Contrasting the Lives of Reason and Spirit
The natural and the spiritual fruits of life are not opposed, but they are different. Its natural fruits are more life, persisting through readjustments and an incessant generation of new forms, so that youth may fill the place of age and attain an equal, though not identical, perfection. It is in these perfections, or in approaches which partly anticipate them, that the spiritual fruits are found. As we have seen, they may ripen early, and may be gathered at all seasons, when any phase of life is perfected in action; but the spiritual fruits are internal or tangential to this action, not consequent upon it, like the natural fruits: they may be omnipresent in existence, but only by everywhere transmuting existence into essence. Spirit is life looking out of the window; the work of the household must have been done first, and is best done by machinery.
Realms '72 at 10 ("The Realm of Essence: Various Approaches to Essence").
Contrasting the Lives of Reason and Spirit
Those who have spirit in them will live in the spirit, or will suffer horribly in the flesh; but this very insight into pure Being and into the realm of essence shows that both are absolutely infinite, the one implicitly, the other explicitly; they therefore release the mind from any exclusive allegiance to this or that good. It is only by the most groundless and unstable of accidents that any such good has been set up, or any such world as that to which this good is relevant; and only to the merest blindness does this world or this good seem absolute or exclusive. Now it would be stupid in a blind man, because he was blind, to deny the greatness of a painter who was admittedly supreme in his art, or the sanctity of a saint, or the insight of some thoroughly trained, purged, and disinterested intellect; yet that blind man would by no means be bound in his own person to begin for that reason to paint, to pray, or to go into the Indian wilderness and contemplate pure Being. Humility in these respects is not incompatible with freedom. Let those excel who can in their rare vocations and leave me in peace to cultivate my own garden. Much as I may admire and in a measure emulate spiritual minds, I am aware of following them non passibus aequis; and I think their ambition, though in some sense the most sublime open to man, is a very special one, beyond the powers and contrary to the virtues of most men. As for me, I frankly cleave to the Greeks and not to the Indians, and I aspire to be a rational animal rather than a pure spirit. Preferences are matters of morals, and morals are part of politics. It is for the statesman or the humanist to compare the functions of various classes in the state and the importance or timeliness of various arts. He must honour the poets as poets and the saints as saints, but on occasion he is not forbidden to banish them.
Contrasting the Lives of Reason and Spirit
All that can be said is that without animal life and capacity for intuition the essence of beauty could not be realized: and if you had no preference for life, no heart, you would not come within range of the good in any form: not even of the spiritual life as a form of salvation. Perhaps, then, you forget that in analyzing the spiritual life, I do not forget (I hope) that it is life: if it becomes pure Being it ceases to exist. And this leads to 2nd the relation of the spiritual life to the rational life. Suppose instead of mysticism I was considering taste: the poet or musician may, in moments of ecstasy, lose himself entirely in the intuition of his ideal theme. It is a limit to one movement in the Life of Reason. To revert to humanity and morality he has to consider the healthfulness of such rapture: he has to re-introduce it into the political life. Yet the moral world (being animal and spontaneous in its elements) does have those windows. I have been looking out of one lately: but, as you seem to suspect, with no intention of jumping out of it.
Letters '55 at 240-41 ("To Sterling P. Lamprecht, January 28, 1929").
Contrasting the Lives of Reason and Spirit
What people . . . dislike is not so much the materialism or ontology slipped under the life of reason, as the 'spiritual life' supposed to be substituted for it in my estimation.
That is a complete misconception. No doubt when I wrote The Life of Reason I was taken up with rational ethics and interested (as I still am) in the theory of government and the pro's and con's of religious institutions. But I never thought of life in society, or of moral economy, as the obligatory or only worthy life. I am not a dogmatist in ethics. In so far as we legislate, and arrange things for mankind at large, of course we must do so rationally, with as fair a regard as possible for all the interests concerned. But these interests change and fade into infinity, and the art of government or education must, in practice, be rather empirical and haphazard. The best results, like the worst, will be unforeseen. Meantime actual life in each creature has its exquisite or terrible immediate reality. It is a spiritual life. It is spiritual in children as easily as in anchorites. This is not a substitute for the life of reason, but the cream or concomitant ultimate actuality of what the organized life of reason produces in consciousness. Of course, in so far as a man's thoughts are absorbed in instrumentalities, in business or politics or war or jollification, we do not call his experience spiritual: but those very actions might be food for a spiritual life if a recollected and mystical man performed them: so that the rationality of his life and its spirituality might be called two concomitant dimensions of it, the one lateral and the other vertical. The vertical or spiritual dimension is what inward religion has always added to life in the world, or in the cloister, which is a part of the world: that element may be more or less emphatic or genuine, according to a man's temperament or experience, but it is always an element, optional, private, like the love of music or like love at large. The legislator may salute it, he cannot contract to produce it.
Animal Faith '67 at 70 ("_____") (letter to Justus Buchler, July 1, 1936).
Contrasting the Lives of Reason and Spirit
[Critics wonder] how at one time I avow a preference for being a rational animal rather than a pure spirit, and at another time profess to have no passionate love of existence and no desire for immortality. . . . [I]f you choose to exalt these feelings into maxims, [though these are better understood as poetic sentiments, than as precepts,] I see no contradiction. . . . The first maxim would therefore merely assert that life is acceptable . . . . The second maxim affirms the same thing seen from above rather than from within.
For those how demand a complete code of ethics, as I do not, there is an orthodox way of reconciling the morality proper to lay life and that peculiar to a consecrated spirit. The Catholic Church, for instance, distinguishes Commandments imposed on everybody from Evangelical Counsels of Perfection . . . .
Another version of the relations between rational and post-rational morality may be found in the Mahabharata, in the well-known scene where two armies face each other with drawn swords, awaiting the signal for battle. . . . .
This version has the advantage of not separating natural virtue and spiritual insight into two different lives or two strands of action or interest: the two may be lived together and in the same moment. Just as rational ethics would have no materials if pre-rational preferences were abolished, so post-rational detachment would have no occasion and no reality if men and nations had no natural passions and ambitions.
Contrasting the Lives of Reason and Spirit
Self-consciousness, fussiness, scruples, effort, etc., are signs of imperfect organisation in the psyche: she has to try hard, hesitates, interferes with herself, and misses. All this is slavery and distraction for the spirit. Spirit appears at golf or billiards, not by inopportunely thinking of what you ought to do, but in feeling fit, having a premonition of a happy stroke, and then the happy perception of the thing done. Spirit is not a power, it cannot interfere with anything; and it can be distracted and interfered with by the world not materially, since spirit is immaterial, but only by having its basis in the psyche disturbed and inhibited: which is just what happens when we are rattled. You will see eventually (I hope) that what I mean by "the world" is the substitution of means for ends in living, the pressure of custom, ambition, conceit, pedantry, pride, and all the other unhappy things that drive us to profitless labour. . . . . The free and happy art of the thing is what would evoke spirit spontaneously and perfectly, as far as the psychic faculty could evoke it.
Santayana '63 at 190 ("Nine: 1937") ("Letter to Daniel Cory, September 4, 1937").
Life of Reason
[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.
Life of Reason
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 . . . .
Scepticism '55 at 109-10 ("Identity and Duration Attributed to Essences").
Life of Reason
This book [The Life of Reason] was intended to be a summary history of the human imagination, expressly distinguishing those phases of it which showed what Herbert Spencer called an adjustment of inner to outer relations; in other words, an adaptation of fancy and habit to material facts and opportunities.
Life of Reason
Consequently there is no opposition in my mind between materialism and a Platonic or even Indian discipline of the spirit. The recognition of the material world and of the conditions of existence in it merely enlightens the spirit concerning the source of its troubles and the means to its happiness or deliverance: and it was happiness or deliverance, the supervening supreme expression of human will and imagination, that alone really concerned me. This alone was genuine philosophy: this alone was the life of reason.
Life of Reason
What from the moral point of view we call the instruments of reason are primarily the ground and cause of reason: and reason can control matter only because reason is matter organised, and assuming a form at once distinctive, plastic, and opportune. Unity of direction is thus imposed on our impulses; the impulses remain and continue to work and to take themselves most seriously; things tempt and hurt us as much as ever. Yet this very synthesis imposed upon the passions has brought steadiness and scope into the mind. The passions seem less absolute than before: we see them in a more tragic or comic light; and we see that even our noble and civilised life of reason is bought at a price. As there were wild animal joys that it has banished, so there may be divine insights that it cannot heed.
Life of Spirit
Evidently that which the Indians discern and venerate is pure spirit, and if nothing compels us to follow them in their traditional ascetic and mystical discipline, calculated to bring them into perfect union or moral identity with that spirit, this happens because we have no wish for identity or union with it, but are perfectly content to be brave working and reasoning animals, as decent as possible, and to leave pure spirit alone with its loneliness.
Life of Spirit
The use of experience, to my mind, cannot be to prepare us for further experience; somewhere this experience must be self-rewarding, else all would be a democracy of unhappy tyrants making slaves of one another. There is a concomitant fruit to be gathered during this journey, experience at another level, the level of reflection, of spiritual self-possession, of poetry, of prayer. This is not a parasitic growth or expensive luxury that need not be added or that might exist elsewhere by itself. It could never exist elsewhere by itself, and the life here could never be complete naturally or spontaneously without it; not that it adds any energy or gives any new direction to the vital process, but that it is that vital process brought to a head and becoming a moral reality instead of a merely physical one. This moral reality or spiritual life will of course be peopled only with such images and sentiments as crude experience has elicited in each particular soul. I cannot transcend the scope of my faculties; but within these limits I am content to trace and to recast freely those special images and conceptions which the world or the arts happen to arouse in me. In the sphere of essence I lose nothing of my lessons learned from the facts, except precisely the wagers that at first I may have made about them. I can now smile at my losses, and at myself; but when the clock strikes, I instantly recover my dogmatic readiness in the requisite direction, and confidently skimming over all essence and appearances, I make my way back to school as directly, if not so fast, as any urchin. But I am no longer merely a distracted automaton; spirit in me has laid up some immaterial treasures in its own depths.
Life of Spirit
[The model of Christ] is what forced Catholic theology to adopt the doctrine of the supernatural human soul: so that only a sacrificial human life and a sanctified human body should be truly natural to man and compatible with his perfect happiness. This implies the sacrifice of almost everything that a man ordinarily cares for, including his animal will and his animal self.
Can this really be the universal vocation of spirit? I will answer this question in the honest scholastic way, by a distinguo. Spirit may be taken in two ways, in its essence or its instances. In its essence, the vocation of spirit is that of Christ: to be incarnate, to suffer and do what is appointed, and to return, at every recollected moment, to perfect union with God. In its instances, however, the vocation of spirit is different in each soul. In the poet, the artist, or the wit, intelligence and love are disinterested: in so far as they those names, that which lives in them is the liberated spirit. At moments they may touch perfect self-forgetfulness; and no fulfilment can come to the spirit more genuine than that. Moreover, the whole evolution of nature and history is centrifugal, polyglot, reaching incommensurable achievements. Life radiates in every way it finds open, and in each species, in each art, flowers into a different glory. To impose one form, one method, one type of virtue upon every creature would be sheer blindness to the essence of the good. Spirit, then, I reply, has its essence in a single vocation, to reflect the glory of God; but this vocation can be realised only in special and diverse forms.
Life of Spirit
The life of spirit, being natural, is contingent; it cannot be anything obligatory. It was not a duty for matter to produce life, nor is it a duty for life to produce spirit. For the most part these transitions do not occur, and the universe rolls on in a peace it does not enjoy towards catastrophes it does not expect. But life when it has arisen begins to pursue certain contingencies and to tremble at others; and spirit inherits this moral and dramatic sensibility. Yet its own impulse is to transcend that agitation. When conflicting movements divide the psyche and would destroy each other, the spirit, being hostile to nothing, feels the suasion of both and triumphs if they manage to unite in a relative euphoria and harmony. But not all soul love harmony Harmony involves sacrifice, and vital passions will not endure it. If they did, their objects would be transformed. They would become themes for the spirit, moving in the magnetic field of the truth, where all things are eternally pictured. That is the realm that spirit looks out upon from the beginning. For spirit is addressed to qualitative being, such as pure attention would discover in every image of sense, in every feeling, in every event: the eternal essence of that image, of that feeling, of that event. This is what poetry, painting, and history arrest and preserve. But attention is seldom or never pure; it is distracted by the irrelevant abundance of blind excitements and the feebleness of its own light. And the automatism of life in most men thirsts for irrelevant excitements, not finding much joy in anything definite and true to itself.