The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress

by George Santayana

But myth is confused with the moral values it expresses.

To separate fable from knowledge nothing is therefore requisite except close scrutiny and the principle of parsimony. Were mythology merely a poetic substitute for natural science the advance of science would sufficiently dispose of it. What remained over would, like the myths in Plato, be at least better than total silence on a subject that interests us and makes us think, although we have no means of testing our thoughts in its regard. But the chief source of perplexity and confusion in mythology is its confusion with moral truth. The myth which originally was but a symbol substituted for empirical descriptions becomes in the sequel an idol substituted for ideal values. This complication, from which half the troubles of philosophy arise, deserves our careful attention.

European history has now come twice upon the dissolution of mythologies, first among the Stoics and then among the Protestants. The circumstances in the two cases were very unlike; so were the mythical systems that were discarded; and yet the issue was in both instances similar. Greek and Christian mythology have alike ended in pantheism. So soon as the constructions of the poets and the Fathers were seen to be ingenious fictions, criticism was confronted with an obvious duty: to break up the mythical compound furnished by tradition into its elements, putting on one side what natural observation or actual history had supplied, and on the other what dramatic imagination had added. For a cool and disinterested observer the task, where evidence and records were not wanting, would be simple enough. But the critic in this case would not usually be cool or disinterested. His religion was concerned; he had no other object to hang his faith and happiness upon than just this traditional hybrid which his own enlightenment was now dissolving. To which part should he turn for support? In which quarter should he continue to place the object of his worship?

Neo-Platonic revision.

From the age of the Sophists to the final disappearance of paganism nearly a thousand years elapsed. A thousand years from the infliction of a mortal wound to the moment of extinction is a long agony. Religions do not disappear when they are discredited; it is requisite that they should be replaced. For a thousand years the augurs may have laughed, they were bound nevertheless to stand at their posts until the monks came to relieve them. During this prolonged decrepitude paganism lived on inertia, by accretions from the Orient, and by philosophic reinterpretations. Of these reinterpretations the first was that attempted by Plato, and afterward carried out by the neo-Platonists and Christians into the notion of a supernatural spiritual hierarchy; above, a dialectical deity, the hypostasis of intellect and its ontological phases; below, a host of angels and demons, hypostases of faculties, moral influences, and evil promptings. In other words, in the diremption of myths which yielded here a natural phenomenon to be explained and there a moral value to be embodied, Platonism attached divinity exclusively to the moral element. The ideas, which were essentially moral functions, were many and eternal; their physical embodiments were adventitious to them and constituted a lapse, a misfortune to be wiped out by an eventual reunion of the alienated nature with its own ideal. Religion in such a system necessarily meant redemption. In this movement paganism turned toward the future, toward supernatural and revealed religion, and away from its own naturalistic principle. Revelation, as Plato himself had said, was needed to guide a mind which distrusted phenomena and recoiled from earthly pursuits.

It made mythical entities of abstractions.

This religion had the strength of despair, but all else in it was weakness. Apart from a revelation which, until Christianity appeared, remained nebulous and arbitrary, there could be no means of maintaining the existence of those hypostasised moral entities. The effort to separate them from the natural functions which they evidently expressed could not succeed while any critical acumen or independence subsisted in the believer. Platonism, to become a religion, had to appeal to superstition. Unity, for instance (which, according to Plato himself, is a category applicable to everything concomitantly with the complementary category of multiplicity, for everything, he says, is evidently both one and many)—unity could not become the One, an independent and supreme deity, unless the meaning and function of unity were altogether forgotten and a foolish idolatry, agape at words, were substituted for understanding. Some one had to come with an air of authority and report his visions of the One before such an entity could be added to the catalogue of actual existences. The reality of all neo-Platonic hypostasis was thus dependent on revelation and on forgetting the meaning once conveyed by the terms so mysteriously transfigured into metaphysical beings.

Hypostasis ruins ideals.

This divorce of neo-Platonic ideas from the functions they originally represented in human life and discourse was found in the end to defeat the very interest that had prompted it—enthusiasm for the ideal. Enthusiasm for the ideal had led Plato to treat all beauties as stepping-stones toward a perfect beauty in which all their charms might be present together, eternally and without alloy. Enthusiasm for the ideal had persuaded him that mortal life was only an impeded effort to fall back into eternity. These inspired but strictly unthinkable suggestions fell from his lips in his zeal to express how much the burden and import of experience exceeded its sensuous vehicle in permanence and value. A thousand triangles revealed one pregnant proportion of lines and areas; a thousand beds and bridles served one perpetual purpose in human life, and found in fulfilling it their essence and standard of excellence; a thousand fascinations taught the same lesson and coalesced into one reverent devotion to beauty and nobility wherever they might bloom. It was accordingly a poignant sense for the excellence of real things that made Plato wish to transcend them; his metaphysics was nothing but a visionary intuition of values, an idealism in the proper sense of the word. But when the momentum of such enthusiasm remained without its motive power, and its transcendence without its inspiration in real experience, idealism ceased to be an idealisation, an interpretation of reality reaching prophetically to its goals. It became a super-numerary second physics, a world to which an existence was attributed which could be hardly conceived and was certainly supported by no evidence, while that significance which it really possessed in reference to natural processes was ignored, or even denied. An idealism which had consisted in understanding and discriminating values now became a superstition incapable of discerning existences. It added a prodigious fictitious setting to the cosmos in which man had to operate; it obscured his real interests and possible happiness by seeking to transport him into that unreal environment, with its fantastic and disproportionate economy; and, worst of all, it robbed the ideal of its ideality by tearing it up from its roots in natural will and in experienced earthly benefits. For an ideal is not ideal if it is the ideal of nothing. In that case it is only a ghostly existence, with no more moral significance or authority in relation to the observer than has any happy creature which may happen to exist somewhere in the unknown reaches of the universe.

The Stoic revision.