The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress

by George Santayana

Science consequently retarded.

One consequence of this profound maladjustment is that science is hard to attain and is at first paradoxical. The change of scale required is violent and frustrates all the mind’s rhetorical habits. There is a constant feeling of strain and much flying back to the mother-tongue of myth and social symbol. Every wrong hypothesis is seized upon and is tried before any one will entertain the right one. Enthusiasm for knowledge is chilled by repeated failures and a great confusion cannot but reign in philosophy. A man with an eye for characteristic features in various provinces of experience is encouraged to deal with each upon a different principle; and where these provinces touch or actually fuse, he is at a loss what method of comprehension to apply. There sets in, accordingly, a tendency to use various methods at once or a different one on each occasion, as language, custom, or presumption seems to demand. Science is reduced by philosophers to plausible discourse, and the more plausible the discourse is, by leaning on all the heterogeneous prejudices of the hour, the more does it foster the same and discourage radical investigation.

Thus even Aristotle felt that good judgment and the dramatic habit of things altogether excluded the simple physics of Democritus. Indeed, as things then stood, Democritus had no right to his simplicity, except that divine right which comes of inspiration. His was an indefensible faith in a single radical insight, which happened nevertheless to be true. To justify that insight forensically it would have been necessary to change the range of human vision, making it telescopic in one region and microscopic in another; whereby the objects so transfigured would have lost their familiar aspect and their habitual context in discourse. Without such a startling change of focus nature can never seem everywhere mechanical. Hence, even to this day, people with broad human interests are apt to discredit a mechanical philosophy. Seldom can penetration and courage in thinking hold their own against the miscellaneous habits of discourse; and nobody remembers that moral values must remain captious, and imaginative life ignoble and dark, so long as the whole basis and application of them is falsely conceived. Discoveries in science are made only by near-sighted specialists, while the influence of public sentiment and policy still works systematically against enlightenment.

and speculation rendered necessary.

The maladaptation of sense to its objects has a second consequence: that speculation is in a way nobler for man than direct perception. For direct perception is wholly inadequate to render the force, the reality, the subtle relations of the object perceived, unless this object be a shell only, like a work of fine art, where nothing counts but the surface. Since the function of perception is properly to give understanding and dominion, direct perception is a defeat and, as it were, an insult to the mind, thus forced to busy itself about so unintelligible and dense an apparition. Æsthetic enthusiasm cares nothing about what the object inwardly is, what is its efficacious movement and real life. It revels selfishly in the harmonies of perception itself, harmonies which perhaps it attributes to the object through want of consideration. These æsthetic objects, which have no intrinsic unity or cohesion, lapse in the most melancholy and inexplicable fashion before our eyes. Then we cry that beauty wanes, that life is brief, and that its prizes are deceptive. Our minds have fed on casual aspects of nature, like tints in sunset clouds. Imaginative fervour has poured itself out exclusively on these apparitions, which are without relevant backing in the world; and long, perhaps, before this life is over, which we called too brief, we begin to pine for another, where just those images which here played so deceptively on the surface of the flux may be turned into fixed and efficacious realities. Meantime speculation amuses us with prophecies about what such realities might be. We look for them, very likely, in the wrong place, namely, in human poetry and eloquence, or at best in dialectic; yet even when stated in these mythical terms the hidden world divined in meditation seems nobler and, as we say, more real than the objects of sense. For we hope, in those speculative visions, to reach the permanent, the efficacious, the stanch principles of experience, something to rely on in prospect and appeal to in perplexity.

Science, in its prosaic but trustworthy fashion, passes likewise beyond the dreamlike unities and cadences which sense discloses; only, as science aims at controlling its speculation by experiment, the hidden reality it discloses is exactly like what sense perceives, though on a different scale, and not observable, perhaps, without a magic carpet of hypothesis, to carry the observer to the ends of the universe or, changing his dimensions, to introduce him into those infinitesimal abysses where nature has her workshop. In this region, were it sufficiently explored, we might find just those solid supports and faithful warnings which we were looking for with such ill success in our rhetorical speculations. The machinery disclosed would not be human; it would be machinery. But it would for that very reason serve the purpose which made us look for it instead of remaining, like the lower animals, placidly gazing on the pageants of sense, till some unaccountable pang forced us to spasmodic movement. It is doubtless better to find material engines—not necessarily inanimate, either—which may really serve to bring order, security, and progress into our lives, than to find impassioned or ideal spirits, that can do nothing for us except, at best, assure us that they are perfectly happy.

Dissatisfaction with mechanism partly natural.

The reigning aversion to mechanism is partly natural and partly artificial. The natural aversion cannot be wholly overcome. Like the aversion to death, to old age, to labour, it is called forth by man’s natural situation in a world which was not made for him, but in which he grew. That the efficacious structure of things should not be intentionally spectacular nor poetical, that its units should not be terms in common discourse, nor its laws quite like the logic of passion, is of course a hard lesson to learn. The learning, however—not to speak of its incidental delights—is so extraordinarily good for people that only with that instruction and the blessed renunciations it brings can clearness, dignity, or virility enter their minds. And of course, if the material basis of human strength could be discovered and better exploited, the free activity of the mind would be not arrested but enlarged. Geology adds something to the interest of landscape, and botany much to the charm of flowers; natural history increases the pleasure with which we view society and the justice with which we judge it. An instinctive sympathy, a solicitude for the perfect working of any delicate thing, as it makes the ruffian tender to a young child, is a sentiment inevitable even toward artificial organisms. Could we better perceive the fine fruits of order, the dire consequences of every specific cruelty or jar, we should grow doubly considerate toward all forms; for we exist through form, and the love of form is our whole real inspiration.

and partly artificial.

The artificial prejudice against mechanism is a fruit of party spirit. When a myth has become the centre or sanction for habits and institutions, these habits and institutions stand against any conception incompatible with that myth. It matters nothing that the values the myth was designed to express may remain standing without it, or may be transferred to its successor. Social and intellectual inertia is too great to tolerate so simple an evolution. It divides opinions not into false and true but into high and low, or even more frankly into those which are acceptable and comforting to its ruffled faith and those which are dangerous, alarming, and unfortunate. Imagine Socrates “viewing with alarm” the implications of an argument! This artificial prejudice is indeed modern and will not be eternal. Ancient sages, when they wished to rebuke the atheist, pointed to the very heavens which a sentimental religion would nowadays gladly prove to be unreal, lest the soul should learn something of their method. Yet the Ptolemaic spheres were no more manlike and far less rich in possibilities of life than the Copernican star-dust. The ancients thought that what was intelligible was divine. Order was what they meant by intelligence, and order productive of excellence was what they meant by reason. When they noticed that the stars moved perpetually and according to law, they seriously thought they were beholding the gods. The stars as we conceive them are not in that sense perfect. But the order which nature does not cease to manifest is still typical of all order, and is sublime. It is from these regions of embodied law that intelligibility and power combined come to make their covenant with us, as with all generations.