The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress

by George Santayana

Confusion in semi-moral subjects.

What confuses and retards science in these ambiguous regions is the difficulty of getting rid of the foreign element, or even of deciding what the element native to the object is. In political economy, for instance, it is far from clear whether the subject is moral, and therefore to be studied and expressed dialectically, or whether it is descriptive, and so in the end a matter of facts and of mechanics. Are you formulating an interest or tracing a sequence of events? And if both simultaneously, are you studying the world in order to see what acts, in a given situation, would serve your purpose and so be right, or are you taking note of your own intentions, and of those of other people, in order to infer from them the probable course of affairs? In the first case you are a moralist observing nature in order to use it; you are defining a policy, and that definition is not knowledge of anything except of your own heart. Neither you nor any one else may ever take such a single-minded and unchecked course in the world as the one you are excogitating. No one may ever have been guided in the past by any such absolute plan.

For this same reason, if (to take up the other supposition) you are a naturalist studying the actual movement of affairs, you would do well not to rely on the conscious views or intentions of anybody. A natural philosopher is on dangerous ground when he uses psychological or moral terms in his calculation. If you use such terms—and to forbid their use altogether would be pedantic—you should take them for conventional literary expressions, covering an unsolved problem; for these views and intentions have a brief and inconsequential tenure of life and their existence is merely a sign for certain conjunctions in nature, where processes hailing from afar have met in a man, soon to pass beyond him. If they figure as causes in nature, it is only because they represent the material processes that have brought them into being. The existential element in mental facts is not so remote from matter as Descartes imagined. Even if we are not prepared to admit with Democritus that matter is what makes them up (as it well might if “matter” were taken in a logical sense)[B] we should agree that their substance is in mechanical flux, and that their form, by which they become moral unities, is only an ideal aspect of that moving substance. Moral unities are created by a point of view, as right and left are, and for that reason are not efficacious; though of course the existences they enclose, like the things lying to the left and to the right, move in unison with the rest of nature.

People doubtless do well to keep an eye open for morals when they study physics, and vice versa, since it is only by feeling how the two spheres hang together that the Life of Reason can be made to walk on both feet. Yet to discriminate between the two is no scholastic subtlety. There is the same practical inconvenience in taking one for the other as in trying to gather grapes from thistles. A hybrid science is sterile. If the reason escapes us, history should at least convince us of the fact, when we remember the issue of Aristotelian physics and of cosmological morals. Where the subject-matter is ambiguous and the method double, you have scarcely reached a result which seems plausible for the moment, when a rival school springs up, adopting and bringing forward the submerged element in your view, and rejecting your achievement altogether. A seesaw and endless controversy thus take the place of a steady, co-operative advance. This disorder reigns in morals, metaphysics, and psychology, and the conflicting schools of political economy and of history loudly proclaim it to the world.

“Physic of metaphysic begs defence.”

The modesty of men of science, their aversion (or incapacity) to carry their principles over into speculation, has left the greater part of physics or the theory of existence to the metaphysicians. What they have made of it does not concern us here, since the result has certainly not been a science; indeed they have obscured the very notion that there should be a science of all existence and that metaphysics, if it is more than a name for ultimate physics, can be nothing but dialectic, which does not look toward existence at all. But the prevalence of a mythical physics, purporting to describe the structure of the universe in terms quite other than those which scientific physics could use, has affected this scientific physics and seriously confused it. Its core, in mechanics, to be sure, could not be touched; and the detail even of natural history and chemistry could not be disfigured: but the general aspect of natural history could be rendered ambiguous in the doctrine of evolution; while in psychology, which attempted to deal with that half of the world which Descartes had not subjected to mechanism, confusion could hold undisputed sway.

Evolution by mechanism.

There is a sense in which the notion of evolution is involved in any mechanical system. Descartes indeed had gone so far as to describe, in strangely simple terms, how the world, with all its detail, might have been produced by starting any motion anywhere in the midst of a plenum at rest. The idea of evolution could not be more curtly put forth; so much so that Descartes had to arm himself against the inevitable charge that he was denying the creation, by protesting that his doctrine was a supposition contrary to fact, and that though the world might have been so formed, it was really created as Genesis recorded. Moreover, in antiquity, every Ionian philosopher had conceived a gradual crystallisation of nature; while Empedocles, in his magnificent oracles, had anticipated Darwin’s philosophy without Darwin’s knowledge. It is clear that if the forces that hold an organism together are mechanical, and therefore independent of the ideal unities they subtend, those forces suffice to explain the origin of the organism, and can have produced it. Darwin’s discoveries, like every other advance in physical insight, are nothing but filling for that abstract assurance. They show us how the supposed mechanism really works in one particular field, in one stage of its elaboration. As earlier naturalists had shown us how mechanical causes might produce the miracle of the sunrise and the poetry of the seasons, so Darwin showed us how similar causes might secure the adaptation of animals to their habitat. Evolution, so conceived, is nothing but a detailed account of mechanical origins.

Evolution by ideal attraction.

At the same time the word evolution has a certain pomp and glamour about it which fits ill with so prosaic an interpretation. In the unfolding of a bud we are wont to see, as it were, the fulfilment of a predetermined and glorious destiny; for the seed was an epitome or condensation of a full-blown plant and held within it, in some sort of potential guise, the very form which now peeps out in the young flower. Evolution suggests a prior involution or contraction and the subsequent manifestation of an innate ideal. Evolution should move toward a fixed consummation the approaches to which we might observe and measure. Yet evolution, in this prophetic sense of the word, would be the exact denial of what Darwin, for instance, was trying to prove. It would be a return to Aristotelian notions of heredity and potential being; for it was the essence of Aristotle’s physics—of which his theology was an integral part and a logical capping—that the forms which beings approached pre-existed in other beings from which they had been inherited, and that the intermediate stages during which the butterfly shrank to a grub could not be understood unless we referred them to their origin and their destiny. The physical essence and potency of seeds lay in their ideal relations, not in any actual organisation they might possess in the day of their eclipse and slumber. An egg evolved into a chicken not by mechanical necessity—for an egg had a comparatively simple structure—but by virtue of an ideal harmony in things; since it was natural and fitting that what had come from a hen should lead on to a hen again. The ideal nature possessed by the parent, hovering over the passive seed, magically induced it to grow into the parent’s semblance; and growth was the gradual approach to the perfection which this ancestral essence prescribed. This was why Aristotle’s God, though in character an unmistakable ideal, had to be at the same time an actual existence; since the world would not have known which way to move or what was its inner ideal, unless this ideal, already embodied somewhere else, drew it on and infused movement and direction into the world’s structureless substance.