physics in moral terms, out of which theology
was afterward developed. Plato, standing nearer to Socrates and being no
naturalist by disposition, never carried the fatal experiment beyond the
mythical stage. He accordingly remained the purer moralist, much as
Aristotle's judgment may be preferred in many particulars. Their
relative position may be roughly indicated by saying that Plato had no
physics and that Aristotle's physics was false; so that ideal science in
the one suffered from want of environment and control, while in the
other it suffered from misuse in a sphere where it had no application.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Plato's myths in lieu of physics.</div>
<p>What had happened was briefly this: Plato, having studied many sorts of
philosophy and being a bold and universal genius, was not satisfied to
leave all physical questions pending, as his master had done. He
adopted, accordingly, Heraclitus's doctrine of the immediate, which he
now called the realm of phenomena; for what exists at any instant, if
you arrest and name it, turns out to have been an embodiment of some
logical essence, such as discourse might define; in every fact some idea
makes its appearance, and such an apparition of the ideal is a
phenomenon. Moreover, another philosophy had made a deep impression on
Plato's mind and had helped to develop Socratic definitions: Parmenides
had called the concept of pure Being the only reality; and to satisfy
the strong dialectic by which this doctrine was supported and at the
same time to bridge the infinite chasm between one formless substance
and many appearances irrelevant to it, Plato substituted the many
Socratic ideas, all of which were relevant to appearance, for the one
concept of Parmenides. The ideas thus acquired what is called
metaphysical subsistence; for they stood in the place of the Eleatic
Absolute, and at the same time were the realities that phenomena
manifested.</p>
<p>The technique of this combination is much to be admired; but the feat is
technical and adds nothing to the significance of what Plato has to say
on any concrete subject. This barren triumph was, however, fruitful in
misunderstandings. The characters and values a thing possessed were now
conceived to subsist apart from it, and might even have preceded it and
caused its existence; a mechanism composed of values and definitions
could thus be placed behind phenomena to constitute a substantial
physical world. Such a dream could not be taken seriously, until good
sense was wholly lost and a bevy of magic spirits could be imagined
peopling the infinite and yet carrying on the business of earth.
Aristotle rejected the metaphysical subsistence of ideas, but thought
they might still be essences operative in nature, if only they were
identified with the life or form of particular things. The dream thus
lost its frank wildness, but none of its inherent incongruity: for the
sense in which characters and values make a thing what it is, is purely
dialectical. They give it its status in the ideal world; but the
appearance of these characters and values here and now is what needs
explanation in physics, an explanation which can be furnished, of
course, only by the physical concatenation and distribution of causes.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Aristotle's final causes. Modern science can avoid such
expedients.</div>
<p>Aristotle himself did not fail to Aristotle's make this necessary
distinction between efficient cause and formal essence; but as his
science was only natural history, and mechanism had no plausibility in
his eyes, the efficiency of the cause was always due, in his view, to
its ideal quality; as in heredity the father's human character, not his
physical structure, might seem to warrant the son's humanity. Every
ideal, before it could be embodied, had to pre-exist in some other
embodiment; but as when the ultimate purpose of the cosmos is considered
it seems to lie beyond any given embodiment, the highest ideal must
somehow exist disembodied. It must pre-exist, thought Aristotle, in
order to supply, by way of magic attraction, a physical cause for
perpetual movement in the world.</p>
<p>It must be confessed, in justice to this consummate philosopher, who is
not less masterly in the use of knowledge than unhappy in divination,
that the transformation of the highest good into a physical power is
merely incidental 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 and every detail in its definition is based on
discrimination between the better and the worse. No accommodation to the
ways of nature is here allowed to cloud the kingdom of heaven; this
deity is not condemned to do whatever happens nor to absorb whatever
exists. It is mythical only in its physical application; in moral
philosophy it remains a legitimate conception.</p>
<p>Truth certainly exists, if existence be not too mean an attribute for
that eternal realm which is tenanted by ideals; but truth is repugnant
to physical or psychical being. Moreover, truth may very well be
identified with an impassible intellect, which should do nothing but
possess all truth, with no point of view, no animal warmth, and no
transitive process. Such an intellect and truth are expressions having a
different metaphorical background and connotation, but, when thought
out, an identical import. They both attempt to evoke that ideal standard
which human thought proposes to itself. This function is their effective
essence. It insures their eternal fixity, and this property surely
endows them with a very genuine and sublime reality. What is fantastic
is only the dynamic function attributed to them by Aristotle, which
obliges them to inhabit some fabulous extension to the physical world.
Even this physical efficacy, however, is spiritualised as much as
possible, since deity is said to move the cosmos only as an object of
love or an object of knowledge may move the mind. Such efficacy is
imputed to a hypostasised end, but evidently resides in fact in the
functioning and impulsive spirit that conceives and pursues an ideal,
endowing it with whatever attraction it may seem to have. The absolute
intellect described by Aristotle remains, therefore, as pertinent to
the Life of Reason as Plato's idea of the good. Though less
comprehensive (for it abstracts from all animal interests, from all
passion and mortality), it is more adequate and distinct in the region
it dominates. It expresses sublimely the goal of speculative thinking;
which is none other than to live as much as may be in the eternal and to
absorb and be absorbed in the truth.</p>
<p>The rest of ancient philosophy belongs to the decadence and rests in
physics on eclecticism and in morals on despair. That creative breath
which had stirred the founders and legislators of Greece no longer
inspired their descendants. Helpless to control the course of events,
they took refuge in abstention or in conformity, and their ethics became
a matter of private economy and sentiment, no longer aspiring to mould
the state or give any positive aim to existence. The time was
approaching when both speculation and morals were to regard the other
world; reason had abdicated the throne, and religion, after that brief
interregnum, resumed it for long ages.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Transcendentalism true but inconsequential.</div>
<p>Such are the threads which tradition puts into the hands of an observer
who at the present time might attempt to knit the Life of Reason ideally
together. The problem is to unite a trustworthy conception of the
conditions under which man lives with an adequate conception of his
interests. Both conceptions, fortunately, lie before us. Heraclitus and
Democritus, in systems easily seen to be complementary, gave long ago a
picture of nature such as all later observation, down to our own day,
has done nothing but fill out and confirm. Psychology and physics still
repeat their ideas, often with richer detail, but never with a more
radical or prophetic glance. Nor does the transcendental philosophy, in
spite of its self-esteem, add anything essential. It was a thing taken
for granted in ancient and scholastic philosophy that a being dwelling,
like man, in the immediate, whose moments are in flux, needed
constructive reason to interpret his experience and paint in his
unstable consciousness some symbolic picture of the world. To have
reverted to this constructive process and studied its stages is an
interesting achievement; but the construction is already made by
common-sense and science, and it was visionary insolence in the Germans
to propose to make that construction otherwise. Retrospective
self-consciousness is dearly bought if it inhibits the intellect and
embarrasses the inferences which, in its spontaneous operation, it has
known perfectly how to make. In the heat of scientific theorising or
dialectical argument it is sometimes salutary to be reminded that we are
men thinking; but, after all, it is no news. We know that life is a
dream, and how should thinking be more? Yet the thinking must go on,
and the only vital question is to what practical or poetic conceptions
it is able to lead us.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Verbal ethics.</div>
<p>Similarly the Socratic philosophy affords a noble and genuine account of
what goods may be realised by living. Modern theory has not done so much
to help us here, however, as it has in physics. It seldom occurs to
modern moralists that theirs is the science of all good and the art of
its attainment; they think only of some set of categorical precepts or
some theory of moral sentiments, abstracting altogether from the ideals
reigning in society, in science, and in art. They deal with the
secondary question 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 in fancy in order to become superstition overlaid
with reasoning. They divide man into compartments and the less they
leave in the one labelled "morality" the more sublime they think their
morality is; and sometimes pedantry and scholasticism are carried so far
that nothing but an abstract sense of duty remains in the broad region
which should contain all human goods.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Spinoza and the Life of Reason.</div>
<p>Such trivial sanctimony in morals is doubtless due to artificial views
about the conditions of welfare; the basis is laid in authority rather
than 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 sufficient interest in culture. Spinoza brought man back into
nature, and made him the nucleus of all moral values, showing how he may
recognise his environment and how he may master it. But Spinoza's
sympathy with mankind fell short of imagination; any noble political or
poetical ideal eluded him. Everything impassioned seemed to him insane,
everything human necessarily petty. Man was to be a pious tame animal,
with the stars shining above his head. Instead of imagination Spinoza
cultivated mysticism, which is indeed an alternative. A prophet in
speculation, he remained a levite in sentiment. Little or nothing would
need to be changed in his system if the Life of Reason, in its higher
ranges, were to be grafted upon it; but such affiliation is not
necessary, and it is rendered unnatural by the lack of sweep and
generosity in Spinoza's practical ideals.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Modern and classic sources of inspiration.</div>
<p>For moral philosophy we are driven back, then, upon the ancients; but
not, of course, for moral inspiration. Industrialism and democracy, the
French Revolution, the Renaissance, and even the Catholic system, which
in the midst of ancient illusions enshrines so much tenderness and
wisdom, still live in the world, though forgotten by philosophers, and
point unmistakably toward their several goals. Our task is not to
construct but only to interpret ideals, confronting them with one
another and with the conditions which, for the most part, they alike
ignore. There is no need of refuting anything, for the will which is
behind all ideals and behind most dogmas cannot itself be refuted; but
it may be enlightened and led to reconsider its intent, when its
satisfaction is seen to be either naturally impossible or inconsistent
with better things. The age of controversy is past; that of
interpretation has succeeded.</p>
<p>Here, then, is the programme of the following work: Starting with the
immediate flux, in which all objects and impulses are given, to describe
the Life of Reason; that is, to note what facts and purposes seem to be
primary, to show how the conception of nature and life gathers around
them, and to point to the ideals of thought and action which are
approached by this gradual mastering of experience by reason. A great
task, which it would be beyond the powers of a writer in this age either
to execute or to conceive, had not the Greeks drawn for us the outlines
of an ideal culture at a time when life was simpler than at present and
individual intelligence more resolute and free.</p>
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