Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

by George Santayana

But as Jean Lahor is only a pseudonym for the man, so the sympathy with India which that name indicates is only one phase of the thinker. Our poet pursued the study of medicine; he realized in the concrete the orderly complexities of natural law and the sordid realities of human life. The vague, sensuous enthusiasm with which he had followed the flux of images in his fancy was now sobered by an accurate knowledge of the miseries, the defeats, the shames that lie beneath. His poetic sense of illusion was deepened into a moral sense of wrong. The same keenness of perception, the same power of graphic expression, which had made him dwell on the luxuriance of Nature now made him paint the irony and brutality of life. There is here and there a touch of bitterness and exaggeration in the satire, as if the man of science felt a personal resentment against a world that had so cheated the poet.

Yet the two descriptions are far from inconsistent; we have merely learned to understand as a process and to conceive as an inner experience what before we had admired as a spectacle. A scientific view has come to give definition and coherence to phenomena which a poetical pantheism merely saluted as they passed and disappeared into the primordial darkness, or, if you like, into the primordial light. The two systems differ in tone and in method, but not in result. Natural science, like pantheism, presents us with a universal flux, in which something, we known not what, moves, we know not why, we know not whither. The method of this transformation may be more or less accurately described, the general sense of continuity and necessity may find a more or less specific expression in the various fields of experience; yet the outcome is still the same whirligig. We find ourselves in either case confronted by the same gloire du néant, by a nothing that lives and that is beautiful in its nothingness.

These two elements in Jean Lahor's philosophy, the Oriental and the scientific, would thus tend alike to represent man with his intelligence as the product and the captive of an irrational engine called the universe. Many a man accepts this solution and reconciles himself as best he can to the truth as it appears to him. What is there, he may say, so dreadful in mutability? What so intolerable in ultimate ignorance? We know what we need to know, and things last, perhaps, as long as they deserve to last. So, once convinced that his naturalistic philosophy is final, a man will silence the demands of his own reason and call them chimerical. There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves. They will put up with present suffering, with the certainty of death, with solitude, with shame, with wrong, with the expectation of eternal damnation. In the face of such things, they can not only be happy for the moment, but solemnly thank God for having brought them into existence. Habit is stronger than reason, and the respect for fact stronger than the respect for the ideal; nor would the ideal and reason ever prevail did they not make up in persistence what they lack in momentary energy.

It would have been easy, therefore, for Jean Lahor, as for the rest of us, to remain in the naturalistic world, had he had only poetical intuition, or only scientific training, or only both. But there was also in him a third and a moral element, an impulse toward ideal creation, a spark of Promethean fire. He felt a genuine admiration for that humane courage which made the Greeks, for all their clear consciousness of fate, hopeful without illusions and independent without rebellion. In the bosom of the intractable infinite he still distinguished the work of human reason—the cosmos of society, character, and art—like a Noah's ark floating in the Deluge. His imagination had succumbed to the dream of sense; his art had not attempted the task of imposing a meaning or an immortal form upon Nature: but his conscience and his political instinct had held out against the fascinations of Maya. The Greek asserted himself here against the barbarian, the moralist against the naturalist. Nor was this a merely accidental addition or an inconsistency. It was the explicit expression of that creative reason which had all along chafed under the dominion of brute fact and of perpetual illusion. The same moral energy which had made him a pessimist in the presence of Nature made him an idealist at the threshold of life.

For why should the natural world ever come to be called a world of illusion? To call the vivid objects of sense illusory is to compare them to their disadvantage with something else which we conceive as more worthy of the title of reality. This deeper reality must be something ideal, something permanent, something conceived by the intellect, and which only a man having faith in the intellect could prefer to the objects of sense or fancy. The Hindoos that our author thinks so much akin to himself would hardly understand this rational bias of his thought, this foregone dissatisfaction with a world of infinite change and indefinite structure. They would accept as a natural fact that perpetual flux which he emphasizes as a paradox and laments as a calamity. In spite of his studied immersion in sensuous illusion, he is still a native of the sphere of intelligible things, and it is only the difficulty of finding the permanent beings which he is inclined to look for and in the presence of which he could alone rest, that makes him linger with tragic self-consciousness in the region of fleeting shadows. Accordingly we need not be surprised by the somewhat forced and pessimistic note of a pantheism which is really exotic, and we may be prepared to find the plastic mind asserting itself ultimately against that system. So Jean Lahor, after the groups of thoughts which he puts under the title of "L'orient" and "Le ciel du Nord," adds another group under the title of "Cosmos."

It would require a philosophical treatise of greater pretentions than the little book before us to explain fully how this cosmos can arise out of the chaos of mechanical forces, and how the life and the work of reason can be superposed upon the life of sense and imagination. Our author's vision, fixed as it is on concrete images and expressed in detached epigrams, does not always extend to the philosophical relations of his thoughts. Yet he offers, perhaps unconsciously, an admirable variation of that revolution of thought which is associated with the name of Kant. He proposes to us as the work of human intelligence what is commonly believed to be the work of God. The universe, apart from us, is a chaos, but it may be made a cosmos by our efforts and in our own minds. The laws of events, apart from us, are inhuman and irrational, but in the sphere of human activity they may be dominated by reason. We are a part of the blind energy behind Nature, but by virtue of that energy we impose our purposes on the part of Nature which we constitute or control. We can turn from the stupefying contemplation of an alien universe to the building of our own house, knowing that, alien as it is, that universe has chanced to blow its energy also into our will and to allow itself to be partially dominated by our intelligence. Our mere existence and the modicum of success we have attained in society, science, and art are the living proofs of this human power. The exercise of this power is the task appointed for us by the indomitable promptings of our own spirit, a task in which we need not labour without hope.

For as the various plants and animals have found foothold and room to grow, maintaining for long periods the life congenial to them, so the human race may be able to achieve something like its perfection and its ideal, maintaining for an indefinite time all that it values, not by virtue of an alleged intentional protection of Providence, but by its own watchful art and exceptional good fortune. The ideal is itself a function of the reality and cannot therefore be altogether out of harmony with the conditions of its own birth and persistence. Civilization is precarious, but it need not be short-lived. Its inception is already a proof that there exists an equilibrium of forces which is favourable to its existence; and there is no reason to suppose this equilibrium to be less stable than that which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits. There is no impossibility, therefore, in the hope that the human will may have time to understand itself, and, having understood itself, to realize the objects of its rational desire.

We see that the "Cosmos" here invoked is not inconsistent with the "Nothingness" before described. It is a triumph amid illusions, an order within chaos, la gloire du néant. This hint of a reconciliation between the practical optimism natural to an active being, and the speculative pessimism inevitable to an intelligent one, is happier than the muddled solutions of the same problem with which current philosophies have made us familiar. The philosophy suggested by Jean Lahor is that of Spinoza, if we subtract from the latter its mystical optimism, and add a broad appreciation of human culture. Man cannot attain his happiness by conforming to that which is hostile to himself; he can thus attain only his dissolution. But by using what is hostile to himself for his own ends, as far as his energy extends, he can make an oasis for himself in Nature, and being at peace with himself, be at peace also with her.

Such a view has some relation to the real conditions of human life and progress. What is called the higher optimism, on the contrary, commonly consists in recounting all the evils of existence with a radiant countenance, and telling us that they are all divine ministers of some glorious consummation; but what this consummation is never appears, and we are reduced in practice to a mere glorification of impulse. We are simply invited to accept the conditions of life as they are, and to find in incidental successes a compensation for incidental or—as we should say if we were sincere—for essential failures. Such an optimism impairs by a kind of philosophic Nature-worship that moral loyalty which consists in giving the highest honour to the highest, not to the strongest, things. It substitutes, as pantheism must, the study of tendencies for the study of ends, and the dignity of success for the dignity of justice.

This moral confusion our author avoids by his greater sincerity. He has understood how fundamentally that man is a dupe who does not begin by settling his accounts with Despair. There is no safety in lies; there is no safety even in "postulates." Let the worst of the truth appear, and when it has once seen the light, let it not be immediately wrapped up again in the swaddling clothes of an equivocal rhetoric. In such a disingenuous course there is both temerity and cowardice: temerity in throwing away the opportunity, always afforded by the recognition of fact, of cultivating the real faculties of human nature; cowardice in not being willing to face with patience and dignity the situation in which fate appears to have put us. That Nature is immense, that her laws are mechanical, that the existence and well-being of man upon earth are, from the point of view of the universe, an indifferent incident,—all this is in the first place to be clearly recognized. It is the lesson which both poetic contemplation and practical science had taught Jean Lahor.