The Life of Reason by George Santayana (best black authors txt) 📖
- Author: George Santayana
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Among the blind, the retina having lost its function, the rest of the skin is said to recover its primordial sensitiveness to distance and light, so that the sightless have a clearer premonition of objects about them than seeing people could have in the dark. So when reason and the ordinary processes of sense are in abeyance a certain universal sensibility seems to return to the soul; influences at other times not appreciable make then a sensible impression, and automatic reactions may be run through in response to a stimulus normally quite insufficient. Now the complexity of nature is prodigious; everything that happens leaves, like buried cities, almost indelible traces which an eye, by chance attentive and duly prepared, can manage to read, recovering for a moment the image of an extinct life. Symbols, illegible to reason, can thus sometimes read themselves out in trance and madness. Faint vestiges may be found in matter of forms which it once wore, or which, like a perfume, impregnated and got lodgment within it. Slight echoes may suddenly reconstitute themselves in the mind's silence; and a half-stunned consciousness may catch brief glimpses of long-lost and irrelevant things. Real ghosts are such reverberations of the past, exceeding ordinary imagination and discernment both in vividness and in fidelity; they may not be explicable without appealing to material influences subtler than those ordinarily recognised, as they are obviously not discoverable without some derangement and hypertrophy of the senses.
That such subtler influences should exist is entirely consonant with reason and experience; but only a hankering tenderness for superstition, a failure to appreciate the function both of religion and of science, can lead to reverence for such oracular gibberish as these influences provoke. The world is weary of experimenting with magic. In utter seriousness and with immense solemnity whole races have given themselves up to exploiting these shabby mysteries; and while a new survey of the facts, in the light of natural science and psychology, is certainly not superfluous, it can be expected to lead to nothing but a more detailed and conscientious description of natural processes. The thought of employing such investigations to save at the last moment religious doctrines founded on moral ideas is a pathetic blunder; the obscene supernatural has nothing to do with rational religion. If it were discovered that wretched echoes of a past life could be actually heard by putting one's ear long enough to a tomb, and if (per impossibile) those echoes could be legitimately attributed to another mind, and to the very mind, indeed, whose former body was interred there, a melancholy chapter would indeed be added to man's earthly fortunes, since it would appear that even after death he retained, under certain conditions, a fatal attachment to his dead body and to the other material instruments of his earthly life. Obviously such a discovery would teach us more about dying than about immortality; the truths disclosed, since they would be disclosed by experiment and observation, would be psycho-physical truths, implying nothing about what a truly disembodied life might be, if one were attainable; for a disembodied life could by no possibility betray itself in spectres, rumblings, and spasms. Actual thunders from Sinai and an actual discovery of two stone tables would have been utterly irrelevant to the moral authority of the ten commandments or to the existence of a truly supreme being. No less irrelevant to a supramundane immortality is the length of time during which human spirits may be condemned to operate on earth after their bodies are quiet. In other words, spectral survivals would at most enlarge our conception of the soul's physical basis, spreading out the area of its manifestations; they could not possibly, seeing the survivals are physical, reveal the disembodied existence of the soul.
Such a disembodied existence, removed by its nature from the sphere of empirical evidence, might nevertheless be actual, and grounds of a moral or metaphysical type might be sought for postulating its reality. Life and the will to live are at bottom identical. Experience itself is transitive and can hardly arise apart from a forward effort and prophetic apprehension by which adjustments are made to a future unmistakably foreseen. This premonition, by which action seeks to justify and explain itself to reflection, may be analysed into a group of memories and sensations of movement, generating ideal expectations which might easily be disappointed; but scepticism about the future can hardly be maintained in the heat of action. A postulate acted on is an act of genuine and dogmatic faith. I not only postulate a morrow when I prepare for it, but ingenuously and heartily believe that the morrow will come. This faith does not amount to certitude; I may confess, if challenged, that before to-morrow I and the world and time itself might conceivably come to an end together; but that idle possibility, so long as it does not slacken action, will not disturb belief. Every moment of life accordingly trusts that life will continue; and this prophetic interpretation of action, so long as action lasts, amounts to continual faith in futurity.
A sophist might easily transform this psychological necessity into a dazzling proof of immortality. To believe anything, he might say, is to be active; but action involves faith in a future and in the fruits of action; and as no living moment can be without this confidence, belief in extinction would be self-contradictory and at no moment a possible belief. The question, however, is not whether every given moment has or has not a specious future before it to which it looks forward, but whether the realisation of such foresight, a realisation which during waking life is roughly usual, is incapable of failing. Now expectation, never without its requisite antecedents and natural necessity, often lacks fulfilment, and never finds its fulfilment entire; so that the necessity of a postulate gives no warrant for its verification. Expectation and action are constantly suspended together; and what happens whenever thought loses itself or stumbles, what happens whenever in its shifts it forgets its former objects, might well happen at crucial times to that train of intentions which we call a particular life or the life of humanity. The prophecy involved in action is not insignificant, but it is notoriously fallible and depends for its fulfilment on external conditions. The question accordingly really is whether a man expecting to live for ever or one expecting to die in his time has the more representative and trustworthy notion of the future. The question, so stated, cannot be solved by an appeal to evidence, which is necessarily all on one side, but only by criticising the value of evidence as against instinct and hope, and by ascertaining the relative status which assumption and observation have in experience.
The transcendental compulsion under which action labours of envisaging a future, and the animal instinct that clings to life and flees from death as the most dreadful of evils are the real grounds why immortality seems initially natural and good. Confidence in living for ever is anterior to the discovery that all men are mortal and to the discovery that the thinker is himself a man. These discoveries flatly contradict that confidence, in the form in which it originally presents itself, and all doctrines of immortality which adult philosophy can entertain are more or less subterfuges and after-thoughts by which the observed fact of mortality and the native inconceivability of death are more or less clumsily reconciled.
The most lordly and genuine fashion of asserting immortality would be to proclaim one's self an exception to the animal race and to point out that the analogy between one's singular self and others is altogether lame and purely conventional. Any proud barbarian, with a tincture of transcendental philosophy, might adopt this tone. "Creatures that perish," he might say, "are and can be nothing but puppets and painted shadows in my mind. My conscious will forbids its own extinction; it scorns to level itself with its own objects and instruments. The world, which I have never known to exist without me, exists by my co-operation and consent; it can never extinguish what lends it being. The death prophetically accepted by weaklings, with such small insight and courage, I mock and altogether defy: it can never touch me."
Such solipsistic boasts may not have been heard in historic times from the lips of men speaking in their own persons. Language has an irresistible tendency to make thought communistic and ideally transferable to others. It forbids a man to say of himself what it would be ridiculous to hear from another. Now solipsism in another man is a comic thing: and a mind, prompted perhaps by hell and heaven to speak solipsistically, is stopped by the laughable echo of its own words, when it remembers its bold sayings. Language, being social, resists a virgin egotism and forbids it to express itself publicly, no matter how well grounded it may be in transcendental logic and in animal instinct. Social convention is necessarily materialistic, since the beginning of all moral reasonableness consists in taming the transcendental conceit native to a living mind, in attaching it to its body, and bringing the will that thought itself absolute down to the rank of animals and men. Otherwise no man would acknowledge another's rights or even conceive his existence.
Primeval solipsism—the philosophy of untamed animal will—has accordingly taken to the usual by-paths and expressed itself openly only in myth or by a speculative abstraction in which the transcendental spirit, for which all the solipsistic privileges were still claimed, was distinguished from the human individual. The gods, it was said, were immortal; and although on earth spirit must submit to the yoke and service of matter, on whose occasions it must wait, yet there existed in the ether other creatures more normally and gloriously compounded, since their forms served and expressed their minds, which ruled also over the elements and feared no assault from time. With the advent of this mythology experience and presumption divided their realms; experience was allowed to shape men's notions of vulgar reality, but presumption, which could not be silenced, was allowed to suggest a second sphere, thinly and momentarily veiled to mortal sense, in which the premonitions of will were abundantly realised.
This expedient had the advantage of endowing the world with creatures that really satisfied human aspirations, such as at any moment they might be. The gods possessed longevity, beauty, magic celerity of movement, leisure, splendour of life, indefinite strength, and practical omniscience. When the gods were also expressions for natural forces, this function somewhat prejudiced their ideality, and they failed to correspond perfectly to what their worshippers would have most esteemed; but religious reformers tended to expunge naturalism from theology and to represent the gods as entirely admirable. The Greek
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