Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Birth of Reason '68 at 72 ("Harmony").
[W]hen existence is reduced by superficial analysis to a train of phenomena, so that all real genesis or derivation must be denied, the notion that like ought to breed like survives in the fancy, and phenomena are conceived somewhat like swarms of summer flies, subject to habit, and justifying their reappearance by the mere fact that they have often appeared before. But habit and facility in repetition are incongruous with pure essences, as Hume, the master of this method, was quick to see: they reside rather in the human psyche, which (though his phenomenalism forbade him to say so) is a self-sustaining and developing organisation in matter, like the life-cycle of insects, to which repetitions and rhythms are congruous and native.
Subject sort: Causation
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsbrit.htm
Database item no.: 165
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Birth of Reason '68 at 72 ("Harmony").
The assimilation of all genesis in nature to animal generation, so that like must produce like, has been one of the chief sources of myth in philosophy. It has favoured the groundless prejudice that mind could only arise from mind: whereas mind, being something spiritual and unsubstantial, is a finality or entelechy involved in motion, and incapable of generating anything else.
Subject sort: Genesis
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprob.htm
Database item no.: 260
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Animal Faith '67 at 81 ("Materialism of Idealists").
[By interpreting behaviourism idealistically, we] shall then be brought back to psychologism, the theory which conceives nature to be composed exclusively of various strands of feelings, and thoughts. Psychologism is one of the modern forms of idealism, transcendentalism being the other: and since transcendentalism can escape materialism if it remains a romantic attitude, without any dogmatic cosmology, dogmatic history, dogmatic psychology, or dogmatic memory, so too psychologism may escape materialism if it remains purely literary, like the world of a novel, and when pressed to specify where the existential elements of its literary landscapes are to be found, retires into the citadel of transcendentalism, and says they are found by being feigned, or by being actually experienced. But if transcendentalists find it impossible, in constructing a system, to avoid some dogmatic beliefs, say as to the course of events, the psychologists do not even attempt such rigour; and they take for granted that perfectly well-known experiences fall to everyone's share: that these persons communicate their feelings, know of one another's existence, and receive the same hard knocks at assignable times, without there existing any common environment, any spatial relations, or any connecting medium between their various experiences. Such, at least, would be their doctrine, if they had one . . . .
Subject sort: Idealism / Psychologism / Transcendentalism
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsisms.htm
Database item no.: 308
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Birth of Reason '68 at 85 ("Friendship").
The question is not what effects friendship may have in the world, but what powers in the world may sustain or prevent friendship. Friendship is an elementary instance of something good in itself. . . . . It is something spiritual, a phase of freedom. It can have no consequences. One of the blunders of philosophy has been to think of freedom as a cause. Freedom is a result of perfect organization. The problem is so to organise ourselves as to become free. Nature must do this for us, not a non-existent power called liberty; and our physical and psychical persons are the parts of nature that do this for the spirit within us, whenever they can.
Subject sort: Friendship
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsgov.htm
Database item no.: 256
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Birth of Reason '68 at 85 ("Friendship").
The question is not what effects friendship may have in the world, but what powers in the world may sustain or prevent friendship. Friendship is an elementary instance of something good in itself. . . . . It is something spiritual, a phase of freedom. It can have no consequences. One of the blunders of philosophy has been to think of freedom as a cause. Freedom is a result of perfect organization. The problem is so to organise ourselves as to become free. Nature must do this for us, not a non-existent power called liberty; and our physical and psychical persons are the parts of nature that do this for the spirit within us, whenever they can.
Subject sort: gswill
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gswill.htm
Database item no.: 157
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Birth of Reason '68 at 134 ("Three American Philosophers").
I cannot understand what satisfaction a philosopher can find in artifices, or in deceiving himself and others. I therefore like to call myself a materialist; but I leave the study and also the worship of matter to others, and my later writings have been devoted to discovering the natural categories of my spontaneous thought, and restating my opinions in those honest terms. It is essentially a literary labour, a form of art; and I do not attempt to drive other people to think as I do. Let them be their own poets.
Subject sort: gscateg
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gscateg.htm
Database item no.: 16
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Birth of Reason '68 at 134 ("Three American Philosophers").
My first philosophical enthusiasm was for Catholic theology; I admired, and still admire, that magnificent construction and the spiritual discipline it can inspire; but I soon learned to admire also Hellenistic and Indian wisdom. All religions and moralities seem to me forms of paganism; only that in ages of ripe experience or of decadence they become penitential and subjective.
Subject sort: gscath
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gscath.htm
Database item no.: 311
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Birth of Reason '68 at 134 ("Three American Philosophers").
I cannot understand what satisfaction a philosopher can find in artifices, or in deceiving himself and others. I therefore like to call myself a materialist; but I leave the study and also the worship of matter to others, and my later writings have been devoted to discovering the natural categories of my spontaneous thought, and restating my opinions in those honest terms. It is essentially a literary labour, a form of art; and I do not attempt to drive other people to think as I do. Let them be their own poets.
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 312
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Birth of Reason '68 at 137 ("Mind Liberating and Deceptive").
If a man, dozing, brushes away a fly from his bald head, he need not have formed a clear image of that fly; yet his action shows an exact apprehension in his organism of an intrusion at that place. In more general terms, a living creature, beneath and before all imagination, is affected by the contact or even by the movement of objects, and has a propensity to react upon them.
Subject sort: gsepi
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsepi.htm
Database item no.: 32
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Animal Faith '67 at 142 ("Inevitable Contingency of All Facts").
[D]eterminism itself, if it rules the world, rules it by chance.
Subject sort: Necessity / Contingency
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprob.htm
Database item no.: 266
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Animal Faith '67 at 145-46 ("The Order of Genesis and the Order of Discovery").
First in the order of genesis comes essence since it spreads out the field of forms through which existence may travel and may pick up one form after another along its special path. Matter in this order is second and truth third; for truth is the ideally complete description of the existing world, as it is, has been, and is to be. Finally spirit with all its discoveries comes last, because the psyche—without which spirit could not arise or live—is a trope established in matter; that is to say, a truth concerning the order and cohesion of certain events in the flux of nature. The tropes proper to spirit—the passions expressed in morals and in literary psychology—are truths about spirit which of course presuppose its existence: but the discovery of these tropes is itself subsequent to them; so that even here, when spirit considers its own career, the relevant spiritual act, the moral sentiment or psychological insight, chronicles a prior truth, and brings into the light of consciousness an order in events which, though the events were spiritual, had hitherto uncoiled itself unnoticed in the natural world.
Subject sort: gstruth
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gstruth.htm
Database item no.: 149
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Animal Faith '67 at 164 ("Maxims").
The importance and beauty of any incident lie in itself: and morally they transcend its accidental function in time and belong in the realms of truth and of value. These realms, being determinate and excluding many features that figure with equal right in the realm of essence, are contingent and, viewed from outside, unnecessary. Yet their importance and beauty, being intrinsic, are inalienable and forever actual in their own being.
Subject sort: gscateg [used in introduction]
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 298
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Animal Faith '67 at 164 ("Maxims").
When all things are possible, what wonder that some things should be actual? (This is my sole deduction of existence from essence.)
Subject sort: gsexist
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsexist.htm
Database item no.: 54
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Animal Faith '67 at 168 ("Maxims").
There are three traps that strangle philosophy: the Church, the marriage-bed, and the professor's chair.
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 114
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Animal Faith '67 at 251 ("Purposes and Results").
The purpose itself arises by virtue of the ripening of certain actions, or impulses in the organism; these impulses, before the sort of action in question has been often performed or observed, come clothed only in vague feelings of uneasiness or impatience: but when the appropriate action is well-known, they come clothed in images picturing that action by anticipation: and the purpose in that case can prefigure graphically its probable or normal fulfilment. The issue is not called forth or shaped by that image in the mind: but the first images accompanying the purpose may be very like the images which perception of the result will arouse in the end: and this natural congruity in two pictures will be transformed by superstitious haste into the power of the first image—whose causes are ignored—to produce the material event which the second image reports to the same minds.
Subject sort: gsepi
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsepi.htm
Database item no.: 31
Year for sort purposes: 0000
Source edition: Animal Faith '67 at 279 ("Comparison With Other Views of Spirit").
The words entelechy and act or actuality, which I have used often to designate consciousness, are borrowed from Aristotle; and indeed I think no other philosopher has conceived the relation of the body to the mind that animates it so fairly and squarely.
Subject sort: Entelechy
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 184
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry & Religion '00 at viii ("Preface").
The environing world can justify itself to the mind only by the free life which it fosters there.
Subject sort: gsmind
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmind.htm
Database item no.: 56
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Letters ___ ("To William James, ____, 1890") (as reported in Roger Kimball, George Santayana, appearing in the New Criterion).
I doubt whether the earth supports a more genuine enemy of all that the Catholic Church inwardly stands for than I do.
Subject sort: gscath [used in introduction]
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 247
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry & Religon '89 at 4 ("Preface").
The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for reality, but mad. The expedient of recognizing facts as facts and accepting ideals as ideals . . . , although apparently simple enough, seems to elude the normal human power of discrimination.
Subject sort: Facts / Ideals
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 309
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry and Religion '00 at 6 ("Understanding, Imagination, and Mysticism").
The same minds [the profounder ones] are, moreover, often swayed by emotion, by the ever-present desire to find a noble solution to all questions, perhaps a solution already hallowed by authority and intertwined inextricably, for those who have always accepted it, with the sanctions of spiritual life.
Subject sort: gslife [used in introduction]
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 334
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry & Religion '00 at 11-13 ("Understanding, Imagination, and Mysticism").
These complications not unnaturally inspire discouragement and a sense of the hopeless relativity of human thought. Indeed, if there be any special endowment of mind and body called human nature, as there seems to be, it is obvious that all human experience must be relative to that. But the truth, the absolute reality, surrounds and precedes these operations of finite faculty. What value, then, we may say, have these various ideals or perceptions, or the conflicts between them? Are not our senses as human, as 'subjective' as our wills? Is not the understanding as visionary as the fancy? Does it not transform the Unknowable into as remote a symbol as does the vainest dream?
The answer which a rational philosophy would make to these questions would be a double one. It is true that every idea is equally relative to human nature and that nothing can be represented in the human mind except by the operation of human faculties. But it is not true that all these products of human ideation are of equal value, since they are not equally conducive to human purposes or satisfactory to human demands.
The impulse that would throw over as equally worthless every product of human art, because it is not indistinguishable from some alleged external reality, does not perceive the serious self-contradictions under which it labours. In the first place the notion of an external reality is a human notion; our reason makes that hypothesis, and its verification in our experience is one of the ideals of science, as its validity is one of the assumptions of daily life. In throwing over all human ideas, because they are infected with humanity, all human ideas are being sacrificed to one of them—the idea of an absolute reality. . . . . Furthermore, even if we granted for the sake of argument a reality which our thoughts were essentially helpless to represent, whence comes the duty of our thoughts to represent it? Whence comes the value of this unattainable truth? From an ideal of human reason. We covet truth. So that the attempt to surrender all human science as relative and all human ideals as trivial is founded on a blind belief in one human idea and an absolute surrender to one human passion.
Subject sort: gsrelative
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsrelative.htm
Database item no.: 126
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry & Religion '00 at 14-15 ("Understanding, Imagination, and Mysticism").
[Mysticism] consists in the surrender of a category of thought on account of the discovery of its relativity. . . . The ideal of mysticism is accordingly exactly contrary to the ideal of reason ; instead of perfecting human nature it seeks to abolish it; instead of building a better world, it would undermine the foundations even of the world we have built already ; instead of developing our mind to greater scope and precision, it would return to the condition of protoplasm to the blessed consciousness of an Unutterable Reality.
Subject sort: Mysticism
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 335
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry & Religion '00 at 16-17 ("Understanding, Imagination, and Mysticism").
The art of mysticism is to be mystical in spots and to aim the heavy guns of your transcendental philosophy against those realities or those ideas which you find particularly galling. Planted on your dearest dogma, on your most precious postulate, you may then transcend everything else to your heart's content. You may say with an air of enlightened profundity that nothing is "really" right or wrong, because in Nature all things are regular and necessary, and God cannot act for purposes as if his will were not already accomplished; your mysticism in religion and morals is kept standing, as it were, by the stiff backing which is furnished by your materialistic cosmology.
Subject sort: No Right or Wrong
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 336
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Letters '55 at 18 ("To Henry Ward Abbot, February 5, 1887").
Philosophy, after all, is not the foundation of things, but a late and rather ineffective activity of reflecting men.
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 110
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Letters '55 at 28 ("To William James, December 18, 1887").
[Philosophy is] an attempt to express a half-undiscovered reality, just as art is, and that two different renderings, if they are expressive, far from canceling each other add to each other's value.
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 111
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Letters '55 at 28 ("To William James, December 18, 1887").
[P]hilosophy seems to me to be its own reward, and its justification lies in the delight and dignity of the art itself.
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 112
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poets '10 at 45 ("Lucretius").
Nothing comes out of nothing, nothing falls back into nothing, if we consider substance; but everything comes from nothing and falls back into nothing if we consider things—the objects of love and experience.
Subject sort: Genesis
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprob.htm
Database item no.: 259
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry & Religion '00 at 56-57 ("The Dissolution of Paganism").
Beginning, however, with that zealous Protestant, the old Xenophanes, the austerer minds, moralists, naturalists, and wits, united in decrying the fanciful polytheism of the poets. This criticism was in one sense unjust; it did not consider the original justification of mythology in human nature and in the external facts. It was, like all heresy or partial scepticism, in a sense superficial and unphilosophical. It was far from conceiving that its own tenets and assumptions were as groundless, without being as natural or adequate, as the system it attacked. To a person sufficiently removed by time or by philosophy from the controversies of sects, orthodoxy must always appear right and heresy wrong ; for he sees in orthodoxy the product of the creative mind, of faith and constructive logic, but in heresy only the rebellion of some partial interest or partial insight against the corollaries of a formative principle imperfectly grasped and obeyed with hesitation. At a distance, the criticism that disintegrates any great product of art or mind must always appear short-sighted and unamiable.
Subject sort: gsprot
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprot.htm
Database item no.: 314
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry & Religion '00 at 70-71 ("The Dissolution of Paganism").
We may venture to say that among the thinkers of all nations Aristotle was the first to reach the conception of what may fitly be called God [a being spiritual, personal, and perfect, immutable without being abstract, and omnipotent without effort and with out degradation]. . . . The analytic study of Nature (a study which at the same time must be imaginative and sympathetic) could guide us to the conception of her inner needs and tendencies and of what their proper fulfilment would be. We could then see that this fulfilment would lie in intelligence and thought. Growth is for the sake of the fruition of life, and the fruition of life consists in the pursuit and attainment of objects. The moral virtues belong to the pursuit, the intellectual to the attainment. Knowledge is the end of all endeavour, the justification and fulfilment of all growth. Intelligence is the clarification of love.
Subject sort: gsmind
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmind.htm
Database item no.: 343
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry & Religion '00 at 91-93 ("The Poetry of Christian Dogma").
Was Christianity right in saying that the world was made for man? Was the account it adopted of the method and causes of Creation conceivably correct? Was the garden of Eden a historical reality, and were the Hebrew prophecies announcements of the advent of Jesus Christ? Did the deluge come because of man's wickedness, and will the last day coincide with the dramatic denouement of the Church's history? In other words, is the spiritual experience of man the explanation of the universe? Certainly not, if we are thinking of a scientific, not of a poetical explanation. As a matter of fact, man is a product of laws which must also destroy him, and which, as Spinoza would say, infinitely exceed him in their scope and power. His welfare is indifferent to the stars, but dependent on them. And yet that counter-Copernican revolution accomplished by Christianity—a revolution which Kant should hardly have attributed to himself—which put man in the centre of the universe and made the stars circle about him, must have some kind of justification. And indeed its justification (if we may be so brief on so great a subject) is that what is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values. While the existence of things must be understood by referring them to their causes, which are mechanical, their functions can only be explained by what is interesting in their results, in other words, by their relation to human nature and to human happiness.
The Christian drama was a magnificent poetic rendering of this side of the matter, a side which Socrates had envisaged by his admirable method, but which now flooded the consciousness of mankind with torrential emotions. Christianity was born under an eclipse, when the light of Nature was obscured; but the star that intercepted that light was itself luminous, and shed on succeeding ages a moonlike radiance, paler and sadder than the other, but no less divine, and meriting no less to be eternal. Man now studied his own destiny, as he had before studied the sky, and the woods, and the sunny depths of water; and as the earlier study produced in his soul—anima naturcditer poeta—the images of Zeus, Pan, and Nereus, so the later study produced the images of Jesus and of Mary, of Heaven and Hell, of miracles and sacraments. The observation was no less exact, the translation into poetic images no less wonderful here than there. To trace the endless transfiguration, with all its unconscious ingenuity and harmony, might be the theme of a fascinating science. Let not the reader fancy that in Christianity everything was settled by records and traditions. The idea of Christ himself had to be constructed by the imagination in response to moral demands, tradition giving only the barest external points of attachment. The facts were nothing until they became symbols ; and nothing could turn them into symbols except an eager imagination on the watch for all that might embody its dreams.
Subject sort: Sciences of Fact and Value
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 344
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry & Religion '00 at 108 ("The Poetry of Christian Dogma").
[M]en became superstitious not because they had too much imagination, but because they were not aware that they had any.
Subject sort: Superstition
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 255
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry & Religion '00 at 166 ("___") (critical edition).
When the 'infinite' spirit enters the human body, it is determined to certain limited forms of life by the organism which it wears; and its blank potentiality becomes actual in thought and deed, according to the fortunes and relations of its organism. The ripeness of the passions may thus precede the information of the mind and lead to groping in by-paths without issue; a phenomenon which appears not only in the obscure individual whose abnormalities the world ignores, but also in the starved, half-educated genius that pours the whole fire of his soul into trivial acts or grotesque superstitions. The hysterical forms of music and religion are the refuge of an idealism that has lost its way; the waste and failures of life flow largely in those channels. The carnal temptations of youth are incidents of the same maladaptation, when passions assert themselves before the conventional order of society can allow them physical satisfaction, and long before philosophy or religion can hope to transform them into fuel for its own sacrificial flames.
Subject sort: Actual (thought / deed) (knowledge / virtue)
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 322
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry & Religion '00 at 168 ("____") (critical edition).
Accordingly Aristophanes, remembering the original religious and political functions of tragedy, blushes to see upon the boards a woman in love. And we should readily agree with him, but for two reasons,—one, that we abstract too much, in our demands upon art, from nobility of mind, and from the thought of totality and proportion; the other, that we have learned to look for a symbolic meaning in detached episodes, and to accept the incidental emotions they cause, because of their violence and our absorption in them, as in some sense sacramental and representative of the whole. Thus the picture of an unmeaning passion, of a crime without an issue, does not appear to our romantic apprehension as the sorry failure it is, but rather as a true tragedy. Some have lost even the capacity to conceive of a true tragedy, because they have no idea of a cosmic order, or general laws of life, or of an impersonal religion. They measure the profundity of feeling by its intensity, not by its justifying relations; and in the radical disintegration of their spirit, the more they are devoured the more they fancy themselves fed. But the majority of us retain some sense of a meaning in our joys and sorrows, and even if we cannot pierce to their ultimate object, we feel that what absorbs us here and now has a merely borrowed or deputed power; that it is a symbol and foretaste of all reality speaking to the whole soul. At the same time our intelligence is too confused to give us any picture of that reality, and our will too feeble to marshal our disorganised loves into a religion consistent with itself and harmonious with the comprehended universe. A rational ideal eludes us, and we are the more inclined to plunge into mysticism.
Subject sort: Rational Ideals (of knowledge and love) vs.
Superstition (mysticism and unmeaning passions)
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 323
Year for sort purposes: 1901
Source edition: Poetry & Religion '00 at 208 ("The Poetry of Barbarism").
Philosophy and religion are nothing if not ultimate; it is their business to deal with general principles and final aims.
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 92
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Common Sense '24 at vii ("Preface to the Second Edition").
[Subjectivity] was a method appropriate to a book like this, a presumptive biography of the human intellect, which instead of the Life of Reason might have been called the Romance of Wisdom.
Subject sort: Life of Reason
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gslife.htm
Database item no.: 239
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Common Sense '24 at xii ("Preface to the Second Edition").
I had no need to adopt the cosmology of Plato—a mythical and metaphysical creation, more or less playful and desperate, designed to buttress his moral philosophy. I was old enough, when I came under his influence, to discount this sort of priestcraft in thought, so familiar to Christian apologists. Experience, knowledge of my own heart, attachment to Spinoza, even the science of the day, protected me against those voluntary illusions. Indeed, to undermine them gently, by showing how unnecessary and treacherous they are in the healthy life of the spirit, was a chief part of my undertaking.
Subject sort: gsexist
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsexist.htm
Database item no.: 33
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Common Sense '24 at xii ("Preface to the Second Edition").
Moral philosophy is not a science.
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 93
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Common Sense '24 at 2 ("Introduction").
To the ideal function of envisaging the absent, memory and reflection will add (since they exist and constitute a new complication in being) the practical function of modifying the future. Vital impulse, however, when it is modified by reflection and veers in sympathy with judgments pronounced on the past, is properly called reason.
Subject sort: Reason
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 198
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Common Sense '24 at 12-13 ("Introduction").
The tenets of Protestant bodies are notoriously varied and on principle subject to change. There is hardly a combination of tradition and spontaneity which has not been tried in some quarter. If we think, however, of broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears that in Protestantism myth, without disappearing, has changed its relation to reality: instead of being an extension to the natural world myth has become its substratum. Religion no longer reveals divine personalities, future rewards, and tenderer Elysian consolations; nor does it seriously propose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a purgatory to be shortened by prescribed devotions. It merely gives the real world an ideal status and teaches men to accept a natural life on supernatural grounds. The consequence is that the most pious can give an unvarnished description of things. Even immortality and the idea of God are submitted, in liberal circles, to scientific treatment. On the other hand, it would be hard to conceive a more inveterate obsession than that which keeps the attitude of these same minds inappropriate to the objects they envisage. They have accepted natural conditions; they will not accept natural ideals. The Life of Reason has no existence for them, because, although its field is clear, they will not tolerate any human or finite standard of value, and will not suffer extant interests, which can alone guide them in action or judgment, to define the worth of life.
Subject sort: gsprot
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprot.htm
Database item no.: 117
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Religion '26 at 91 ("The Christian Epic").
Man is still in his childhood; for he cannot respect an ideal which is not imposed on him against his will, nor can he find satisfaction in a good created by his own action.
Subject sort: Externalizing Ideals
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 337
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Science '25 at 108-09 ("Hesitations in Method").
All that is scientific or Darwinian in the theory of evolution is accordingly an application of mechanism, a proof that mechanism lies at the basis of life and morals. The Aristotelian notion of development, however, was too deeply rooted in tradition for it to disappear at a breath. Evolution as conceived by Hegel, for instance, or even Spencer, retained Aristotelian elements, though these were disguised and hidden under a cloud of new words. Both identify evolution with progress, with betterment; a notion which would naturally be prominent in any one with enlightened sympathies living in the nineteenth century, when a new social and intellectual order was forcing itself on a world that happened largely to welcome the change, but a notion that has nothing to do with natural science. The fittest to live need not be those with the most harmonious inner life nor the best possibilities. The fitness might be due to numbers, as in a political election, or to tough fibre, as in a tropical climate. Of course a form of being that circumstances make impossible or hopelessly laborious had better dive under and cease for the moment to be; but the circumstances that render it inopportune do not render it essential inferior. Circumstances have no power of that kind; and perhaps the worst incident in the popular acceptance of evolution has been a certain brutality thereby introduced into moral judgment, an abdication of human ideals, a mocking indifference to justice, under cover of respect for what is bound to be, and for the rough economy of the world. Disloyalty to the good in the guise of philosophy had appeared also among the ancients, when their political ethics had lost its authority, just as it appeared among us when the prestige of religion had declined. The Epicureans sometimes said that one should pursue pleasure because all the animals did so, and the Stoics that one should fill one's appointed place in nature, because such was the practice of the clouds and rivers.
Subject sort: Evolution
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsgov.htm
Database item no.: 283
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Religion '26 at 114 ("Pagan Custom and Barbarian Genius Infused Into Christianity").
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitations without benefit. It marks very clearly that margin of irresponsible variation in manners and thoughts which among a people artificially civilised may so easily be larger than the solid core. It is characteristic of occidental society in mediæval and modern times, because this society is led by people who, being educated in a foreign culture, remain barbarians at heart.
Subject sort: Fashion
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 340
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Religion '26 at 114 ("Pagan Custom and Barbarian Genius Infused Into Christianity").
To this day we have not achieved a really native civilisation. Our art, morals, and religion, though deeply dyed in native feeling, are still only definable and, indeed, conceivable by reference to classic and alien standards. Among the northern races culture is even more artificial and superinduced than among the southern; whence the strange phenomenon of snobbery in society, affectation in art, and a violent contrast between the educated and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, classes that live on different intellectual planes and often have different religions. Some educated persons, accordingly, are merely students and imbibers; they sit at the feet of a past which, not being really theirs, can produce no fruit in them but sentimentality. Others are merely protestants; they are active in the moral sphere only by virtue of an inward rebellion against something greater and overshadowing, yet repulsive and alien. They are conscious truants from a foreign school of life.
Subject sort: gsprot
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprot.htm
Database item no.: 339
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Religion '26 at 121-22 ("Pagan Custom and Barbarian Genius Infused Into Christianity").
[Protestantism's] true essence is not constituted by the Christian dogmas that at a given moment it chances to retain, but by the spirit in which it constantly challenges the others, by the expression it gives to personal integrity, to faith in conscience, to human instinct courageously meeting the world. It rebels, for instance, against the Catholic system of measurable sins and merits, with rewards and punishments legally adjusted and controlled by priestly as well as by divine prerogative. Such a supernatural mechanism seems to an independent and uncowed nature a profanation and an imposture. Away, it says, with all intermediaries between the soul and God, with all meddlesome priestcraft and all mechanical salvation. Salvation shall be by faith alone, that is, by an attitude and sentiment private to the spirit, by an inner co-operation of man with the world. The Church shall be invisible, constituted by all those who possess this necessary faith and by no others. It really follows from this, although the conclusion may not be immediately drawn, that religion is not an adjustment to other facts or powers, or to other possibilities, than those met with in daily life and in surrounding nature, but is rather a spiritual adjustment to natural life, an insight into its principles, by which a man learns to identify himself with the cosmic power and to share its multifarious business no less than its ulterior security and calm.
Protestantism, in this perfectly instinctive trustfulness and self-assertion, is not only prior to Christianity but more primitive than reason and even than man. The plants and animals, if they could speak, would express their attitude to their destiny in the Protestant fashion. "He that formed us," they would say, "lives and energises within us. He has sealed a covenant with us, to stand by us if we are faithful and strenuous in following the suggestions he whispers in our hearts. With fidelity to ourselves and, what is the same thing, to him, we are bound to prosper and to have life more and more abundantly for ever." This attitude, where it concerns religion, involves two corollaries: first, what in accordance with Hebrew precedent may be called symbolically faith in God, that is, confidence in one's own impulse and destiny, a confidence which the world in the end is sure to reward; and second, abomination of all contrary religious tenets and practices—of asceticism, for instance, because it denies the will; of idolatry and myth, because they render divinity concrete rather than relative to inner cravings and essentially responsive; finally of tradition and institutional authority, because these likewise jeopardise the soul's experimental development as, in profound isolation, she wrestles with reality and with her own inspiration.
Subject sort: gsprot
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprot.htm
Database item no.: 341
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Science '25 at 127 ("Psychology").
The thoughts of men are incredibly evanescent, merely the foam of their labouring natures . . . .
Subject sort: gsepi
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsepi.htm
Database item no.: 18
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Science '25 at 149 note ("Psychology").
Aristotle called the soul the first entelechy of such a body. This first entelechy is what we should call life, since it is possessed by a man asleep. The French I know but do not use is in its first entelechy; the French I am actually speaking is in its second. Consciousness is therefore the second or actualised entelechy of its body.
Subject sort: Entelechy
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 182
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Common Sense '24 at 206 ("How Thought is Practical").
Mind is the body's entelechy, a value which accrues to the body when it has reached a certain perfection, of which it would be a pity, so to speak, that it should remain unconscious; so that while the body feeds the mind the mind perfects the body, lifting it and all its natural relations and impulses into the moral world, into the sphere of interests and ideas.
Subject sort: gsmind
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmind.htm
Database item no.: 57
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Science '25 at 208-09 ("Dialectic").
The sincere dialectician, the genuine moralist, must stand upon human, Socratic ground. Though art be long, it must take a short life for its basis and an actual interest for its guide. The liberal dialectician has the gift of conversation; he does not pretend to legislate from the throne of Jehovah about the course of affairs, but asks the ingenuous heart to speak for itself, guiding and checking it only in its own interest. The result is to express a given nature and to cultivate it; so that whenever any one possessing such a nature is born into the world he may use this calculation, and more easily understand and justify his mind. Of course, if experience were no longer the same, and faculties had entirely varied, the former interpretation could no longer serve. Where nature shows a new principle of growth the mind must find a new method of expression, and move toward other goals. Ideals are not forces stealthily undermining the will; they are possible forms of being that would frankly express it. These forms are invulnerable, eternal, and free; and he who finds them divine and congenial and is able to embody them at least in part and for a season, has to that extent transfigured life, turning it from a fatal process into a liberal art.
Subject sort: Art of Government
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsgov.htm
Database item no.: 214
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Science '25 at 208-09 ("Dialectic").
The sincere dialectician, the genuine moralist, must stand upon human, Socratic ground. Though art be long, it must take a short life for its basis and an actual interest for its guide. The liberal dialectician has the gift of conversation; he does not pretend to legislate from the throne of Jehovah about the course of affairs, but asks the ingenuous heart to speak for itself, guiding and checking it only in its own interest. The result is to express a given nature and to cultivate it; so that whenever any one possessing such a nature is born into the world he may use this calculation, and more easily understand and justify his mind. Of course, if experience were no longer the same, and faculties had entirely varied, the former interpretation could no longer serve. Where nature shows a new principle of growth the mind must find a new method of expression, and move toward other goals. Ideals are not forces stealthily undermining the will; they are possible forms of being that would frankly express it. These forms are invulnerable, eternal, and free; and he who finds them divine and congenial and is able to embody them at least in part and for a season, has to that extent transfigured life, turning it from a fatal process into a liberal art.
Subject sort: Dialectic
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 177
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Common Sense '24 at 212 ("How Thought is Practical").
Spirit is useless, being the end of things: but it is not vain, since it alone rescues all else from vanity.
Subject sort: gsmind
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmind.htm
Database item no.: 58
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Science '25 at 216-17 ("Prerational Morality").
Philosophers would do a great discourtesy to estimation if they sought to justify it. It is all other acts that need justification by this one. The good greets us initially in every experience and in every object. Remove from anything its share of excellence and you have made it utterly insignificant, irrelevant to human discourse, and unworthy of even theoretical consideration. Value is the principle of perspective in science, no less than of rightness in life. The hierarchy of goods, the architecture of values, is the subject that concerns man most. Wisdom is the first philosophy, both in time and in authority . . . . The first philosophers were accordingly sages. They were statesmen and poets who knew the world and cast a speculative glance at the heavens, the better to understand the conditions and limits of human happiness. . . . . Such was philosophy in the beginning and such is philosophy still.
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 94
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Religion '26 at 227-28 ("Charity").
As common morality itself falls easily into mythical expressions and speaks of a fight between conscience and nature, reason and the passions, as if these were independent in their origin or could be divided in their operation, so spiritual life even more readily opposes the ideal to the real, the revealed and heavenly truth to the extant reality, as if the one could be anything but an expression and fulfillment of the other. Being equally convinced that spiritual life is authoritative and possible, and that it is opposed to all that earthly experience has as yet supplied, the prophet almost inevitably speaks of another world above the clouds and another existence beyond the grave; he thus seeks to clothe in concrete and imaginable form the ideal to which natural existence seem to him wholly rebellious. Spiritual life comes to mean life abstracted from politics, from art, from sense, even in the end from morality. Natural motives and natural virtues are contrasted with those which are henceforth called supernatural, and all the grounds and sanctions of right living are transferred to another life.
Subject sort: gslife [used in introduction]
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 333
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Science '25 at 243-44 ("Rational Ethics").
The autonomous moralist differs from the sophist or ethical sceptic in this: that he retains his integrity. In vindicating his ideal he does not recant his human nature. In asserting the initial right of every impulse in others, he remains the spokesman of his own. Knowledge of the world, courtesy, and fairness do not neutralise his positive life. He is thoroughly sincere, as the sophist is not; for every man, while he lives, embodies and enacts some special interest; and this truth, which those who confound psychology with ethics may think destructive of all authority in morals, is in fact what alone renders moral judgment possible and respectable. If the sophist declares that what his nature attaches him to is not 'really' a good, because it would not be a good, perhaps, for a different creature, he is a false interpreter of his own heart, and rather discreditably stultifies his honest feelings and actions by those theoretical valuations which, in guise of a mystical ethics, he gives out to the world.
Subject sort: gsrelative
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsrelative.htm
Database item no.: 127
Year for sort purposes: 1905
Source edition: Religion '26 at 266 ("Ideal Immortality").
It is hard to convince people that they have such a gift as intelligence. If they perceive its animal basis they cannot conceive its ideal affinities or understand what is meant by calling it divine; if they perceive its ideality and see the immortal essences that swim into its ken, they hotly deny that it is an animal faculty, and invent ultramundane places and bodiless persons in which it is to reside; as if those celestial substances could be, in respect to thought, any less material than matter or, in respect to vision and life, any less instrumental than bodily organs. It never occurs to them that if nature has added intelligence to animal life it is because they belong together. Intelligence is a natural emanation of vitality.
Subject sort: Facts / Ideals : Experience of
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 338
Year for sort purposes: 1910
Source edition: Poets '10 at ____ ("Goethe's Faust") (6 Triton at 127-28).
Spinoza has an admirable doctrine, or rather insight, which he calls seeing things under the form of eternity. This faculty is fundamental in the human mind; ordinary perception and memory are cases of it. Therefore, when we use it to deal with ultimate issues, we are not alienated from experience, but, on the contrary, endowed with experience and with its fruits. A thing is seen under the form of eternity when all its parts or stages are conceived in their true relations, and thereby conceived together. The complete biography of Caesar is Caesar seen under the form of eternity.
Subject sort: Form of Eternity
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 318
Year for sort purposes: 1910
Source edition: Poets '10 at ___ ("Lucretius") (6 Triton at 63).
[The one comprehensive and orthodox solution] is that universal terms or natures exist before the particulars, and in the particulars, and after the particulars: for God, before he made the world . . . had eternally in his mind the notions of a perfect man, horse, etc., after which the particulars were modeled . . . . But universal terms or natures existed also in particulars, since the particulars illustrated them . . . . Nevertheless, the universals existed also after the particulars: for the discursive mind of man . . . could not help noticing and abstracting the common types that often recur; and this ex post facto idea, in the human mind, is a universal term also. To deny any of the three theories, and not to see their consistency, is to miss the medieval point of view, which, in every sense of the word, was Catholic.
Subject sort: Realist / Conceptualist / Nominalist
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprob.htm
Database item no.: 317
Year for sort purposes: 1910
Source edition: Poets '10 at 38-39 ("_____").
Lucretius knows very well that this distinction is moral only, or as people now say, subjective. . . . [F]rom the point of view of any particular life or interest, the distinction between a creative force and a destructive force is real and all-important. To make it is not to deny the mechanical structure of nature, but only to show how this mechanical structure is fruitful morally, how the outlying parts of it are friendly or hostile to me or to you, its local and living products.
Subject sort: gsmoral
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmoral.htm
Database item no.: 74
Year for sort purposes: 1910
Source edition: Poets '10 at 76 ("Dante").
[U]nder this childish or metaphorical [Socratic] physics, there is a serious morality. After all, the use of opium is that it is a narcotic; no matter why, physically, it is one. The use of the body is the mind, whatever the origin of the body may be. . . . [Nature's] use is to serve the good—to make life, happiness, and virtue possible. . . . Observation must yield to dialectic [under the Socratic philosophy] . . . .
Subject sort: gsexist
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsexist.htm
Database item no.: 34
Year for sort purposes: 1910
Source edition: Poets '10 at 141-42 ("_____").
Faust is, then, no philosophical poem, after an open or deliberate fashion; and yet it offers a solution to the moral problem of existence as truly as do the poems of Lucretius and Dante.
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 95
Year for sort purposes: 1911
Source edition: Letters '55 at 104 ("To Susana Sturgis de Sastre, May 16, 1911").
I am writing a brand new system of philosophy to be called 'Three Realms of Being'—not the mineral vegetable and animal, but something far more metaphysical, namely Essence, Matter and Consciousness.
Subject sort: gstruth
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gstruth.htm
Database item no.: 148
Year for sort purposes: 1915
Source edition: Letters '55 at 148 ("To B.A.G. Fuller, August 4, 1915").
Philosophy is not a science; it might be a life or a means of artistic expression, but it is not likely to be either at an American college.
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 113
Year for sort purposes: 1916
Source edition: Egotism '40 at 12 ("The General Character of German Philosophy").
In inventing the transcendental method, the study of subjective projections and perspectives, [German philosophy] has added a new dimension to human speculation.
Subject sort: Transcendental Method
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 321
Year for sort purposes: 1916
Source edition: Egotism '40 at 17-18 ("The General Character of German Philosophy").
Such in brief is German philosophy, at least, such it might be said to be if any clear account of it did not necessarily falsify it; but one of its chief characteristics, without which it would melt away, is ambiguity. You cannot maintain that the natural world is the product of the human mind without changing the meaning of the word mind and of the word human. You cannot deny that there is a substance without turning into a substance whatever you substitute for it. You cannot identify yourself with God without at once asserting and denying the existence of God and of yourself. When you speak of such a thing as the consciousness of society you must never decide whether you mean the consciousness individuals have of society or a fabled consciousness which society is to have of itself: the first meaning would spoil your eloquence, and the second would betray your mythology.
What is involved in all these equivocations is not merely a change of vocabulary, that shifting use of language which time brings with it. No, the persistence of the old meanings alone gives point to the assertions that change them and identify them with their opposites. Everywhere, therefore, in these speculations, you must remain in suspense as to what precisely you are talking about. A vague, muffled, dubious thought must carry you along as on a current. [A] certain afflatus must bear you nobly onward through a perpetual incoherence. . . .
Subject sort: gsdef [used in introduction]
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 295
Year for sort purposes: 1916
Source edition: Egotism '40 at 29 ("The Protestant Heritage").
For favourable as Protestantism is to investigation and learning, it is almost incompatible with clearness of thought and fundamental freedom of attitude.
Subject sort: gsprot
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprot.htm
Database item no.: 118
Year for sort purposes: 1916
Source edition: Egotism '40 at 70-71 ("Transcendentalism Perfected").
A theoretical materialist, who looks on the natural world as on a soil that he has risen from and feeds on, may perhaps feel a certain piety towards those obscure abysses of nature that have given him birth; but his delight will be rather in the clear things of the imagination, in the humanities, by which the rude forces of nature are at once expressed and eluded. Not so the transcendentalist. Regarding his mind as the source of everything, he is moved to solemn silence and piety only before himself: on the other hand, what bewitches him, what he loves to fondle, is his progeny, the material environment, the facts, the laws, the blood, and the iron in which he conceives (quite truly, perhaps) that his spirit perfectly and freely expresses itself. To despise the world and withdraw into the realm of mind, as into a subtler and more congenial sphere, is quite contrary to his idealism. Such a retreat might bring him peace, and he wants war. His idealism teaches him that strife and contradiction, as Heraclitus said, are the parents of all things; and if he stopped striving, if he grew sick of ambition and material goods, he thinks he would be forsaking life, for he hates as he would death what another kind of idealists have called salvation.
Subject sort: Transcendentalism
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsisms.htm
Database item no.: 234
Year for sort purposes: 1916
Source edition: Egotism '40 at 110-11 ("The Breach with Christianity").
He [the romantic pessimist] imagines that what is desired is not this or that—food, children, victory, knowledge, or some other specific goal of a human instinct—but an abstract and perpetual happiness behind all these alternating interests. Of course an abstract and perpetual happiness is impossible, not merely because events are sure to disturb any equilibrium we may think we have established in our lives, but for the far more fundamental reason that we have no abstract and perpetual instinct to satisfy. . . . . A highest good to be obtained apart from each and every specific interest is more than unattainable; it is unthinkable. . . . . [T]he highest good of man is the sum and harmony of those specific goods upon which his nature is directed.
Subject sort: Highest Good
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprob.htm
Database item no.: 261
Year for sort purposes: 1916
Source edition: Egotism '40 at 135 ("The Ethics of Nietzsche").
That an attitude is foolish, incoherent, disastrous, proves nothing against the depth of the instinct that inspires it. Who could be more intensely unintelligent than Luther or Rousseau? Yet the world followed them, not to turn back. The molecular forces of society, so to speak, had already undermined the systems which these men denounced. If the systems have survived it is only because the reformers, in their intellectual helplessness, could supply nothing to take their place. So Nietzsche, in his genial imbecility, betrays the shifting of great subterranean forces. What he said may be nothing, but the fact that he said it is all-important.
Subject sort: gsprot
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprot.htm
Database item no.: 119
Year for sort purposes: 1916
Source edition: Egotism '40 at 146-47 ("Heathenism").
[S]o that the later Jewish religion went almost as far as Platonism or Christianity in the direction opposite to heathenism [and toward an orthodox wisdom].
[T]he reformers [at the rise of romanticism] are deceived. What really offends them may not be what is false in the received orthodoxy, but what though true is uncongenial to them. In that case heathenism, under the guise of a search for a purer wisdom, is working in their souls against wisdom of any sort. Such is the suspicion that Catholics would throw on Protestantism, naturalists on idealism, and conservatives generally on all revolutions.
Subject sort: gsprot
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprot.htm
Database item no.: 120
Year for sort purposes: 1916
Source edition: Egotism '40 at 151 ("Heathenism").
The rebellion of the heathen soul is unmistakable in the Reformation, but it is not recognised in this simple form, because those who feel that it was justified do not dream that it was heathen, and those who see it was heathen will not admit that it was justified. Externally, of course, it was an effort to recover the original essence of Christianity; [but it] was simply the inertia of established prejudice that made people use tradition to correct tradition; until the whole substance of tradition, worn away by that internal friction, should be dissolved, and impulse and native genius should assert themselves unimpeded.
Subject sort: gsprot
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprot.htm
Database item no.: 121
Year for sort purposes: 1916
Source edition: Egotism '40 at 152-53 ("Heathenism").
But heathenism ignores happiness, despises it, or thinks it impossible. . . . . [German moralists] think the pursuit of happiness low, materialistic, and selfish. They wish everybody to sacrifice or rather to forget happiness, and to do "deeds."
It is in the nature of things that those who are incapable of happiness should have no idea of it. Happiness is not for wild animals, who can only oscillate between apathy and passion. To be happy, even to conceive of happiness, you must be reasonable or (if Nietzsche prefers the word) you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passions and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy you must be wise. This happiness is sometimes found instinctively, and then the rudest fanatic can hardly fail to see how lovely it is; but sometimes it comes of having learned something by experience (which empirical people never do) and involves some chastening and renunciation; but it is not less sweet for having this touch of holiness about it, and the spirit of it is healthy and beneficent. The nature of happiness, therefore, dawns upon philosophers when their wisdom begins to report the lessons of experience; an a priori philosophy can have no inkling of it.
Happiness is the union of vitality with art, and in so far as vitality is a spiritual thing and not mere restlessness and vehemence, art increases vitality. . . .
Subject sort: Happiness
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 189
Year for sort purposes: 1916
Source edition: Egotism '40 at 164 ("Egotism in Practice").
Indeed, nothing beside his own purpose will have any value in his eyes, or even any existence. He will therefore inevitably act without consideration for others, without courtesy, without understanding. When he chooses to observe anything external—and he is studious—his very attentions will be an insult; for he will assume that his idea of that external thing is the reality of it, and that other people can have only such rights and only such a character as he is willing to assign to them. It follows from his egotistical principles that in judging others he should be officious and rude, learned and mistaken.
Subject sort: Egotism Learned & Mistaken
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 248
Year for sort purposes: 1916
Source edition: Animal Faith '67 at 355 ("Two Rational Moralists").
[Socrates and Plato] were political philosophers by tradition, being Greeks, but private moralists by vocation, and it is only to private morality that their system really applies. In the 'Republic' the problem is how to save the soul, and the political discussion is introduced only as a great parable, because the public in those pre-Christian days had a keener sense for political than for spiritual perfection. What enabled Socrates and Plato to apply their personal morality in the gross, and to imagine that they had a political system as well as a spiritual one, was a triple oversight on their part. In the first place they thought that scientific knowledge of nature was impossible, or at least irrelevant to the government of life and to the right choice of ideals. In the next place, unlike the Indians, they overlooked the whole non-human creation. Finally they assumed that human nature was single, definite, and invariable. If appearance, tradition, and religious faith enlightened us sufficiently about the universe, if no beings counted except the human, and all human beings were essentially identical with ourselves, then, indeed, the morality of the single soul would cover all public morality: all men, to be good, would need to follow the same precepts, and if all men were good, society would be perfect.
Most of us now see quite clearly how far this is from being the case. The living world is fluid and contradictory, and to assume the uniformity of human nature and the adequacy of private virtue to secure public good opens the door wide to tyranny and to political apathy. The orthodox then profess to know the man better a priori than he knows himself by experience; everything that departs from their conventions is set down for a disease, a sin, or a contradiction; and this innate obliquity in man their zeal must hasten to extirpate. No attempt to do justice to life or society is possible on such a basis.
Subject sort: gsrelative
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsrelative.htm
Database item no.: 138
Year for sort purposes: 1916
Source edition: Animal Faith '67 at 355 ("Two Rational Moralists").
What enabled Socrates and Plato to apply their personal morality in the gross, and to imagine that they had a political system as well as a spiritual one, was a triple oversight on their part. In the first place they thought that scientific knowledge of nature was impossible, or at least irrelevant to the government of life and to the right choice of ideals. In the next place, unlike the Indians, they overlooked the whole non-human creation. Finally they assumed that human nature was single, definite, and invariable. If appearance, tradition, and religious faith enlightened us sufficiently about the universe, if no beings counted except the human, and all human beings were essentially identical with ourselves, then, indeed, the morality of the single soul would cover all public morality: all men, to be good, would need to follow the same precepts, and if all men were good, society would be perfect.
Most of us now see quite clearly how far this is from being the case. The living world is fluid and contradictory, and to assume the uniformity of human nature and the adequacy of private virtue to secure public good opens the door wide to tyranny and to political apathy. The orthodox then profess to know man better a priori than he knows himself by experience; everything that departs from their conventions is set down for a disease, a sin, or a contradiction; and this innate obliquity in man their zeal must hasten to extirpate. No attempt to do justice to life or society is possible on such a basis.
Subject sort: Personal Morality / Political System
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprob.htm
Database item no.: 270
Year for sort purposes: 1919
Source edition: Letters '55 at 177-78 ("To Robert Bridges, September 18, 1919")
If you mean that [Plotinus'] system of the universe is not a map of it, is not scientifically correct or in scale, of course I agree. But it seems to me a very great system, very "good philosophy" . . . . The doctrines of Plotinus are flights in the same direction as the doctrines of Christianity: they are not hypotheses intended to explain facts, but expressions invented for sentiment and aspiration. The world, he feels, is full of the suggestion of beauty and goodness, but of the suggestion only. In fact, it betrays and obliterates everything it tries to express, like an inscription in invisible ink that should become luminous only for a moment. And his question is What does the world say, what does life mean, what is there beyond . . . that might lend significance and a worthy origin and end to this wonderful apparition and to our passionate love and passionate dissatisfaction in its presence? His system is an elaborate answer to this question. It is not a hypothesis but an intention, and such rightness as it has is merely fidelity and fineness in rendering moral experience. Of course all those things he describes do not exist; of course he is not describing this world, he is describing the other world, that is, deciphering the good, just beyond it or above it, which each actual thing suggests. Even this rendering of moral aspiration is arbitrary, because nature really does not aspire to anything, and each living thing aspires to something different, in diverse ways. But this arbitrary aspiration, which Plotinus reads into the world, sincerely expresses his own aspiration and that of his age. That is why I say he is decidedly a "good philosopher." . . . . It seems to me better than Christian theology in this respect, that it isn't mixed up with history, it isn't half Jewish, half worldly. It is the Greek side of Christian theology isolated and made pure; and that is the side of it which seems to me truly spiritual, truly sacrificial and penitentially joyful. That it is terribly superstitious and turns all physics into magic is an integral part of its poetic and expressive virtue. Every passion, every force, must be a devil or an angel, because it is agreed to begin with we are looking for the spirit in things.
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 296
Year for sort purposes: 1920
Source edition: Character & Opinion '20 at ___ ("_____") (8 Triton at 110-12).
Everywhere [in late 19th and early 20th-century America] co-operation is taken for granted, as something that no one would be so mean or so short-sighted as to refuse. . . . Every political body, every public meeting, every club, or college, or athletic team, is full of it. Out it comes whenever there is an accident in the street or a division in a church, or a great unexpected emergency like the late war. . . .
Such a way of proceeding seems . . . irresistible in a natural democracy. But if we consider human nature at large and the practice of most nations, we shall see that it is a very rare, wonderful, and unstable convention. . . . [Under American conditions of this time, the] most opposite systems of religion and education could look smiling upon one another's prosperity, because the country could afford these superficial luxuries, having a constitutional religion and education of its own, which everybody drank in unconsciously and which assured the moral cohesion of the people. . . . It was because life in America was naturally more co-operative and more plastic than in England that the spirit of English liberty, which demands co-operation and plasticity, could appear there more boldly and universally than it ever did at home.
English liberty is a method, not a goal. . . . In English civilisation the individual is neutralised; it does not matter so much even in high places if he is rather stupid or rather cheap; public spirit sustains him, and he becomes its instrument all the more readily, perhaps, for not being very distinguished or clear-headed himself. . . . Its very looseness gives the English method its lien on the future. . . . Anglo-Saxon imperialism is unintended . . . . It has a commercial and missionary quality, and is essentially an invitation to pull together . . . ; but whether it is accepted or rejected, it is an offer of co-operation, a project for a limited partnership, not a complete plan of life to be imposed on anybody.
It is a wise instinct, in dealing with foreigners or with material things (which are foreigners to the mind), to limit oneself in this way to establishing external relations, partial mutual adjustments, with a great residuum of independence and reserve. . . . So deep-seated is this prudent instinct in the English nature that it appears even at home; most of the concrete things which English genius has produced are expedients. . . . [A]part from the literature that simply utters the inner man, no one considering the English language, the English church, or English philosophy, or considering the common law and parliamentary government, would take them for perfect realisations of art or truth or an ideal polity. Institutions so jumbled and limping could never have been planned; . . . they are accepted and prized, where they are native, for keeping the door open to a great volume and variety of goods, at a moderate cost of danger and absurdity.
Subject sort: Common Law and Liberty
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsgov.htm
Database item no.: 319
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 95 ("War Shrines").
My instinct is to go and stand under the cross, with the monks and the crusaders, far away from these Jews and Protestants who adore the world and who govern it.
Subject sort: gsprot
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprot.htm
Database item no.: 122
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 95-96 ("War Shrines").
Substance may be conceived logically, and then it means pure Being; or it may be conceived psychologically, and then it means absorption in the sense of pure Being; or it may be conceived physically as matter, a name for the constant quantities in things that are traceably transformed into one another. Pure Being and the contemplation of pure Being seem at first sight very different from matter; but they may be a dramatic impersonation of matter, viewed from the inside, and felt as blind intensity and solidified ignorance.
Subject sort: Substance
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 205
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 123 ("Imagination").
When I speak of being governed by imagination, of course I am indulging in a figure of speech, in an ellipsis; in reality we are governed by that perpetual latent process within us by which imagination itself is created. Actual imaginings—the cloud-like thoughts drifting by—are not masters over themselves nor over anything else. . . . . Imagination, when it chimes within us, apparently of itself, is no less elaborately grounded [than the chime in the night is grounded in the church tower, the composer's head, and the beadle winding things up]; it is a last symptom, a rolling echo, by which we detect and name the obscure operation that occasions it . . . .
Subject sort: gsepi
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsepi.htm
Database item no.: 19
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 124 ("Imagination").
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.
Subject sort: Imagination on Human Scale
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 249
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 157 ("Masks").
Empiricism would be agony if any one was so silly as really to forget his material status and to become the sport of his passing ideas.
Subject sort: Empiricism
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsisms.htm
Database item no.: 224
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 184 ("The Irony of Liberalism").
It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy . . . .
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 96
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 193 ("John Bull and His Philosophers").
It was a false step at which Hobbes halted, which Locke took unsuspectingly, and which sent Berkeley and Hume head over heels: the assumption that facts are known immediately.
Subject sort: Immediacy of Knowledge?
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsbrit.htm
Database item no.: 167
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 193 ("John Bull and His Philosophers").
It was a false step at which Hobbes halted, which Locke took unsuspectingly and which sent Berkeley and Hume head over heels: the assumption that facts are known immediately.
Subject sort: Knowledge Not Immediate
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprob.htm
Database item no.: 263
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 196-97 ("Occam's Razor").
What happens to exist can take very good care of itself, and is quite indifferent to what people think of it; and as for us, if we possess such cursory knowledge of the nearer parts of existence as is sufficient for our safety, there is no reason why we should attend to it too minutely: there's metal more attractive in discourse and in fiction. Mind, as Hobbes said, is fancy, and it is the things of fancy that greet us first and reward us best. They are far from being more absurd than the facts.
It is only what exists materially that exists without excuse, whereas what the mind creates has some vital justification, and may serve to justify the rest.
Subject sort: gsmind
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmind.htm
Database item no.: 59
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 200-01 ("Empiricism").
It is true that the romantic empiricist is not very radical . . . . In strictness, however, he has no right to this fond interest in himself. If he became a perfect empiricist he would trust experience only if it taught him absolutely nothing, even about is own past.
Subject sort: gsisms [used in introduction]
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 304
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 208 ("The Progress of Philosophy").
There has been progress in [the history of philosophy]; if we start with the first birth of intelligence and assume that the end pursued is to understand the world, the progress has been immense.
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 97
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 209 ("The Progress of Philosophy").
Suppose I arrange the works of the essential philosophers—leaving out secondary and transitional systems—in a bookcase of four shelves; on the top shelf (out of reach, since I can't read the language) I will place the Indians; on the next the Greek naturalists; and to remedy the unfortunate paucity of their remains, I will add here those free inquirers of the renaissance, leading to Spinoza, who after two thousand years picked up the thread of scientific speculation; and besides, all modern science: so that this shelf will run over into a whole library of what is not ordinarily called philosophy. On the third shelf I will put Platonism, including Aristotle, the Fathers, the Scholastics, and all honestly Christian theology; and on the last, modern or subjective philosophy in its entirety. I will leave lying on the table, as of doubtful destination, the works of my contemporaries.
Subject sort: gsphil [used in introduction]
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 285
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 215 ("The Progress of Philosophy").
Platonic metaphysics projects into the universe the moral progress of the soul. It is like a mountain lake, in which the aspirations and passions of a civilized mind are reflected upside down and a certain tremor and intensity is added to them in that narrow frame, which they would hardly have in the upper air. This system renders the life of the soul more unified and more beautiful than it would otherwise be. Everything becomes magical, and a sort of perpetual miracle of grace; the forms which things wear to the human mind are deputed to be their substance; the uses of life become its protecting gods; the categories of logic and of morals become celestial spheres enclosing the earth. A monstrous dream, if you take it for a description of nature; but a suitable allegory by which to illustrate the progress of the inner life: because those stages, or something like them, are really the stages of moral progress for the soul.
Subject sort: gsexist
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsexist.htm
Database item no.: 35
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 215 ("The Progress of Philosophy").
[Platonism is a] monstrous dream, if you take it for a description of nature; but a suitable allegory by which to illustrate the progress of the inner life: because those stages, or something like them, are really the stages of moral progress for the soul.
Subject sort: gsmoral
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmoral.htm
Database item no.: 75
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 227 ("Reversion to Platonism").
The whole of natural life, then, is an aspiration after the realization and vision of Ideas, and all action is for the sake of contemplation.
Subject sort: gsmind
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmind.htm
Database item no.: 60
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 227 ("Reversion to Platonism").
[The psyche] begins to ask itself what it is living for. The answer is not, as an unspiritual philosophy would have it: In order to live on. The true answer is : In order to understand, in order to see the Ideas.
Subject sort: gsmind
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmind.htm
Database item no.: 61
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 228 ("Reversion to Platonism").
Spirituality, then, lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely as a vehicle for joy.
Subject sort: gsmind
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmind.htm
Database item no.: 62
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 230 ("Ideas").
The Ideas were our true friends, our natural companions, and all our safe knowledge was of them; things were only vehicles by which Ideas were conveyed to us, as the copies of a book are vehicles for its sense.
Subject sort: gsmind
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmind.htm
Database item no.: 63
Year for sort purposes: 1922
Source edition: Soliloquies '22 at 258 ("On My Friendly Critics").
[A]ll I wish for others, or dare to recommend to them, is that they should keep their lives sweet also, not after my fashion, but each man in his own way. I talk a great deal about the good and the ideal, having learned from Plato and Aristotle (since the living have never shown me how to live) that, granting a human nature to which to appeal, the good and the ideal may be defined with some accuracy. Of course, they cannot be defined immutably, because human nature is not immutable; and they cannot be defined in such a way as to be transferred without change from one race or person to another, because human nature is various. Yet any reflective and honest man, in expressing his hopes and preferences, may expect to find many of his neighbours agreeing with him, and when they agree, they may work politically together. Now I am sometimes blamed for not labouring more earnestly to bring down the good of which I prate into the lives of other men. My critics suppose, apparently, that I mean by the good some particular way of life or some type of character which is alone virtuous, and which ought to be propagated. Alas, their propagandas! How they have filled this world with hatred, darkness, and blood! How they are still the eternal obstacle, in every home and in every heart, to a simple happiness! I have no wish to propagate any particular character, least of all my own; my conceit does not take that form. I wish individuals, and races, and nations to be themselves, and to multiply the forms of perfection and happiness, as nature prompts them. The only thing which I think might be propagated without injustice to the types thereby suppressed is harmony; enough harmony to prevent the interference of one type with another, and to allow the perfect development of each type. The good, as I conceive it, is happiness, happiness for each man after his own heart, and for each hour according to its inspiration.
Subject sort: gsrelative
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsrelative.htm
Database item no.: 128
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at ix ("Preface").
[A]nd as I am content to write in English, although it was not my mother-tongue, and although in speculative matters I have not much sympathy with the English mind, so I am content to follow the European tradition in philosophy, little as I respect its rhetorical metaphysics, its humanism, and its worldliness.
Subject sort: gsprot
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprot.htm
Database item no.: 123
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 22 ("Doubts About Self-Consciousness").
It might seem for a moment as if this pressing actuality of experience implied a relation between subject and object, so that an indescribable being called the ego or self was given with and involved in any actual fact. This analysis, however, is merely grammatical, and if pressed issues in mythical notions.
Subject sort: Subject / Object-Predicate
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprob.htm
Database item no.: 278
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 82-84 ("Some Uses of This Discovery").
The notion of essence is also useful in dismissing and handing over to physical science, where it belongs, the mooted question concerning the primary and secondary qualities of matter. . . . . [T]he question of primary and secondary qualities, as mooted in modern philosophy, is a false problem. It rests on the presumption that the data of sense can be and should be constituents of the object in nature, or at least exactly like its constituents. . . . [Psychological critics of experience] continue illegitimately to posit the bread, as an animal would, and then, in their human wisdom, proceed to remove from the description of it the colour and the pleasure concerned, as being mere effects on themselves, while they identify the bread itself with the remainder of their description hypostatised: shape, weight, and hardness. . . . Evidently these so-called primary qualities are simply those essences which custom or science continues to use in its description of things. . . .
It is because essences are not discerned that philosophers in so many ways labour the hopeless notion that there is nothing in sense which is not first in things.
Subject sort: Primary / Secondary Qualities
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprob.htm
Database item no.: 273
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 91-93 ("Some Uses of This Discovery").
Suppose, for instance, that I see yellow, that my eyes are open, and that there is a buttercup before me; my intuition (not properly the essence 'yellow' which is the datum) is then called a sensation. If again I see yellow with my eyes closed, the intuition is called an idea or a dream—although often in what is called an idea no yellow appears, but only words. If yet again I see yellow with my eyes open, but there is no buttercup, the intuition is called a hallucination. These various situations are curious, and worth distinguishing in optics and in medical psychology, but for the sceptical scrutiny of experience they make no difference. . . . . Again, if I see yellow once, my experience is called a particular impression, and its object, yellow, is supposed to exist and to be a particular too; but if I see yellow again, yellow has mysteriously become a universal, a general idea, and an abstraction.
Subject sort: Particular / Universal
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprob.htm
Database item no.: 269
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 102 ("The Watershed of Criticism").
Sensation and thought (between which there is no essential difference) . . . .
Subject sort: Sensation / Thought
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsprob.htm
Database item no.: 275
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 109-10 ("Identity and Duration Attributed to Essences").
Beliefs and ideas might also be surveyed in the order of discovery, as within the field of human grammar and thought they come to be discriminated. Such a survey would be a biography of reason, in which I should neglect the external occasions on which ideas and beliefs arise and study only the changing patterns which they form in the eye of thought, as in a kaleidoscope. What would probably come first in the order of discovery would be goods and evils . . . .
Subject sort: Life of Reason
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gslife.htm
Database item no.: 240
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 128 ("Essence and Intuition").
[Spirit] aspires to see each thing clearly and to see all things together, that is to say, under the form of eternity, and as sheer essences given in intuition.
Subject sort: Form of Eternity
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 185
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 129-30 ("Essence and Intuition").
Value accrues to any part of the realm of essence by virtue of the interest which somebody takes in it, as being the part relevant to his own life. If the organ of this life comes to perfect operation, it will reach intuition of that relevant part of essence. . . . The life of the psyche, which rises to this intuition, determines all the characters of the essence evoked, and among them its moral quality. . . . [P]ure intuition is life at its best . . . .
Subject sort: gsmind
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmind.htm
Database item no.: 64
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 130 ("Essence and Intuition").
The contemplation of so much of essence as is relevant to a particular life is what Aristotle called the entelechy or perfect fruition of life.
Subject sort: Entelechy
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 183
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 130 ("Essence and Intuition").
The contemplation of so much of essence as is relevant to a particular life is what Aristotle called the entelechy or perfect fruition of that life.
Subject sort: gsmind
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmind.htm
Database item no.: 65
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 133 ("Essence and Intuition").
[Belief] is not inevitable, if I am willing and able to look passively on the essences that may happen to be given: but [ ] if I consider what they are, and how they appear, I see that this appearance is an accident to them; that the principle of it is a contribution from my side, which I call intuition. The difference between essence and intuition, though men may have discovered it late, then seems to me profound and certain. They belong to two different realms of being.
Subject sort: gscateg
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gscateg.htm
Database item no.: 1
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 133 ("Essence and Intuition").
The existence of things is assumed by animals in action and expectation before intuition supplies any description of what the thing is that confronts them in a certain quarter.
Subject sort: gsepi
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsepi.htm
Database item no.: 20
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 173-74 ("Knowledge is Faith Mediated by Symbols").
Knowledge of discourse in other people, or of myself at other times, is what I call literary psychology. It is, or may be, in its texture, the most literal and adequate sort of knowledge of which a mind is capable.
Subject sort: Literary Psychology
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 320
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 227 ("Sublimations of Animal Faith").
The truth, however nobly it may loom before the scientific intellect, is ontologically something secondary.
Subject sort: gstruth
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gstruth.htm
Database item no.: 140
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 273-74 ("Discernment of Spirit").
Spirit, in a word, is no phenomenon, not sharing the aesthetic sort of reality proper to essences when given, nor that other sort proper to dynamic and material things; its peculiar reality is to be intelligence in act.
Subject sort: gscateg
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gscateg.htm
Database item no.: 2
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 274 ("Discernment of Spirit").
By spirit essences are transposed into appearances and things into objects of belief; and (as if to compensate them for that derogation from their native status) they are raised to a strange actuality in thought—a moral actuality which in their logical being or their material flux they had never aspired to have: like those rustics and servants at an inn whom a traveling poet may take note of and afterwards, to their astonishment, may put upon the stage with applause.
Subject sort: gsmoral
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmoral.htm
Database item no.: 76
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 275 ("Discernment of Spirit").
Spirit is a category, not an individual being . . . .
Subject sort: gscateg
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gscateg.htm
Database item no.: 3
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 281-82 ("Discernment of Spirit").
The psyche is plastic . . . . Scarcely is the impression received, but it merges in the general sensitiveness or responsiveness of the organ affected, modifying its previous way of reacting on some natural object, an object reported not by that impression alone, but by many others: so that the synthetic unity of apperception (that most radical of transcendental principles) obeys a compulsion peculiar to animal economy, which no pure spirit would need to share, the compulsion to use things as materials, to drop them and forge ahead, or to eat and to digest them: for the drinking in of light through the eyes, or of currents from other organs, thereby rearranging the habits of the nervous system, is very like the consumption of food, restoring the vegetative functions. . . . Pure spirit would never need to apperceive at all; this is an animal exigency that distracts it from intuition.
Subject sort: Synthetic Unity of Apperception
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 206
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 283 ("Discernment of Spirit").
There is no dilemma in the choice between animal faith and reason, because reason is only a form of animal faith, and utterly unintelligible dialectically, although full of a pleasant alacrity and confidence, like the chirping of birds.
Subject sort: Reason
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsdefs.htm
Database item no.: 199
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 284 ("Discernment of Spirit").
Fact can never be explained, since only another fact could explain it: therefore the existence of a universe rather than no universe, or of one sort of universe rather than another, must be accepted without demur.
Subject sort: gsexist
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsexist.htm
Database item no.: 36
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 287 ("Discernment of Spirit").
[When those who deny the existence of spirit] hear the word used, it irritates them, because they suppose it means some sort of magical power or metaphysical caloric, alleged to keep bodies alive, and to impose purposes on nature; purposes which such a prior spirit, being supernatural and immortal, could have had no reason for choosing. Such a dynamic spirit would indeed be nothing but an immaterial matter, a second physical substance distinguished from its grosser partner only in that we know nothing of it, but assign to its operation all those results which seem to us inexplicable. Belief in such a spirit is simply belief in magic; innocent enough at first when it is merely verbal and childish, but becoming perverse when defended after it has ceased to be spontaneous.
Subject sort: gsexist
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsexist.htm
Database item no.: 37
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 288 ("Discernment of Spirit").
[S]pirit is in another realm of being altogether, and needs the being and movement of matter, by its large sweeping harmonies, to generate it, and give it wings.
Subject sort: gscateg
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gscateg.htm
Database item no.: 4
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 304 ("Comparison with Other Criticisms of Knowledge").
[The systems of psychological philosophers] are the very opposite of philosophy. . . . . Far from purging the mind and strengthening it, that it might gain a clearer and more stable vision of the world, these critics have bewildered it . . . .
Subject sort: gsphil
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsphil.htm
Database item no.: 98
Year for sort purposes: 1923
Source edition: Scepticism '55 at 309 ("Comparison with Other Criticisms of Knowledge").
This natural faith opens to me various Realms of Being, having very different kinds of reality in themselves and a different status in respect to my knowledge of them.
Subject sort: gscateg
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gscateg.htm
Database item no.: 5
Year for sort purposes: 1924
Source edition: Letters '55 at 213-14 ("To C.J. Ducasse, April 19, 1924").
[The issue uppermost in the minds of Hume and Mill was] what internal relevance there was between cause and effect, to be the reason for their sequence. . . . . People, in a word, desiderate a dialectical or moral unity in natural sequences, and it was the absence of this desideration that Hume and Mill pointed out.
Subject sort: Causation
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsbrit.htm
Database item no.: 164
Year for sort purposes: 1924
Source edition: Letters '55 at 213-14 ("To C.J. Ducasse, April 19, 1924").
[The issue uppermost in the minds of Hume and Mill was] what internal relevance there was between cause and effect, to be the reason for their sequence. . . . . People, in a word, desiderate a dialectical or moral unity in natural sequences, and it was the absence of this desideration that Hume and Mill pointed out.
Subject sort: gsmoral
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmoral.htm
Database item no.: 88
Year for sort purposes: 1925
Source edition: Letters '55 at 222 ("To Robert Bridges, Paris, 1925").
. . . I am not at all sure that the extant sayings of Democritus and the rest will justify everything that I put in their mouths. I use them only as Platonic types for points of view which are natural to my own mind . . . .
Subject sort: gsisms [used in introduction]
Site location: http://members.aol.com/santayana/gsmisc.htm
Database item no.: 305
Year for sort purposes: 1925
Source edition: Letters '55 at 222-23 ("To Robert Bridges, Paris, August 8, 1925").
And there are two things which I should be much pleased if people found in this book, although I am afraid they won't: one is a connected doctrine and theme, the other an assimilation in spirit, though not in language, between Greek and Indian philosophy. I have long thought that the earlier Greeks had virtually the same wisdom as the Indians, and that it was only an accident of race and rhetoric that they seemed physiologers rather than religious mystics. My Democritus is intended to establish between his 'atoms and void' on the one hand and his 'normal madness' on the other precisely the same opposition and connection that the Indians established between Brahma and Illusion. I think myself that this is the only right physics or metaphysics: but it is only half of human philosophy. Socrates (who is nothing in physics, or a mere child) is brought into [sic] supply the other half, the self-justification of Illusion, because it is the moral essence and fruit of life: and the 'Secret of Aristotle' (which I am much pleased that you take to kindly) is the means of harmonising the two points of view, and proving them to be not only consistent but indispensable to one another if the n