George Santayana - Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy
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George Santayana >> Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy
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6 SOME TURNS OF THOUGHT IN
MODERN PHILOSOPHY
_Five Essays_
BY
GEORGE SANTAYANA
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1933
Published under the auspices of
THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
I. Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense page 1
Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature on the
occasion of the Tercentenary of the birth of John Locke.
With some Supplementary Notes
II. Fifty Years of British Idealism 48
Reflections on the republication of Bradley's _Ethical Studies_
III. Revolutions in Science 71
Some Comments on the Theory of Relativity and the new Physics
IV. A Long Way Round to Nirvana 87
Development of a suggestion found in Freud's _Beyond the
Pleasure Principle_
V. The Prestige of the Infinite 102
A review of Julien Benda's _Sketch of a consistent theory of
the relations between God and the World_
The Author's acknowledgments are due to the Editors of _The New Adelphi_,
_The Dial_, and the _Journal of Philosophy_, in which one or more of these
Essays originally appeared.
I
LOCKE AND THE FRONTIERS OF COMMON SENSE[1]
A good portrait of Locke would require an elaborate background. His is not
a figure to stand statuesquely in a void: the pose might not seem grand
enough for bronze or marble. Rather he should be painted in the manner of
the Dutch masters, in a sunny interior, scrupulously furnished with all
the implements of domestic comfort and philosophic enquiry: the Holy Bible
open majestically before him, and beside it that other revelation--the
terrestrial globe. His hand might be pointing to a microscope set for
examining the internal constitution of a beetle: but for the moment his
eye should be seen wandering through the open window, to admire the
blessings of thrift and liberty manifest in the people so worthily busy in
the market-place, wrong as many a monkish notion might be that still
troubled their poor heads. From them his enlarged thoughts would easily
pass to the stout carved ships in the river beyond, intrepidly setting
sail for the Indies, or for savage America. Yes, he too had travelled, and
not only in thought. He knew how many strange nations and false religions
lodged in this round earth, itself but a speck in the universe. There were
few ingenious authors that he had not perused, or philosophical
instruments that he had not, as far as possible, examined and tested; and
no man better than he could understand and prize the recent discoveries of
"the incomparable Mr Newton". Nevertheless, a certain uneasiness in that
spare frame, a certain knitting of the brows in that aquiline countenance,
would suggest that in the midst of their earnest eloquence the
philosopher's thoughts might sometimes come to a stand. Indeed, the
visible scene did not exhaust the complexity of his problem; for there was
also what he called "the scene of ideas", immaterial and private, but
often more crowded and pressing than the public scene. Locke was the
father of modern psychology, and the birth of this airy monster, this
half-natural changeling, was not altogether easy or fortunate.[2]
I wish my erudition allowed me to fill in this picture as the subject
deserves, and to trace home the sources of Locke's opinions, and their
immense influence. Unfortunately, I can consider him--what is hardly
fair--only as a pure philosopher: for had Locke's mind been more profound,
it might have been less influential. He was in sympathy with the coming
age, and was able to guide it: an age that confided in easy, eloquent
reasoning, and proposed to be saved, in this world and the next, with as
little philosophy and as little religion as possible. Locke played in the
eighteenth century very much the part that fell to Kant in the nineteenth.
When quarrelled with, no less than when embraced, his opinions became a
point of departure for universal developments. The more we look into the
matter, the more we are impressed by the patriarchal dignity of Locke's
mind. Father of psychology, father of the criticism of knowledge, father
of theoretical liberalism, god-father at least of the American political
system, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedia, at home he was the ancestor of
that whole school of polite moderate opinion which can unite liberal
Christianity with mechanical science and with psychological idealism. He
was invincibly rooted in a prudential morality, in a rationalised
Protestantism, in respect for liberty and law: above all he was deeply
convinced, as he puts it, "that the handsome conveniences of life are
better than nasty penury". Locke still speaks, or spoke until lately,
through many a modern mind, when this mind was most sincere; and two
hundred years before Queen Victoria he was a Victorian in essence.
A chief element in this modernness of Locke was something that had hardly
appeared before in pure philosophy, although common in religion: I mean,
the tendency to deny one's own presuppositions--not by accident or
inadvertently, but proudly and with an air of triumph. Presuppositions are
imposed on all of us by life itself: for instance the presupposition that
life is to continue, and that it is worth living. Belief is born on the
wing and awakes to many tacit commitments. Afterwards, in reflection, we
may wonder at finding these presuppositions on our hands and, being
ignorant of the natural causes which have imposed them on the animal mind,
we may be offended at them. Their arbitrary and dogmatic character will
tempt us to condemn them, and to take for granted that the analysis which
undermines them is justified, and will prove fruitful. But this critical
assurance in its turn seems to rely on a dubious presupposition, namely,
that human opinion must always evolve in a single line, dialectically,
providentially, and irresistibly. It is at least conceivable that the
opposite should sometimes be the case. Some of the primitive
presuppositions of human reason might have been correct and inevitable,
whilst the tendency to deny them might have sprung from a plausible
misunderstanding, or the exaggeration of a half-truth: so that the
critical opinion itself, after destroying the spontaneous assumptions on
which it rested, might be incapable of subsisting.
In Locke the central presuppositions, which he embraced heartily and
without question, were those of common sense. He adopted what he calls a
"plain, historical method", fit, in his own words, "to be brought into
well-bred company and polite conversation". Men, "barely by the use of
their natural faculties", might attain to all the knowledge possible or
worth having. All children, he writes, "that are born into this world,
being surrounded with bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them"
have "a variety of ideas imprinted" on their minds. "External material
things as objects of Sensation, and the operations of our own minds as
objects of Reflection, are to me", he continues, "the only originals from
which all our ideas take their beginnings." "Every act of sensation", he
writes elsewhere, "when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both
parts of nature, the corporeal and the spiritual. For whilst I know, by
seeing or hearing,... that there is some corporeal being without me, the
object of that sensation, I do more certainly know that there is some
spiritual being within me that sees and hears."
Resting on these clear perceptions, the natural philosophy of Locke falls
into two parts, one strictly physical and scientific, the other critical
and psychological. In respect to the composition of matter, Locke accepted
the most advanced theory of his day, which happened to be a very old one:
the theory of Democritus that the material universe contains nothing but a
multitude of solid atoms coursing through infinite space: but Locke added
a religious note to this materialism by suggesting that infinite space, in
its sublimity, must be an attribute of God. He also believed what few
materialists would venture to assert, that if we could thoroughly examine
the cosmic mechanism we should see the demonstrable necessity of every
complication that ensues, even of the existence and character of mind: for
it was no harder for God to endow matter with the power of thinking than
to endow it with the power of moving.
In the atomic theory we have a graphic image asserted to describe
accurately, or even exhaustively, the intrinsic constitution of things, or
their primary qualities. Perhaps, in so far as physical hypotheses must
remain graphic at all, it is an inevitable theory. It was first suggested
by the wearing out and dissolution of all material objects, and by the
specks of dust floating in a sunbeam; and it is confirmed, on an enlarged
scale, by the stellar universe as conceived by modern astronomy. When
today we talk of nuclei and electrons, if we imagine them at all, we
imagine them as atoms. But it is all a picture, prophesying what we might
see through a sufficiently powerful microscope; the important
philosophical question is the one raised by the other half of Locke's
natural philosophy, by optics and the general criticism of perception. How
far, if at all, may we trust the images in our minds to reveal the nature
of external things?
On this point the doctrine of Locke, through Descartes,[3] was also
derived from Democritus. It was that all the sensible qualities of things,
except position, shape, solidity, number and motion, were only ideas in
us, projected and falsely regarded as lodged in things. In the things,
these imputed or secondary qualities were simply powers, inherent in their
atomic constitution, and calculated to excite sensations of that character
in our bodies. This doctrine is readily established by Locke's plain
historical method, when applied to the study of rainbows, mirrors, effects
of perspective, dreams, jaundice, madness, and the will to believe: all of
which go to convince us that the ideas which we impulsively assume to be
qualities of objects are always, in their seat and origin, evolved in our
own heads.
These two parts of Locke's natural philosophy, however, are not in perfect
equilibrium. _All_ the feelings and ideas of an animal must be equally
conditioned by his organs and passions,[4] and he cannot be aware of what
goes on beyond him, except as it affects his own life.[5] How then could
Locke, or could Democritus, suppose that his ideas of space and atoms were
less human, less graphic, summary, and symbolic, than his sensations of
sound or colour? The language of science, no less than that of sense,
should have been recognised to be a human language; and the nature of
anything existent collateral with ourselves, be that collateral existence
material or mental, should have been confessed to be a subject for faith
and for hypothesis, never, by any possibility, for absolute or direct
intuition.
There is no occasion to take alarm at this doctrine as if it condemned us
to solitary confinement, and to ignorance of the world in which we live.
We see and know the world through our eyes and our intelligence, in visual
and in intellectual terms: how else should a world be seen or known which
is not the figment of a dream, but a collateral power, pressing and alien?
In the cognisance which an animal may take of his surroundings--and surely
all animals take such cognisance--the subjective and moral character of
his feelings, on finding himself so surrounded, does not destroy their
cognitive value. These feelings, as Locke says, are signs: to take them
for signs is the essence of intelligence. Animals that are sensitive
physically are also sensitive morally, and feel the friendliness or
hostility which surrounds them. Even pain and pleasure are no idle
sensations, satisfied with their own presence: they violently summon
attention to the objects that are their source. Can love or hate be felt
without being felt towards something--something near and potent, yet
external, uncontrolled, and mysterious? When I dodge a missile or pick a
berry, is it likely that my mind should stop to dwell on its pure
sensations or ideas without recognising or pursuing something material?
Analytic reflection often ignores the essential energy of mind, which is
originally more intelligent than sensuous, more appetitive and dogmatic
than aesthetic. But the feelings and ideas of an active animal cannot help
uniting internal moral intensity with external physical reference; and the
natural conditions of sensibility require that perceptions should owe
their existence and quality to the living organism with its moral bias,
and that at the same time they should be addressed to the external objects
which entice that organism or threaten it.
All ambitions must be defeated when they ask for the impossible. The
ambition to know is not an exception; and certainly our perceptions cannot
tell us how the world would look if nobody saw it, or how valuable it
would be if nobody cared for it. But our perceptions, as Locke again said,
are sufficient for our welfare and appropriate to our condition. They are
not only a wonderful entertainment in themselves, but apart from their
sensuous and grammatical quality, by their distribution and method of
variation, they may inform us most exactly about the order and mechanism
of nature. We see in the science of today how completely the most accurate
knowledge--proved to be accurate by its application in the arts--may shed
every pictorial element, and the whole language of experience, to become a
pure method of calculation and control. And by a pleasant compensation,
our aesthetic life may become freer, more self-sufficing, more humbly
happy in itself: and without trespassing in any way beyond the modesty of
nature, we may consent to be like little children, chirping our human
note; since the life of reason in us may well become science in its
validity, whilst remaining poetry in its texture.
I think, then, that by a slight re-arrangement of Locke's pronouncements
in natural philosophy, they could be made inwardly consistent, and still
faithful to the first presuppositions of common sense, although certainly
far more chastened and sceptical than impulsive opinion is likely to be
in the first instance.
There were other presuppositions in the philosophy of Locke besides his
fundamental naturalism; and in his private mind probably the most
important was his Christian faith, which was not only confident and
sincere, but prompted him at times to high speculation. He had friends
among the Cambridge Platonists, and he found in Newton a brilliant example
of scientific rigour capped with mystical insights. Yet if we consider
Locke's philosophical position in the abstract, his Christianity almost
disappears. In form his theology and ethics were strictly rationalistic;
yet one who was a Deist in philosophy might remain a Christian in
religion. There was no great harm in a special revelation, provided it
were simple and short, and left the broad field of truth open in almost
every direction to free and personal investigation. A free man and a good
man would certainly never admit, as coming from God, any doctrine contrary
to his private reason or political interest; and the moral precepts
actually vouchsafed to us in the Gospels were most acceptable, seeing
that they added a sublime eloquence to maxims which sound reason would
have arrived at in any case.
Evidently common sense had nothing to fear from religious faith of this
character; but the matter could not end there. Common sense is not more
convinced of anything than of the difference between good and evil,
advantage and disaster; and it cannot dispense with a moral interpretation
of the universe. Socrates, who spoke initially for common sense, even
thought the moral interpretation of existence the whole of philosophy. He
would not have seen anything comic in the satire of Moliere making his
chorus of young doctors chant in unison that opium causes sleep because it
has a dormitive virtue. The virtues or moral uses of things, according to
Socrates, were the reason why the things had been created and were what
they were; the admirable virtues of opium defined its perfection, and the
perfection of a thing was the full manifestation of its deepest nature.
Doubtless this moral interpretation of the universe had been overdone, and
it had been a capital error in Socrates to make that interpretation
exclusive and to substitute it for natural philosophy. Locke, who was
himself a medical man, knew what a black cloak for ignorance and villainy
Scholastic verbiage might be in that profession. He also knew, being an
enthusiast for experimental science, that in order to control the movement
of matter--which is to realise those virtues and perfections--it is better
to trace the movement of matter materialistically; for it is in the act of
manifesting its own powers, and not, as Socrates and the Scholastics
fancied, by obeying a foreign magic, that matter sometimes assumes or
restores the forms so precious in the healer's or the moralist's eyes. At
the same time, the manner in which the moral world rests upon the natural,
though divined, perhaps, by a few philosophers, has not been generally
understood; and Locke, whose broad humanity could not exclude the moral
interpretation of nature, was driven in the end to the view of Socrates.
He seriously invoked the Scholastic maxim that nothing can produce that
which it does not contain. For this reason the unconscious, after all,
could never have given rise to consciousness. Observation and experiment
could not be allowed to decide this point: the moral interpretation of
things, because more deeply rooted in human experience, must envelop the
physical interpretation, and must have the last word.
It was characteristic of Locke's simplicity and intensity that he retained
these insulated sympathies in various quarters. A further instance of his
many-sidedness was his fidelity to pure intuition, his respect for the
infallible revelation of ideal being, such as we have of sensible
qualities or of mathematical relations. In dreams and in hallucinations
appearances may deceive us, and the objects we think we see may not exist
at all. Yet in suffering an illusion we must entertain an idea; and the
manifest character of these ideas is that of which alone, Locke thinks, we
can have certain "knowledge".
"These", he writes, "are two very different things and carefully to
be distinguished: it being one thing to perceive and know the idea
of white or black, and quite another to examine what kind of
particles they must be, and how arranged ... to make any object
appear white or black." "A man infallibly knows, as soon as ever he
has them in his mind, that the ideas he calls white and round are
the very ideas they are, and that they are not other ideas which he
calls red or square.... This ... the mind ... always perceives at
first sight; and if ever there happen any doubt about it, it will
always be found to be about the names and not the ideas
themselves."
This sounds like high Platonic doctrine for a philosopher of the Left; but
Locke's utilitarian temper very soon reasserted itself in this subject.
Mathematical ideas were not only lucid but true: and he demanded this
truth, which he called "reality", of all ideas worthy of consideration:
mere ideas would be worthless. Very likely he forgot, in his philosophic
puritanism, that fiction and music might have an intrinsic charm. Where
the frontier of human wisdom should be drawn in this direction was clearly
indicated, in Locke's day, by Spinoza, who says:
"If, in keeping non-existent things present to the imagination, the
mind were at the same time aware that those things did not exist,
surely it would regard this gift of imagination as a virtue in its
own constitution, not as a vice: especially if such an imaginative
faculty depended on nothing except the mind's own nature: that is
to say, if this mental faculty of imagination were free".
But Locke had not so firm a hold on truth that he could afford to play
with fancy; and as he pushed forward the claims of human jurisdiction
rather too far in physics, by assuming the current science to be literally
true, so, in the realm of imagination, he retrenched somewhat illiberally
our legitimate possessions. Strange that as modern philosophy transfers
the visible wealth of nature more and more to the mind, the mind should
seem to lose courage and to become ashamed of its own fertility. The
hard-pressed natural man will not indulge his imagination unless it poses
for truth; and being half aware of this imposition, he is more troubled at
the thought of being deceived than at the fact of being mechanised or
being bored: and he would wish to escape imagination altogether. A good
God, he murmurs, could not have made us poets against our will.
Against his will, however, Locke was drawn to enlarge the subjective
sphere. The actual existence of mind was evident: you had only to notice
the fact that you were thinking. Conscious mind, being thus known to
exist directly and independently of the body, was a primary constituent of
reality: it was a fact on its own account.[6] Common sense seemed to
testify to this, not only when confronted with the "I think, therefore I
am" of Descartes, but whenever a thought produced an action. Since mind
and body interacted,[7] each must be as real as the other and, as it were,
on the same plane of being. Locke, like a good Protestant, felt the right
of the conscious inner man to assert himself: and when he looked into his
own mind, he found nothing to define this mind except the ideas which
occupied it. The existence which he was so sure of in himself was
therefore the existence of his ideas.
Here, by an insensible shift in the meaning of the word "idea", a
momentous revolution had taken place in psychology. Ideas had originally
meant objective terms distinguished in thought-images, qualities,
concepts, propositions. But now ideas began to mean living thoughts,
moments or states of consciousness. They became atoms of mind,
constituents of experience, very much as material atoms were conceived to
be constituents of natural objects. Sensations became the only objects of
sensation, and ideas the only objects of ideas; so that the material world
was rendered superfluous, and the only scientific problem was now to
construct a universe in terms of analytic psychology. Locke himself did
not go so far, and continued to assign physical causes and physical
objects to some, at least, of his mental units; and indeed sensations and
ideas could not very well have other than physical causes, the existence
of which this new psychology was soon to deny: so that about the origin of
its data it was afterwards compelled to preserve a discreet silence. But
as to their combinations and reappearances, it was able to invoke the
principle of association: a thread on which many shrewd observations may
be strung, but which also, when pressed, appears to be nothing but a
verbal mask for organic habits in matter.
The fact is that there are two sorts of unobjectionable psychology,
neither of which describes a mechanism of disembodied mental states, such
as the followers of Locke developed into modern idealism, to the
confusion of common sense.[8] One unobjectionable sort of psychology is
biological, and studies life from the outside. The other sort, relying on
memory and dramatic imagination, reproduces life from the inside, and is
literary. If the literary psychologist is a man of genius, by the
clearness and range of his memory, by quickness of sympathy and power of
suggestion, he may come very near to the truth of experience, as it has
been or might be unrolled in a human being.[9] The ideas with which Locke
operates are simply high lights picked out by attention in this nebulous
continuum, and identified by names. Ideas, in the original ideal sense of
the word, are indeed the only definite terms which attention can
discriminate and rest upon; but the unity of these units is specious, not
existential. If ideas were not logical or aesthetic essences but
self-subsisting feelings, each knowing itself, they would be insulated for
ever; no spirit could ever survey, recognise, or compare them; and mind
would have disappeared in the analysis of mind.
These considerations might enable us, I think, to mark the just frontier
of common sense even in this debatable land of psychology. All that is
biological, observable, and documentary in psychology falls within the
lines of physical science and offers no difficulty in principle. Nor need
literary psychology form a dangerous salient in the circuit of nature. The
dramatic poet or dramatic historian necessarily retains the presupposition
of a material world, since beyond his personal memory (and even within it)
he has nothing to stimulate and control his dramatic imagination save
knowledge of the material circumstances in which people live, and of the
material expression in action or words which they give to their feelings.
His moral insight simply vivifies the scene that nature and the sciences
of nature spread out before him: they tell him what has happened, and his
heart tells him what has been felt. Only literature can describe
experience for the excellent reason that the terms of experience are moral
and literary from the beginning. Mind is incorrigibly poetical: not
because it is not attentive to material facts and practical exigencies,
but because, being intensely attentive to them, it turns them into
pleasures and pains, and into many-coloured ideas. Yet at every turn there
is a possibility and an occasion for transmuting this poetry into science,
because ideas and emotions, being caused by material events, refer to
these events, and record their order.
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