George Santayana - Winds Of Doctrine

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WINDS OF DOCTRINE

STUDIES IN
CONTEMPORARY OPINION

BY

G. SANTAYANA

LATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

FIRST PRINTED IN 1913

CONTENTS

I. THE INTELLECTUAL TEMPER OF THE AGE

II. MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY

III. THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON

IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL--

i. A NEW SCHOLASTICISM

ii. THE STUDY OF ESSENCE

iii. THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM

iv. HYPOSTATIC ETHICS

V. SHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES

VI. THE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY

WINDS OF DOCTRINE

I

THE INTELLECTUAL TEMPER OF THE AGE

The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The
civilisation characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet
another civilisation has begun to take its place. We still understand
the value of religious faith; we still appreciate the pompous arts of
our forefathers; we are brought up on academic architecture,
sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. We still love monarchy and
aristocracy, together with that picturesque and dutiful order which
rested on local institutions, class privileges, and the authority of
the family. We may even feel an organic need for all these things,
cling to them tenaciously, and dream of rejuvenating them. On the
other hand the shell of Christendom is broken. The unconquerable mind
of the East, the pagan past, the industrial socialistic future
confront it with their equal authority. Our whole life and mind is
saturated with the slow upward filtration of a new spirit--that of an
emancipated, atheistic, international democracy.

These epithets may make us shudder; but what they describe is
something positive and self-justified, something deeply rooted in our
animal nature and inspiring to our hearts, something which, like every
vital impulse, is pregnant with a morality of its own. In vain do we
deprecate it; it has possession of us already through our
propensities, fashions, and language. Our very plutocrats and monarchs
are at ease only when they are vulgar. Even prelates and missionaries
are hardly sincere or conscious of an honest function, save as they
devote themselves to social work; for willy-nilly the new spirit has
hold of our consciences as well. This spirit is amiable as well as
disquieting, liberating as well as barbaric; and a philosopher in our
day, conscious both of the old life and of the new, might repeat what
Goethe said of his successive love affairs--that it is sweet to see
the moon rise while the sun is still mildly shining.

Meantime our bodies in this generation are generally safe, and often
comfortable; and for those who can suspend their irrational labours
long enough to look about them, the spectacle of the world, if not
particularly beautiful or touching, presents a rapid and crowded drama
and (what here concerns me most) one unusually intelligible. The
nations, parties, and movements that divide the scene have a known
history. We are not condemned, as most generations have been, to fight
and believe without an inkling of the cause. The past lies before us;
the history of everything is published. Every one records his opinion,
and loudly proclaims what he wants. In this Babel of ideals few
demands are ever literally satisfied; but many evaporate, merge
together, and reach an unintended issue, with which they are content.
The whole drift of things presents a huge, good-natured comedy to the
observer. It stirs not unpleasantly a certain sturdy animality and
hearty self-trust which lie at the base of human nature.

A chief characteristic of the situation is that moral confusion is not
limited to the world at large, always the scene of profound conflicts,
but that it has penetrated to the mind and heart of the average
individual. Never perhaps were men so like one another and so divided
within themselves. In other ages, even more than at present, different
classes of men have stood at different levels of culture, with a
magnificent readiness to persecute and to be martyred for their
respective principles. These militant believers have been keenly
conscious that they had enemies; but their enemies were strangers to
them, whom they could think of merely as such, regarding them as blank
negative forces, hateful black devils, whose existence might make life
difficult but could not confuse the ideal of life. No one sought to
understand these enemies of his, nor even to conciliate them, unless
under compulsion or out of insidious policy, to convert them against
their will; he merely pelted them with blind refutations and clumsy
blows. Every one sincerely felt that the right was entirely on his
side, a proof that such intelligence as he had moved freely and
exclusively within the lines of his faith. The result of this was that
his faith was intelligent, I mean, that he understood it, and had a
clear, almost instinctive perception of what was compatible or
incompatible with it. He defended his walls and he cultivated his
garden. His position and his possessions were unmistakable.

When men and minds were so distinct it was possible to describe and to
count them. During the Reformation, when external confusion was at
its height, you might have ascertained almost statistically what
persons and what regions each side snatched from the other; it was not
doubtful which was which. The history of their respective victories
and defeats could consequently be written. So in the eighteenth
century it was easy to perceive how many people Voltaire and Rousseau
might be alienating from Bossuet and Fenelon. But how shall we satisfy
ourselves now whether, for instance, Christianity is holding its own?
Who can tell what vagary or what compromise may not be calling itself
Christianity? A bishop may be a modernist, a chemist may be a mystical
theologian, a psychologist may be a believer in ghosts. For science,
too, which had promised to supply a new and solid foundation for
philosophy, has allowed philosophy rather to undermine its foundation,
and is seen eating its own words, through the mouths of some of its
accredited spokesmen, and reducing itself to something utterly
conventional and insecure. It is characteristic of human nature to be
as impatient of ignorance regarding what is not known as lazy in
acquiring such knowledge as is at hand; and even those who have not
been lazy sometimes take it into their heads to disparage their
science and to outdo the professional philosophers in psychological
scepticism, in order to plunge with them into the most vapid
speculation. Nor is this insecurity about first principles limited to
abstract subjects. It reigns in politics as well. Liberalism had been
supposed to advocate liberty; but what the advanced parties that still
call themselves liberal now advocate is control, control over
property, trade, wages, hours of work, meat and drink, amusements,
and in a truly advanced country like France control over education and
religion; and it is only on the subject of marriage (if we ignore
eugenics) that liberalism is growing more and more liberal. Those who
speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality; how
many people read and write, or how many people there are, or what is
the annual value of their trade; whereas true progress would rather
lie in reading or writing fewer and better things, and being fewer and
better men, and enjoying life more. But the philanthropists are now
preparing an absolute subjection of the individual, in soul and body,
to the instincts of the majority--the most cruel and unprogressive of
masters; and I am not sure that the liberal maxim, "the greatest
happiness of the greatest number," has not lost whatever was just or
generous in its intent and come to mean the greatest idleness of the
largest possible population.

Nationality offers another occasion for strange moral confusion. It
had seemed that an age that was levelling and connecting all nations,
an age whose real achievements were of international application, was
destined to establish the solidarity of mankind as a sort of axiom.
The idea of solidarity is indeed often invoked in speeches, and there
is an extreme socialistic party that--when a wave of national passion
does not carry it the other way--believes in international
brotherhood. But even here, black men and yellow men are generally
excluded; and in higher circles, where history, literature, and
political ambition dominate men's minds, nationalism has become of
late an omnivorous all-permeating passion. Local parliaments must be
everywhere established, extinct or provincial dialects must be
galvanised into national languages, philosophy must be made racial,
religion must be fostered where it emphasises nationality and
denounced where it transcends it. Man is certainly an animal that,
when he lives at all, lives for ideals. Something must be found to
occupy his imagination, to raise pleasure and pain into love and
hatred, and change the prosaic alternative between comfort and
discomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow. Now that
the hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most part
is so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonal
business, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of honour.
It has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid illusion. Illusion, I
mean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a mystical essence, for
of course nationality is a fact. People speak some particular language
and are very uncomfortable where another is spoken or where their own
is spoken differently. They have habits, judgments, assumptions to
which they are wedded, and a society where all this is unheard of
shocks them and puts them at a galling disadvantage. To ignorant
people the foreigner as such is ridiculous, unless he is superior to
them in numbers or prestige, when he becomes hateful. It is natural
for a man to like to live at home, and to live long elsewhere without
a sense of exile is not good for his moral integrity. It is right to
feel a greater kinship and affection for what lies nearest to oneself.
But this necessary fact and even duty of nationality is accidental;
like age or sex it is a physical fatality which can be made the basis
of specific and comely virtues; but it is not an end to pursue or a
flag to flaunt or a privilege not balanced by a thousand incapacities.
Yet of this distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol,
perhaps because it is the only distinction they feel they have left.

Anomalies of this sort will never be properly understood until people
accustom themselves to a theory to which they have always turned a
deaf ear, because, though simple and true, it is materialistic:
namely, that mind is not the cause of our actions but an effect,
collateral with our actions, of bodily growth and organisation. It may
therefore easily come about that the thoughts of men, tested by the
principles that seem to rule their conduct, may be belated, or
irrelevant, or premonitory; for the living organism has many strata,
on any of which, at a given moment, activities may exist perfect
enough to involve consciousness, yet too weak and isolated to control
the organs of outer expression; so that (to speak geologically) our
practice may be historic, our manners glacial, and our religion
palaeozoic. The ideals of the nineteenth century may be said to have
been all belated; the age still yearned with Rousseau or speculated
with Kant, while it moved with Darwin, Bismarck, and Nietzsche: and
to-day, in the half-educated classes, among the religious or
revolutionary sects, we may observe quite modern methods of work
allied with a somewhat antiquated mentality. The whole nineteenth
century might well cry with Faust: "Two souls, alas, dwell in my
bosom!" The revolutions it witnessed filled it with horror and made it
fall in love romantically with the past and dote on ruins, because
they were ruins; and the best learning and fiction of the time were
historical, inspired by an unprecedented effort to understand remote
forms of life and feeling, to appreciate exotic arts and religions,
and to rethink the blameless thoughts of savages and criminals. This
sympathetic labour and retrospect, however, was far from being merely
sentimental; for the other half of this divided soul was looking
ahead. Those same revolutions, often so destructive, stupid, and
bloody, filled it with pride, and prompted it to invent several
incompatible theories concerning a steady and inevitable progress in
the world. In the study of the past, side by side with romantic
sympathy, there was a sort of realistic, scholarly intelligence and an
adventurous love of truth; kindness too was often mingled with
dramatic curiosity. The pathologists were usually healers, the
philosophers of evolution were inventors or humanitarians or at least
idealists: the historians of art (though optimism was impossible here)
were also guides to taste, quickeners of moral sensibility, like
Ruskin, or enthusiasts for the irresponsibly beautiful, like Pater and
Oscar Wilde. Everywhere in the nineteenth century we find a double
preoccupation with the past and with the future, a longing to know
what all experience might have been hitherto, and on the other hand to
hasten to some wholly different experience, to be contrived
immediately with a beating heart and with flying banners. The
imagination of the age was intent on history; its conscience was
intent on reform.

Reform! This magic word itself covers a great equivocation. To reform
means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of
the act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
Usually the movement starts from the mere sense of oppression, and
people break down some established form, without any qualms about the
capacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may
be needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order,
intended to secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious
forms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre
and the sum of them chaotic. If the accent, however, could only be
laid on the second phase of the transformation, reform might mean the
creation of order where it did not sufficiently appear, so that
diffuse life should be concentrated into a congenial form that should
render it strong and self-conscious. In this sense, if we may trust
Mr. Gilbert Murray, it was a great wave of reform that created Greece,
or at least all that was characteristic and admirable in it--an effort
to organise, train, simplify, purify, and make beautiful the chaos of
barbaric customs and passions that had preceded. The clanger here, a
danger to which Greece actually succumbed, is that so refined an
organism may be too fragile, not inclusive enough within, and not
buttressed strongly enough without against the flux of the uncivilised
world. Christianity also, in the first formative centuries of its
existence, was an integrating reform of the same sort, on a different
scale and in a different sphere; but here too an enslaved rabble
within the soul claiming the suffrage, and better equipped
intellectual empires rising round about, seem to prove that the
harmony which the Christian system made for a moment out of nature and
life was partial and insecure. It is a terrible dilemma in the life of
reason whether it will sacrifice natural abundance to moral order, or
moral order to natural abundance. Whatever compromise we choose proves
unstable, and forces us to a new experiment.

Perhaps in the century that has elapsed since the French Revolution
the pendulum has had time to swing as far as it will in the direction
of negative reform, and may now begin to move towards that sort of
reform which is integrating and creative. The veering of the advanced
political parties from liberalism to socialism would seem to be a
clear indication of this new tendency. It is manifest also in the love
of nature, in athletics, in the new woman, and in a friendly medical
attitude towards all the passions.

In the fine arts, however, and in religion and philosophy, we are
still in full career towards disintegration. It might have been
thought that a germ of rational order would by this time have
penetrated into fine art and speculation from the prosperous
constructive arts that touch the one, and the prosperous natural and
mathematical sciences that touch the other. But as yet there is little
sign of it. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century painting and
sculpture have passed through several phases, representatives of each
naturally surviving after the next had appeared. Romanticism, half
lurid, half effeminate, yielded to a brutal pursuit of material truth,
and a pious preference for modern and humble sentiment. This realism
had a romantic vein in it, and studied vice and crime, tedium and
despair, with a very genuine horrified sympathy. Some went in for a
display of archaeological lore or for exotic _motifs_; others gave all
their attention to rediscovering and emphasising abstract problems of
execution, the highway of technical tradition having long been
abandoned. Beginners are still supposed to study their art, but they
have no masters from whom to learn it. Thus, when there seemed to be
some danger that art should be drowned in science and history, the
artists deftly eluded it by becoming amateurs. One gave himself to
religious archaism, another to Japanese composition, a third to
barbaric symphonies of colour; sculptors tried to express dramatic
climaxes, or inarticulate lyrical passion, such as music might better
convey; and the latest whims are apparently to abandon painful
observation altogether, to be merely decorative or frankly mystical,
and to be satisfied with the childishness of hieroglyphics or the
crudity of caricature. The arts are like truant children who think
their life will be glorious if they only run away and play for ever;
no need is felt of a dominant ideal passion and theme, nor of any
moral interest in the interpretation of nature. Artists have no less
talent than ever; their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often
interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in
their works.

In philosophy there are always the professors, as in art there are
always the portrait painters and the makers of official sculpture; and
both sorts of academicians are often very expert and well-educated.
Yet in philosophy, besides the survival of all the official and
endowed systems, there has been of late a very interesting fresh
movement, largely among the professors themselves, which in its
various hues may be called irrationalism, vitalism, pragmatism, or
pure empiricism. But this movement, far from being a reawakening of
any organising instinct, is simply an extreme expression of romantic
anarchy. It is in essence but a franker confession of the principle
upon which modern philosophy has been building--or unbuilding--for
these three hundred years, I mean the principle of subjectivity.
Berkeley and Hume, the first prophets of the school, taught that
experience is not a partial discovery of other things but is itself
the only possible object of experience. Therefore, said Kant and the
second generation of prophets, any world we may seem to live in, even
those worlds of theology or of history which Berkeley or Hume had
inadvertently left standing, must be an idea which our present
experience suggests to us and which we frame as the principles of our
mind allow and dictate that we should. But then, say the latest
prophets--Avenarius, William James, M. Bergson--these mental
principles are no antecedent necessities or duties imposed on our
imagination; they are simply parts of flying experience itself, and
the ideas--say of God or of matter--which they lead us to frame have
nothing compulsory or fixed about them. Their sole authority lies in
the fact that they may be more or less congenial or convenient, by
enriching the flying moment aesthetically, or helping it to slip
prosperously into the next moment. Immediate feeling, pure experience,
is the only reality, the only _fact_: if notions which do not
reproduce it fully as it flows are still called true (and they
evidently ought not to be) it is only in a pragmatic sense of the
word, in that while they present a false and heterogeneous image of
reality they are not practically misleading; as, for instance, the
letters on this page are no true image of the sounds they call up, nor
the sounds of the thoughts, yet both may be correct enough if they
lead the reader in the end to the things they symbolise. It is M.
Bergson, the most circumspect and best equipped thinker of this often
scatter-brained school, who has put this view in a frank and tenable
form, avoiding the bungling it has sometimes led to about the "meaning
of truth." Truth, according to M. Bergson, is given only in intuitions
which prolong experience just as it occurs, in its full immediacy; on
the other hand, all representation, thought, theory, calculation, or
discourse is so much mutilation of the truth, excusable only because
imposed upon us by practical exigences. The world, being a feeling,
must be felt to be known, and then the world and the knowledge of it
are identical; but if it is talked about or thought about it is
denaturalised, although convention and utility may compel the poor
human being to talk and to think, exiled as he is from reality in his
Babylon of abstractions. Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by
practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside. The mystic can
live happy in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and
those of the universe.

With this we seem to have reached the extreme of self-concentration
and self-expansion, the perfect identity and involution of everything
in oneself. And such indeed is the inevitable goal of the malicious
theory of knowledge, to which this school is committed, remote as that
goal may be from the boyish naturalism and innocent intent of many of
its pupils. If all knowledge is of experience and experience cannot be
knowledge of anything else, knowledge proper is evidently impossible.
There can be only feeling; and the least self-transcendence, even in
memory, must be an illusion. You may have the most complex images you
will; but nothing pictured there can exist outside, not even past or
alien experience, if you picture it.[1] Solipsism has always been the
evident implication of idealism; but the idealists, when confronted
with this consequence, which is dialectically inconvenient, have never
been troubled at heart by it, for at heart they accept it. To the
uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave
of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to
be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual,
that oneself cannot be the absolute because the _idea_ of oneself, to
arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well
have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the _idea_ of
yourself.

[Footnote 1: Perhaps some unsophisticated reader may wonder if I am
not trying to mislead him, or if any mortal ever really maintained
anything so absurd. Strictly the idealistic principle does not justify
a denial that independent things, by chance resembling my ideas, may
actually exist; but it justifies the denial that these things, if they
existed, could be those I know. My past would not be my past if I did
not appropriate it; my ideas would not refer to their objects unless
both were ideas identified in my mind. In practice, therefore,
idealists feel free to ignore the gratuitous possibility of existences
lying outside the circle of objects knowable to the thinker, which,
according to them, is the circle of his ideas. In this way they turn a
human method of approach into a charter for existence and
non-existence, and their point of view becomes the creative power.
When the idealist studies astronomy, does he learn anything about the
stars that God made? Far from him so naive a thought! His astronomy
consists of two activities of his own (and he is very fond of
activity): star-gazing and calculation. When he has become quite
proficient he knows all about star-gazing and calculation; but he
knows nothing of any stars that God made; for there are no stars
except his visual images of stars, and there is no God but himself. It
is true that to soften this hard saying a little he would correct me
and say his _higher_ self; but as his lower self is only the idea of
himself which he may have framed, it is his higher self that is
himself simply: although whether he or his idea of himself is really
the higher might seem doubtful to an outsider.]

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