From Three Philosophical Poets
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.
From Soliloquies in England
[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.
From Scepticism and Animal Faith
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.
From Letters of George Santayana
[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.
From Letters of George Santayana
I should therefore agree with you completely if it were understood that you were traversing the life of spirit only, and leaving out all physics and logic: but even then so exclusive an interest in the moral side of things, ignoring their natural basis and ontological surroundings, leads into ambiguities and illusions: the relative becomes absolute and the absolute relative.
From Realms of Being
In the sphere of action—which if we distinguish moral from spiritual life would also be the sphere of morals . . . .
From Realms of Being
There is a sense in which all moral life lies beyond truth. [T]he living spirit, in which this moral life is actualized and enacted, has other interests besides the interest in truth.
From Philosophy of George Santayana
Science expresses in human terms our dynamic relation to surrounding reality. Philosophies and religions, where they do not misrepresent these same dynamic relations and do not contradict science, express destiny in moral dimensions, in obviously mythical and poetical images: but how else should these moral truths be expressed at all in a traditional or popular fashion? Religions are the great fairy-tales of the conscience.
From Philosophy of George Santayana
[N]ot that [experience] 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 . . . .
From Philosophy of George Santayana
Nature reproduces itself by generation or derivation on the material plane. When it creates feeling and thought it passes to the moral plane of comment and enjoyment.
From Birth of Reason and Other Essays
[I]t is chiefly the impact of surrounding bodies, or troubles, needs, and impulses in his own organism, that cause ideas to appear before his mind. To these removed facts his instincts and actions then adjust themselves automatically . . . . And the same animal life lends to these ideas another quality . . . : they become welcome or unwelcome, enticing or terrible. So appearance announces reality. The trivial spectrum of logic and aesthetics borrows the deep thunder and colouring of a moral world.
Birth of Reason '68 at 158 ("On the False Steps of Philosophy").
From Dominations and Powers
[T]he distinction between Dominations and Powers is moral, not physical. It . . . hang[s] . . . on its relation to the spontaneous life of some being that it affects.
From Dominations and Powers
An animal has inward invisible specific springs of action, called instincts, needs, passions, or interests; and it is only in relation to these psychic springs of action that Powers and Dominations can be distinguished. The criterion in politics is moral; and the agent in politics is not man as he appears to the senses, but an inner proclivity to action and passion that animates him, and that I call the psyche.
Dominations '72 at 14 ("The Agent in Politics Is the Psyche").
From Dominations and Powers
[The psyche is vital and potentially conscious.] When that potentiality becomes actual, we have a spontaneous overtone and moral expression, such as pleasure and pain are, for psychic achievements and psychic impediments or revulsions; and the coherent fictions of the poet or prophet are the same thing in an elaborated and articulate form.
Dominations '72 at 16 ("The Agent in Politics Is the Psyche").
From Dominations and Powers
[P]olitics is a moral subject and it is the earthly fortunes of spirit that, at bottom, are its theme . . . .
Dominations '72 at 55 ("Captive Spirit and Its Possible Freedom").
From Dominations and Powers
The word 'moral' comes from the Latin mores, customs.
From Dominations and Powers
[T]he notion of a merciless natural order may some day acquire its right of domicile in the mind . . . . Natural piety has never attempted to moralise the cosmos, but only to recognise in that non-moral natural order the reservoir of force and the field of action proper for man and his morality.
From Physical Order and Moral Liberty
The notion of types or Platonic Ideas being the reality behind things is not now prevalent in physics, and never should have been so. It is an interpretation of discourse, not of nature; it belongs to moral philosophy, not natural science, since it clarifies the goals and meanings of human life, but never discloses the causes or origins of anything.