The Life of Reason by George Santayana (best black authors txt) 📖
- Author: George Santayana
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There is a second constituent of current psychology which is indeed a science, but not a science of matters of fact—I mean the dialectic of ideas. The character of father, for example, implies a son, and this relation, involved in the ideas both of son and of father, implies further that a transmitted essence or human nature is shared by both. Every idea, if its logical texture is reflected upon, will open out into a curious world constituted by distinguishing the constituents of that idea more clearly and making explicit its implicit structure and relations. When an idea has practical intent and is a desire, its dialectic is even more remarkable. If I love a man I thereby love all those who share whatever makes me love him, and I thereby hate whatever tends to deprive him of this excellence. If it should happen, however, that those who resembled him most in amiability—say by flattering me no less than he did—were precisely his mortal enemies, the logic of my affections would become somewhat involved. I might end either by striving to reconcile the rivals or by discovering that what I loved was not the man at all, but only an office exercised by him in my regard which any one else might also exercise.
These inner lucubrations, however, while they lengthen the moment's vista and deepen present intent, give no indication whatever about the order or distribution of actual feelings. They are out of place in a psychology that means to be an account of what happens in the world. For these dialectical implications do not actually work themselves out. They have no historical or dynamic value. The man that by mistake or courtesy I call a father may really have no son, any more than Herodotus for being the father of history; or having had a son, he may have lost him; or the creature sprung from his loins may be a misshapen idiot, having nothing ideal in common with his parent. Similarly my affection for a friend, having causes much deeper than discourse, may cling to him through all transformations in his qualities and in his attitude toward me; and it may never pass to others for resembling him, nor take, in all its days, a Platonic direction. The impulse on which that dialectic was based may exhaust its physical energy, and all its implications may be nipped in the bud and be condemned for ever to the limbo of things unborn.
Spinoza's account of the passions is a beautiful example of dialectical psychology, beautiful because it shows so clearly the possibilities and impossibilities in such a method. Spinoza began with self-preservation, which was to be the principle of life and the root of all feelings. The violence done to physics appears in this beginning. Self-preservation, taken strictly, is a principle not illustrated in nature, where everything is in flux, and where habits destructive or dangerous to the body are as conspicuous as protective instincts. Physical mechanism requires reproduction, which implies death, and it admits suicide. Spinoza himself, far too noble a mind to be fixed solely on preserving its own existence, was compelled to give self-preservation an extravagant meaning in order to identify it with "intellectual love of God" or the happy contemplation of that natural law which destroyed all individuals. To find the self-preserving man you must take him after he has ceased to grow and before he has begun to love. Self-preservation, being thus no principle of natural history, the facts or estimations classed under that head need to be referred instead to one of two other principles—either to mechanical equilibrium and habit, or to dialectical consistency in judgment.
Self-preservation might express, perhaps, the values which conceived events acquire in respect to a given attitude of will, to an arrested momentary ideal. The actual state of any animal, his given instincts and tensions, are undoubtedly the point of origin from which all changes and relations are morally estimated; and if this attitude is afterward itself subjected to estimation, that occurs by virtue of its affinity or conflict with the living will of another moment. Valuation is dialectical, not descriptive, nor contemplative of a natural process. It might accordingly be developed by seeing what is implied in the self-preservation, or rather expression, of a will which by that dialectic would discover its ideal scope.
Such a principle, however, could never explain the lapse of that attitude itself. A natural process cannot be governed by the ideal relations which conceived things acquire by being represented in one of its moments. Spinoza, however, let himself wander into this path and made the semblance of an attempt, indeed not very deceptive, to trace the sequence of feelings by their mutual implication. The changes in life were to be explained by what the crystallised posture of life might be at a single instant. The arrow's flight was to be deduced from its instantaneous position. A passion's history was to be the history of what would have been its expression if it had had no history at all.
A man suffered by destiny to maintain for ever a single unchanged emotion might indeed think out its multifarious implications much in Spinoza's way. It is in that fashion that parties and sects, when somewhat stable, come to define their affinities and to know their friends and enemies all over the universe of discourse. Suppose, for instance, that I feel some titillation on reading a proposition concerning the contrast between Paul's idea of Peter and Peter's idea of himself, a titillation which is accompanied by the idea of Spinoza, its external cause. Now he who loves an effect must proportionately love its cause, and titillation accompanied by the idea of its external cause is, Spinoza has proved, what men call love. I therefore find that I love Spinoza. Having got so far, I may consider further, referring to another demonstration in the book, that if some one gives Spinoza joy—Hobbes, for instance—my delight in Spinoza's increased perfection, consequent upon his joy and my love of him, accompanied by the idea of Hobbes, its external cause, constitutes love on my part for the redoubtable Hobbes as well. Thus the periphery of my affections may expand indefinitely, till it includes the infinite, the ultimate external cause of all my titillations. But how these interesting discoveries are interrupted before long by a desire for food, or by an indomitable sense that Hobbes and the infinite are things I do not love, is something that my dialectic cannot deduce; for it was the values radiating from a given impulse, the implications of its instant object, that were being explicated, not at all the natural forces that carry a man through that impulse and beyond it to the next phase of his dream, a phase which if it continues the former episode must continue it spontaneously, by grace of mechanical forces.
When dialectic is thus introduced into psychology, an intensive knowledge of the heart is given out for distributive knowledge of events. Such a study, when made by a man of genius, may furnish good spiritual reading, for it will reveal what our passions mean and what sentiments they would lead to if they could remain fixed and dictate all further action. This insight may make us aware of strange inconsistencies in our souls, and seeing how contrary some of our ideals are to others and how horrible, in some cases, would be their ultimate expression, we may be shocked into setting our house in order; and in trying to understand ourselves we may actually develop a self that can be understood. Meantime this inner discipline will not enlighten us about the march of affairs. It will not give us a key to evolution, either in ourselves or in others. Even while we refine our aspirations, the ground they sprang from will be eaten away beneath our feet. Instead of developing yesterday's passion, to-day may breed quite another in its place; and if, having grown old and set in our mental posture, we are incapable of assuming another, and are condemned to carrying on the dialectic of our early visions into a new-born world, to be a schoolmaster's measuring-rod for life's infinite exuberance, we shall find ourselves at once in a foreign country, speaking a language that nobody understands. No destiny is more melancholy than that of the dialectical prophet, who makes more rigid and tyrannous every day a message which every day grows less applicable and less significant.
That remaining portion of psychology which is a science, and a science of matters of fact, is physiological; it belongs to natural history and constitutes the biology of man. Soul, which was not originally distinguished from life, is there studied in its natural operation in the body and in the world. Psychology then remains what it was in Aristotle's De Anima—an ill-developed branch of natural science, pieced out with literary terms and perhaps enriched by occasional dramatic interpretations. The specifically mental or psychic element consists in the feeling which accompanies bodily states and natural situations. This feeling is discovered and distributed at the same time that bodies and other material objects are defined; for when a man begins to decipher permanent and real things, and to understand that they are merely material, he thereby sets apart, in contrast with such external objects, those images and emotions which can no longer enter into the things' texture. The images and emotions remain, however, attached to those things, for they are refractions of them through bodily organs, or effects of their presence on the will, or passions fixed upon them as their object.
In parts of biology which do not deal with man observers do not hesitate to refer in the same way to the pain, the desire, the intention, which they may occasionally read in an animal's aspect. Darwin, for
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