THE LIFE OF REASON
The Phases of Human Progress
Volumes One Through Five
GEORGE SANTAYANA
hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê
In Five Volumes
Introduction to Life of Reason
Volume One
Volume Two
Volume Three
Volume Four
Volume Five
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
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CONTENTS
Introduction to "The Life of Reason"
THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTECEDENTS
Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.—Efficacious reflection is reason.—The Life of Reason a name for all practical thought and all action justified by its fruits in consciousness.—It is the sum of Art.—It has a natural basis which makes it definable.—Modern philosophy not helpful.—Positivism no positive ideal.—Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and conditions.—Liberal theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural world.—The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals.—Heraclitus and the immediate.—Democritus and the naturally intelligible.—Socrates and the autonomy of mind.—Plato gave the ideal its full expression.—Aristotle supplied its natural basis.—Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of restatement.—Plato's myths in lieu of physics.—Aristotle's final causes.—Modern science can avoid such expedients.—Transcendentalism true but inconsequential.—Verbal ethics.—Spinoza and the Life of Reason.—Modern and classic sources of inspiration
Volume One: Reason in Common Sense
CHAPTER I
THE BIRTH OF REASON
Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible with a chosen good.—Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent, indifferent.—In experience order is relative to interests which determine the moral status of all powers.—The discovered conditions of reason not its beginning.—The flux first.—Life the fixation of interests.—Primary dualities.—First gropings.—Instinct the nucleus of reason.—Better and worse the fundamental categories Pages 35-47
CHAPTER II
FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS
Dreams before thoughts.—The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by physical forces.—Internal order supervenes.—Intrinsic pleasure in existence.—Pleasure a good, but not pursued or remembered unless it suffuses an object.—Subhuman delights.—Animal living.—Causes at last discerned.—Attention guided by bodily impulse Pages 48-63
CHAPTER III
THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS
Nature man's home.—Difficulties in conceiving nature.—Transcendental qualms.—Thought an aspect of life and transitive.—Perception cumulative and synthetic.—No identical agent needed.—Example of the sun.—His primitive divinity.—Causes and essences contrasted.—Voracity of intellect.—Can the transcendent be known?—Can the immediate be meant?—Is thought a bridge from sensation to sensation?—Mens naturaliter platonica.—Identity and independence predicated of things Pages 64-83
CHAPTER IV
ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY
Psychology as a solvent.—Misconceived rôle of intelligence.—All criticism dogmatic.—A choice of hypotheses.—Critics disguised enthusiasts.—Hume's gratuitous scepticism.—Kant's substitute for knowledge.—False subjectivity attributed to reason.—Chimerical reconstruction.—The Critique a work on mental architecture.—Incoherences.—Nature the true system of conditions.—Artificial pathos in subjectivism.—Berkeley's algebra of perception.—Horror of physics.—Puerility in morals.—Truism and sophism.—Reality is the practical made intelligible.—Vain "realities" and trustworthy "fictions" Pages 84-117
CHAPTER V
NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED
Man's feeble grasp of nature.—Its unity ideal and discoverable only by steady thought.—Mind the erratic residue of existence.—Ghostly character of mind.—Hypostasis and criticism both need control.—Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas.—Spirit and sense defined by their relation to nature.—Vague notions of nature involve vague notions of spirit.—Sense and spirit the life of nature, which science redistributes but does not deny Pages 118-136
CHAPTER VI
DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS
Another background for current experience may be found in alien minds.—Two usual accounts of this conception criticised: analogy between bodies, and dramatic dialogue in the soul.—Subject and object empirical, not transcendental, terms.—Objects originally soaked in secondary and tertiary qualities.—Tertiary qualities transposed.—Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities of perceived body—"Pathetic fallacy" normal, yet ordinarily fallacious.—Case where it is not a fallacy.—Knowledge succeeds only by accident.—Limits of insight.—Perception of character.—Conduct divined, consciousness ignored.—Consciousness untrustworthy.—Metaphorical mind.—Summary Pages 137-160
CHAPTER VII
CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE
So-called abstract qualities primary.—General qualities prior to particular things.—Universals are concretions in discourse.—Similar reactions, merged in one habit of reproduction, yield an idea.—Ideas are ideal.—So-called abstractions complete facts.—Things concretions of concretions.—Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the order of nature.—Aristotle's compromise.—Empirical bias in favour
CHAPTER VIII
ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS
Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical principle.—Concretions in discourse express instinctive reactions.—Idealism rudimentary.—Naturalism sad.—The soul akin to the eternal and ideal.—Her inexperience.—Platonism spontaneous.—Its essential fidelity to the ideal.—Equal rights of empiricism.—Logic dependent on fact for its importance, and for its subsistence.—Reason and docility.—Applicable thought and clarified experience Pages 184-204
CHAPTER IX
HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL
Functional relations of mind and body.—They form one natural life.—Artifices involved in separating them.—Consciousness expresses vital equilibrium and docility.—Its worthlessness as a cause and value as an expression.—Thought's march automatic and thereby implicated in events.—Contemplative essence of action.—Mechanical efficacy alien to thought's essence.—Consciousness transcendental and transcendent.—It is the seat of value.—Apparent utility of pain.—Its real impotence.—Preformations involved.—Its untoward significance.—Perfect function not unconscious.—Inchoate ethics.—Thought the entelechy of being.—Its exuberance Pages 205-235
CHAPTER X
THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION
Honesty in hedonism.—Necessary qualifications.—The will must judge.—Injustice inherent in representation.—Æsthetic and speculative cruelty.—Imputed values: their inconstancy.—Methods of control.—Example of fame.—Disproportionate interest in the æsthetic.—Irrational religious allegiance.—Pathetic idealisations.—Inevitable impulsiveness in prophecy.—The test a controlled present ideal Page 236-255
CHAPTER XI
SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL
The ultimate end a resultant.—Demands the substance of ideals.—Discipline of the will.—Demands made practical and consistent.—The ideal natural.—Need of unity and finality.—Ideals of nothing.—Darwin on moral sense.—Conscience and reason compared.—Reason imposes no new sacrifice.—Natural goods attainable and compatible in principle.—Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand of reason Pages 256-268
CHAPTER XII
FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE
Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed.—Contrary currents of opinion.—Pantheism.—Instability in existences does not dethrone their ideals.—Absolutist philosophy human and halting.—All science a deliverance of momentary thought.—All criticism likewise.—Origins inessential.—Ideals functional.—They are transferable to similar beings.—Authority internal.—Reason autonomous.—Its distribution.—Natural selection of minds.—Living stability.—Continuity necessary to progress.—Limits of variation. Spirit a heritage.—Perfectibility.—Nature and human nature.—Human nature formulated.—Its concrete description reserved for the sequel Pages 269-291
Volume Two: Reason in Society
CHAPTER I
LOVE
Fluid existences have none but ideal goals.—Nutrition and reproduction.—Priority of the latter.—Love celebrates the initial triumph of form and is deeply ideal.—Difficulty in describing love.—One-sided or inverted theories about it.—Sexual functions its basis.—Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty.—Glory of animal love.—Its degradation when instincts become numerous and competitive.—Moral censure provoked.—The heart alienated from the world.—Childish ideals.—Their light all focussed on the object of love.—Three environments for love.—Subjectivity of the passion.—Machinery regulating choice.—The choice unstable.—Instinctive essence of love.—Its ideality.—Its universal scope.—Its euthanasia. Pages 3-34
CHAPTER II
THE FAMILY
The family arises spontaneously.—It harmonises natural interests.—Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth.—The naturally dull achieve intelligence.—It is more blessed to save than to create.—Parental instinct regards childhood only.—Handing on the torch of life.—Adventitious functions assumed by the family.—Inertia in human nature.—Family tyrannies.—Difficulty in abstracting from the family.—Possibility of substitutes.—Plato's heroic communism.—Opposite modern tendencies.—Individualism in a sense rational.—The family tamed.—Possible readjustments and reversions.—The ideal includes generation.—Inner values already lodged in this function.—Outward beneficence might be secured by experiment Pages 35-59
CHAPTER III
INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR
Patriarchal economy.—Origin of the state.—Three uses of civilisation.—Its rationality contingent.—Sources of wealth.—Excess of it possible.—Irrational industry.—Its jovial and ingenious side.—Its tyranny.—An impossible remedy.—Basis of government.—How rationality accrues.—Ferocious but useful despotisms.—Occasional advantage of being conquered.—Origin of free governments.—Their democratic tendencies.—Imperial peace.—Nominal and real status of armies.—Their action irresponsible.—Pugnacity human.—Barrack-room philosophy.—Military virtues.—They are splendid vices.—Absolute value in strife.—Sport a civilised way of preserving it.—Who shall found the universal commonwealth? Pages 60-87
CHAPTER IV
THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL
Eminence, once existing, grows by its own operation.—Its causes natural and its privileges just.—Advantage of inequality.—Fable of the belly and the members.—Fallacy in it.—Theism expresses better the aristocratic ideal.—A heaven with many mansions.—If God is defined as the human ideal, apotheosis the only paradise.—When natures differ perfections differ too.—Theory that stations actually correspond to faculty.—Its falsity.—Feeble individuality the rule.—Sophistical envy.—Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is.—Mutilation by crowding.—A hint to optimists.—How aristocracies might do good.—Man adds wrong to nature's
CHAPTER V
DEMOCRACY
Democracy as an end and as a means.—Natural democracy leads to monarchy.—Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege.—Ideals and expedients.—Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, if rational, would serve common interests.—People jealous of eminence.—It is representative, but subject to decay.—Ancient citizenship a privilege.—Modern democracy industrial.—Dangers to current civilisation.—Is current civilisation a good?—Horrors of materialistic democracy.—Timocracy or socialistic aristocracy.—The difficulty the same as in all Socialism.—The masses would have to be plebeian in position and patrician in feeling.—Organisation for ideal ends breeds fanaticism.—Public spirit the life of democracy. Pages 114-136
CHAPTER VI
FREE SOCIETY
Primacy of nature over spirit.—All experience at bottom liberal.—Social experience has its ideality too.—The self an ideal.—Romantic egotism.—Vanity.—Ambiguities of fame.—Its possible ideality.—Comradeship.—External conditions of friendship.—Identity in sex required, and in age.—Constituents of friendship.—Personal liking.—The refracting human medium for ideas.—Affection based on the refraction.—The medium must also be transparent.—Common interests indispensable.—Friendship between man and wife.—Between master and disciple.—Conflict between ideal and natural allegiance.—Automatic idealisation of heroes Pages 137-159
CHAPTER VII
PATRIOTISM
The creative social environment, since it eludes sense, must be represented symbolically.—Ambiguous limits of a native country, geographical and moral.—Sentimental and political patriotism.—The earth and the race the first objects of rational loyalty.—Race, when distinct, the greatest of distinctions.—"Pure" races may be moraliy sterile.—True nationality direction on a definite ideal.—Country well represented by domestic and civic religion.—Misleading identification of country with government.—Sporting or belligerent patriotism.—Exclusive patriotism rational only when the government supported is universally beneficent.—Accidents of birth and training affect the ideal.—They are conditions and may contribute something.—They are not ends.—The symbol for country may be a man and may become an idol.—Feudal representation sensitive but partial.—Monarchical representation comprehensive but treacherous.—Impersonal symbols no advantage.—Patriotism not self-interest, save to the social man whose aims are ideal Pages 160-183
CHAPTER VIII
IDEAL SOCIETY
The gregarious instinct all social instincts in suspense.—It gives rise to conscience or sympathy with the public voice.—Guises of public opinion.—Oracles and revelations.—The ideal a measure for all existences and no existence itself.—Contrast between natural and intellectual bonds.—Appeal from man to God, from real to ideal society.—Significant symbols revert to the concrete.—Nature a symbol for destiny.—Representative notions have also inherent values.—Religion and science indirectly cognitive and directly ideal.—Their opposite outlook.—In translating existence into human terms they give human nature its highest exercise.—Science should be mathematical and religion anthropomorphic.—Summary of this book Pages 184-205
Volume Three: Reason in Religion
CHAPTER I
HOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON
Religion is certainly significant, but not literally true.—All religion is positive and particular.—It aims at the Life of Reason, but largely fails to attain it.—Its approach imaginative.—When its poetic method is denied its value is jeopardised.—It precedes science rather than hinders it.—It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human. Pages 3-14
CHAPTER II
RATIONAL ELEMENTS IN SUPERSTITION
Felt causes not necessary causes.—Mechanism and dialectic ulterior principles.—Early selection of categories.—Tentative rational worlds.—Superstition a rudimentary philosophy.—A miracle, though unexpected, more intelligible than a regular process.—Superstitions come of haste to understand.—Inattention suffers them to spread.—Genius may use them to convey an inarticulate wisdom. Pages 15-27
CHAPTER III
MAGIC, SACRIFICE, AND PRAYER
Fear created the gods.—Need also contributed.—The real evidences of God's existence.—Practice precedes theory in religion.—Pathetic, tentative nature of religious practices.—Meanness and envy in the gods, suggesting sacrifice.—Ritualistic arts.—Thank-offerings.—The sacrifice of a contrite heart.—Prayer is not utilitarian in essence.—Its supposed efficacy magical.—Theological puzzles.—A real efficacy would be mechanical.—True uses of prayer.—It clarifies the ideal.—It reconciles to the inevitable.—It fosters spiritual life by conceiving it in its perfection.—Discipline and contemplation are their own reward Pages 28-48
CHAPTER IV
MYTHOLOGY
Status of fable in the mind.—It requires genius.—It only half deceives.—Its interpretative essence.—Contrast with science.—Importance of the moral factor.—Its submergence.—Myth justifies magic.—Myths might be metaphysical.—They appear ready made, like parts of the social fabric.—They perplex the conscience.—Incipient myth in the Vedas.—Natural suggestions soon exhausted.—They will be carried out in abstract fancy.—They may become moral ideals.—The Sun-god moralised.—The leaven of religion is moral idealism Pages 49-68
CHAPTER V
THE HEBRAIC TRADITION
Phases of Hebraism.—Israel's tribal monotheism.—Problems involved.—The prophets put new wine in old bottles.—Inspiration and authority.—Beginnings of the Church.—Bigotry turned into a principle.—Penance accepted.—Christianity combines optimism and asceticism.—Reason smothered between the two.—Religion made an institution Pages 69-82
CHAPTER
THE CHRISTIAN EPIC
The essence of the good not adventitious but expressive.—A universal religion must interpret the whole world.—Double appeal of Christianity.—Hebrew metaphors become Greek myths.—Hebrew philosophy of history identified with Platonic cosmology.—The resulting orthodox system.—The brief drama of things.—Mythology is a language and must be understood to convey something by symbols Pages 83-98
CHAPTER VII
PAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY
Need of paganising Christianity.—Catholic piety more human than the liturgy.—Natural pieties.—Refuge taken in the supernatural.—The episodes of life consecrated mystically.—Paganism chastened, Hebraism liberalised.—The system post-rational and founded on despair.—External conversion of the barbarians.—Expression of the northern genius within Catholicism,—Internal discrepancies between the two.—Tradition and instinct at odds in Protestantism.—The Protestant spirit remote from that of the gospel.—Obstacles to humanism.—The Reformation and counter-reformation.—Protestantism an expression of character.—It has the spirit of life and of courage, but the voice of inexperience.—Its emancipation from Christianity Pages 99-126
CHAPTER VIII
CONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH
Myth should dissolve with the advance of science.—But myth is confused with the moral values it expresses.—Neo-Platonic revision.—It made mythical entities of abstractions.—Hypostasis ruins ideals.—The Stoic revision.—The ideal surrendered before the physical.—Parallel movements in Christianity.—Hebraism, if philosophical, must be pantheistic.—Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals.—Truly divine action limited to what makes for the good.—Need of an opposing principle.—The standard of value is human.—Hope for happiness makes belief in God Pages 127-147
CHAPTER IX
THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE
Suspense between hope and disillusion.—Superficial solution.—But from what shall we be redeemed?—Typical attitude of St. Augustine.—He achieves Platonism.—He identifies it with Christianity.—God the good.—Primary and secondary religion.—Ambiguous efficacy of the good in Plato.—Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job.—The Manicheans.—All things good by nature.—The doctrine of creation demands that of the fall.—Original sin.—Forced abandonment of the ideal.—The problem among the Protestants.—Pantheism accepted.—Plainer scorn for the ideal.—The price of mythology is superstition. Pages 148-177
CHAPTER X
PIETY
The core of religion not theoretical.—Loyalty to the sources of our being.—The pious Æneas.—An ideal background required.—Piety accepts natural conditions and present tasks.—The leadership of instinct is normal.—Embodiment essential to spirit.—Piety to the gods takes form from current ideals.—The religion of humanity.—Cosmic piety Pages 178-192
CHAPTER XI
SPIRITUALITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS
To be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal.—Spirituality natural.—Primitive consciousness may be spiritual.—Spirit crossed by instrumentalities.—One foe of the spirit is worldliness.—The case for and against pleasure.—Upshot of worldly wisdom.—Two supposed escapes from vanity: fanaticism and mysticism.—Both are irrational.—Is there a third course?—Yes, for experience has intrinsic, inalienable values.—For these the religious imagination must supply an ideal standard Pages 193-213
CHAPTER XII
CHARITY
Possible tyranny of reason.—Everything has its rights.—Primary and secondary morality.—Uncharitable pagan justice is not just.—The doom of ancient republics.—Rational charity.—Its limits.—Its mythical supports.—There is intelligence in charity.—Buddhist and Christian forms of it.—Apparent division of the spiritual and the natural Pages 214-228
CHAPTER XIII
THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE
The length of life a subject for natural science.—"Psychical" phenomena.—Hypertrophies of sense.—These possibilities affect physical existence only.—Moral grounds for the doctrine.—The necessary assumption of a future.—An assumption no evidence.—A solipsistic argument.—Absoluteness and immortality transferred to the gods.—Or to a divine principle in all beings.—In neither case is the individual immortal.—Possible forms of survival.—Arguments from retribution and need of opportunity.—Ignoble temper of both.—False optimistic postulate involved.—Transition to ideality Pages 229-250
CHAPTER XIV
IDEAL IMMORTALITY
Olympian immortality the first ideal.—Its indirect attainment by reproduction.—Moral acceptance of this compromise.—Even vicarious immortality intrinsically impossible.—Intellectual victory over change.—The glory of it.—Reason makes man's divinity and his immortality.—It is the locus of all truths.—Epicurean immortality, through the truth of existence.—Logical immortality, through objects of thought.—Ethical immortality, through types of excellence Pages 251-273
CHAPTER XV
CONCLUSION
The failure of magic and of mythology.—Their imaginative value.—Piety and spirituality justified.—Mysticism a primordial state of feeling.—It may recur at any stage of culture.—Form gives substance its life and value. Pages 274-279
Volume Four: Reason in Art
CHAPTER I
THE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE
Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.—Art is plastic instinct conscious of its aims.—It is automatic.—So are the ideas it expresses.—We are said to control whatever obeys us.—Utility is a result.—The useful naturally stable.—Intelligence is docility.—Art is reason propagating itself.—Beauty an incident in rational art, inseparable from the others. Pages 3-
CHAPTER II
RATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART
Utility is ultimately ideal.—Work wasted and chances missed.—Ideals must be interpreted, not prescribed.—The aim of industry is to live well.—Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature.—Servile arts may grow spontaneous or their products may be renounced.—Art starts from two potentialities: its material and its problem.—Each must be definite and congruous with the other.—A sophism exposed.—Industry prepares matter for the liberal arts.—Each partakes of the other. Pages 18-33
CHAPTER III
EMERGENCE OF FINE ART
Art is spontaneous action made stable by success.—It combines utility and automatism.—Automatism fundamental and irresponsible.—It is tamed by contact with the world.—The dance.—Functions of gesture.—Automatic music. Pages 34-43
CHAPTER IV
MUSIC
Music is a world apart.—It justifies itself.—It is vital and transient.—Its physical affinities.—Physiology of music.—Limits of musical sensibility.—The value of music is relative to them.—Wonders of musical structure.—Its inherent emotions.—In growing specific they remain unearthly.—They merge with common emotions, and express such as find no object in nature.—Music lends elementary feelings an intellectual communicable form.—All essences are in themselves good, even the passions.—Each impulse calls for a possible congenial world.—Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings.—Music may do so.—Instability the soul of matter.—- Peace the triumph of spirit.—Refinement is true strength. Pages 44-67
CHAPTER V
SPEECH AND SIGNIFICATION
Sounds well fitted to be symbols.—Language has a structure independent of things.—Words, remaining identical, serve to identify things that change.—Language the dialectical garment of facts.—Words are wise men's counters.—Nominalism right in psychology and realism in logic.—Literature moves between the extremes of music and denotation.—Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may have affinity.—Syntax positively representative.—Yet it vitiates what it represents.—Difficulty in subduing a living medium.—Language foreshortens experience.—It is a perpetual mythology.—It may be apt or inapt, with equal richness.—Absolute language a possible but foolish art Pages 68-86
CHAPTER VI
POETRY AND PROSE
Force of primary expressions.—Its exclusiveness and narrowness.—Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm.—Inspiration irresponsible.—Plato's discriminating view.—Explosive and pregnant expression.—Natural history of inspiration.—Expressions to be understood must be recreated, and so changed.—Expressions may be recast perversely, humourously, or sublimely.—The nature of prose.—It is more advanced and responsible than poetry.—Maturity brings love of practical truth.—Pure prose would tend to efface itself.—Form alone, or substance alone, may be poetical.—Poetry has its place in the medium.—It is the best medium possible.—Might it not convey what it is best to know?—A rational poetry would exclude much now thought poetical.—All apperception modifies its object.—Reason has its own bias and method.—Rational poetry would envelop exact knowledge in ultimate emotions.—An illustration.—Volume can be found in scope better than in suggestion Pages 87-115
CHAPTER VII
PLASTIC CONSTRUCTION
Automatic expression often leaves traces in the outer world.—Such effects fruitful.—Magic authority of man's first creations.—Art brings relief from idolatry.—Inertia in technique.—Inertia in appreciation.—Adventitious effects appreciated first.—Approach to beauty through useful structure.—Failure of adapted styles.—Not all structure beautiful, nor all beauty structural.—Structures designed for display.—Appeal made by decoration.—Its natural rights.—Its alliance with structure in Greek architecture.—Relations of the two in Gothic art.—The result here romantic.—The mediæval artist.—Representation introduced.—Transition to illustration. Pages 116-143
CHAPTER VIII
PLASTIC REPRESENTATION
Psychology of imitation.—Sustained sensation involves reproduction.—Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a new material.—Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge.—How the artist is inspired and irresponsible.—Need of knowing and loving the subject rendered.—Public interests determine the subject of art, and the subject the medium.—Reproduction by acting ephemeral.—demands of sculpture.—It is essentially obsolete.—When men see groups and backgrounds they are natural painters.—Evolution of painting.—Sensuous and dramatic adequacy approached.—Essence of landscape-painting.—Its threatened dissolution.—Reversion to pure decorative design.—Sensuous values are primordial and so indispensable Pages 144-165
CHAPTER IX
JUSTIFICATION OF ART
Art is subject to moral censorship.—Its initial or specific excellence is not enough.—All satisfactions, however hurtful, have an initial worth.—But, on the whole, artistic activity is innocent.—It is liberal, and typical of perfect activity.—The ideal, when incarnate, becomes subject to civil society.—Plato's strictures: he exaggerates the effect of myths.—His deeper moral objections.—Their lightness.—Importance of æsthetic alternatives.—The importance of æsthetic goods varies with temperaments.—The æsthetic temperament requires tutelage.—Aesthetic values everywhere interfused.—They are primordial.—To superpose them adventitiously is to destroy them.—They flow naturally from perfect function.—Even inhibited functions, when they fall into a new rhythm, yield new beauties.—He who loves beauty must chasten it Pages 166-190
CHAPTER X
THE CRITERION OF TASTE
Dogmatism is inevitable but may be enlightened.—Taste gains in authority as it is more and more widely based.—Different æsthetic endowments may be compared in quantity or force.—Authority of vital over verbal judgments.—Tastes differ also in purity or consistency.—They differ, finally, in pertinence, and in width of appeal.—Art may grow classic by idealising the familiar, or by reporting the ultimate.—Good taste demands that art should be rational, i.e., harmonious with all other interests.—A
CHAPTER XI
ART AND HAPPINESS
Aesthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones, which in turn would be suffused with beauty, yet prototypes of true perfections.—Pros and cons of detached indulgences.—The happy imagination is one initially in line with things, and brought always closer to them by experience.—Reason is the principle of both art and happiness.—Only a rational society can have sure and perfect arts.—Why art is now empty and unstable.—Anomalous character of the irrational artist.—True art measures and completes happiness. Pages 216-230
Volume Five: Reason in Science
CHAPTER I
TYPES AND AIMS OF SCIENCE
Science still young.—Its miscarriage in Greece.—Its timid reappearance in modern times.—Distinction between science and myth.—Platonic status of hypothesis.—Meaning of verification.—Possible validity of myths.—Any dreamed-of thing might be experienced.—But science follows the movement of its subject-matter.—Moral value of science.—Its continuity with common knowledge.—Its intellectual essence.—Unity of science.—In existence, judged by reflection, there is a margin of waste.—Sciences converge from different points of origin.—Two chief kinds of science, physics and dialectic.—Their mutual implication.—Their coöperation.—No science a priori.—Role of criticism. Pages 3-38
CHAPTER II
HISTORY
History an artificial memory.—Second sight requires control.—Nature the theme common to various memories.—Growth of legend.—No history without documents.—The aim is truth.—Indirect methods of attaining it.—Historical research a part of physics.—Verification here indirect.—Futile ideal to survey all facts.—Historical theory.—It is arbitrary.—A moral critique of the past is possible.—How it might be just.—Transition to historical romance.—Possibility of genuine epics.—Literal truth abandoned.—History exists to be transcended.—Its great rôle. Pages 39-68
CHAPTER III
MECHANISM
Recurrent forms in nature.—Their discovery makes the flux calculable.—Looser principles tried first.—Mechanism for the most part hidden.—Yet presumably pervasive.—Inadequacy of consciousness.—Its articulation inferior to that of its objects.—Science consequently retarded, and speculation rendered necessary.—Dissatisfaction with mechanism partly natural, and partly artificial.—Biassed judgments inspired by moral inertia.—Positive emotions proper to materialism.—The material world not dead nor ugly, nor especially cruel.—Mechanism to be judged by its fruits Pages 69-94
CHAPTER IV
HESITATIONS IN METHOD
Mechanism restricted to one-half of existence.—Men of science not speculative.—Confusion in semi-moral subjects.—"Physic of metaphysic begs defence."—Evolution by mechanism.—Evolution by ideal attraction.—If species are evolved they cannot guide evolution.—Intrusion of optimism.—Evolution according to Hegel.—The conservative interpretation.—The radical one.—Megalomania.—Chaos in the theory of mind.—Origin of self-consciousness.—The notion of spirit.—The notion of sense.—Competition between the two.—The rise of scepticism Pages 95-125
CHAPTER V
PSYCHOLOGY
Mind reading not science.—Experience a reconstruction.—The honest art of education.—Arbitrary readings of the mind.—Human nature appealed to rather than described.—Dialectic in psychology.—Spinoza on the passions.—A principle of estimation cannot govern events.—Scientific psychology a part of biology.—Confused attempt to detach the psychic element.—Differentia of the psychic.—Approach to irrelevant sentience.—Perception represents things in their practical relation to the body.—Mind the existence in which form becomes actual.—Attempt at idealistic physics.—Association not efficient.—- It describes coincidences.—Understanding is based on instinct and expressed in dialectic.—Suggestion a fancy name for automatism, and will another.—Double attachment of mind to nature.—Is the subject-matter of psychology absolute being?—Sentience is representable only in fancy.—The conditions and objects of sentience, which are not sentience, are also real.—Mind knowable and important in so far as it represents other things Pages 126-166
CHAPTER VI
THE NATURE OF INTENT
Dialectic better than physics.—Maladjustments to nature render physics conspicuous and unpleasant.—Physics should be largely virtual, and dialectic explicit.—Intent is vital and indescribable.—It is analogous to flux in existence.—It expresses natural life.—- It has a material basis.—It is necessarily relevant to earth.—The basis of intent becomes appreciable in language.—Intent starts from a datum, and is carried by a feeling.—It demands conventional expression.—A fable about matter and form Pages 167-186
CHAPTER VII
DIALECTIC
Dialectic elaborates given forms.—Forms are abstracted from existence by intent.—Confusion comes of imperfect abstraction, or ambiguous intent.—The fact that mathematics applies to existence is empirical.—Its moral value is therefore contingent.—Quantity submits easily to dialectical treatment—Constancy and progress in intent.—Intent determines the functional essence of objects.—Also the scope of ideals.—Double status of mathematics.—Practical rôle of dialectic.—Hegel's satire on dialectic.—Dialectic expresses a given intent.—Its empire is ideal and autonomous Pages 187-209
CHAPTER VIII
PRERATIONAL MORALITY
Empirical alloy in dialectic.—Arrested rationality in morals.—Its emotional and practical power.—Moral science is an application of dialectic, not a part of anthropology.—Estimation the soul of philosophy.—Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable.—A choice of proverbs.—Their various representative value.—Conflict of partial moralities.—The Greek ideal.—Imaginative
CHAPTER IX
RATIONAL ETHICS
Moral passions represent private interests.—Common ideal interests may supervene.—To this extent there is rational society.—A rational morality not attainable, but its principle clear.—It is the logic of an autonomous will.—Socrates' science.—Its opposition to sophistry and moral anarchy.—Its vitality.—Genuine altruism is natural self-expression.—Reason expresses impulses, but impulses reduced to harmony.—Self-love artificial.—The sanction of reason is happiness.—Moral science impeded by its chaotic data, and its unrecognised scope.—Fallacy in democratic hedonism.—Sympathy a conditional duty.—All life, and hence right life, finite and particular. Pages 233-261
CHAPTER X
POST-RATIONAL MORALITY
Socratic ethics retrospective.—Rise of disillusioned moralities.—The illusion subsisting in them.—Epicurean refuge in pleasure.—Stoic recourse to conformity.—Conformity the core of Islam, enveloped in arbitrary doctrines.—The latter alone lend it practical force.—Moral ambiguity in pantheism.—Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires a mythology.—A supernatural world made by the Platonist out of dialectic.—The Hebraic cry for redemption.—The two factors meet in Christianity.—Consequent electicism.—The negation of naturalism never complete.—Spontaneous values rehabilitated.—A witness out of India.—Dignity of post-rational morality.—Absurdities nevertheless involved.—The soul of positivism in all ideals.—Moribund dreams and perennial realities. Pages 262-300
CHAPTER XI
THE VALIDITY OF SCIENCE
Various modes of revising science.—Science its own best critic.—Obstruction by alien traditions.—Needless anxiety for moral interests.—Science an imaginative and practical art.—Arrière-pensée in transcendentalism.—Its romantic sincerity.—Its constructive impotence.—Its dependence on common-sense.—Its futility.—Ideal science is self-justified.—Physical science is presupposed in scepticism.—It recurs in all understanding of perception.—Science contains all trustworthy knowledge.—It suffices for the Life of Reason Pages 301-320