From Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
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.
Poetry & Religion '00 at 11-13 ("Understanding, Imagination, and Mysticism").
From Reason in Science
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.
From Animal Faith and Spiritual Life
[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.
From Soliloquies in England
[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.
From Platonism and the Spiritual Life
Values presuppose living beings having a direction of development, and exerting themselves in it, so that good and evil may exist in reference to them. That the good should be relative to actual natures and simply their innate ideal, latent or realized, is essential to its being truly a good. Otherwise the term 'good' would be an empty title applied to some existing object or force for no assignable reason.
From Realms of Being
Hence the absence of a need or a passion in one phase of life cannot be taken for an argument that such a need or passion is false or wicked elsewhere. The contrary assumption is the root of much idle censoriousness and injustice in moralists, who are probably old men, and sapless even in youth, all their zeal being about phrases and maxims that run in their heads and desiccate the rest of their spirit.
From Egotism in German Philosophy
Like the animal life which it expresses, pre-rational morality is far from being inwardly wicked or condemnable. . . . . Reason cannot oppose these intuitions but may insinuate itself into them and transform them. Therefore, Socrates, the father of rational ethics, though he had clear moral and political allegiances of his own, never imposed them dogmatically upon his disciples. He begged them to speak for themselves, merely testing their consistency and pointing out the consequences. And he sought to enlighten only the Athenians, especially the very young among them, though with little success. Here, at least, he thought he knew the nature of the animal and its possible virtue, so that in appealing to spontaneous judgments he could be sure of the issue. He was never guilty of the moralistic practice of blaming fishes for liking to live under water. St. Francis, when he preached to them, also avoided this error.
From Philosophy of George Santayana
Spinoza, too, whom I was reading under Royce himself, filled me with joy and enthusiasm: I gathered at once from him a doctrine which has remained axiomatic with me ever since, namely that good and evil are relative to the natures of animals, irreversible in that relation, but indifferent to the march of cosmic events, since the force of the universe infinitely exceeds the force of any of its parts.
From Philosophy of George Santayana
This principle is what I call moralism, and has two forms. One, moralism proper, asserts the categorical imperative of an absolute reason or duty determining right judgment and conduct. In the other form, moralism becomes a principle of cosmology and religion; it asserts the actual dominance of reason or goodness over the universe at large.
From Philosophy of George Santayana
There are thus two kinds of dogmatism, although both preserve this fundamental presupposition of animal intelligence, namely: that apprehension is informative, that antecedent or hidden facts exist to be discovered, and that knowledge of them is possible. But the initial kind of dogmatist, having only sensation and fancy to guide him, assumes that things are just as they seem or as he thinks they ought to be: and if this assumption be challenged, the rash dogmatist hotly denies the relativity of his knowledge and of his conscience. Now I have always asserted this double relativity; it is implied in my materialism. I am not, then, a dogmatist in this first popular sense of the word, but decidedly a sceptic. Yet I stoutly assert relativity; I am a dogmatist there; for I see clearly that an animal cannot exist without a habitat, and that his impulses and perceptions are soon directed upon it with a remarkable quickness and precision: he therefore has true and transitive knowledge. But I also see clearly that knowledge, if it takes an imaginative or moral form at all, must take a form determined by his specific senses and instincts. His true knowledge must then be, in its terms, relative to his nature, and no miraculous intuition of his habitat as it exists in itself.
This inevitable relativity of knowledge and interest, far from abolishing their assertiveness, justifies this assertiveness in its intellectual confidence and in its moral warmth. For it is some soul that is being touched, that is finding its level, and building its nest. My perceptions and my preferences are my own; but they are just as relevant to the facts as those of other creatures, and just as true to my nature as their different sentiments are to theirs. In this way I confirm myself in a dogmatism of a deliberate, qualified, and critical kind, not built on sense or imagination, but on faith, a faith in which active impulse is redirected by reflection and judgment.
From Idea of Christ in the Gospels
The effort to moralise God or nature, and to see in God or nature the model for human virtue—an effort which I call moralism—ends by justifying all evils and dissolving any definite human morality in theory if not in practice.
From Idea of Christ in the Gospels
Two mistakes seem to me to inhere in moralism: one, that God cannot be good or worthy of worship unless he obeys the precepts of human morality; the other, that if God is not good after our fashion, our own morality is undermined.
From Idea of Christ in the Gospels
This idea of Christ . . . is also an ideal to hold up before the philosopher who cannot renounce being a man, yet cannot help transcending his humanity in thought before the overwhelming spectacle of nature and the infinite intricacies of logic. . . . . Yet, with this model before him, he may at least escape the snare of moralism, that destroys the sweetness of human affections by stretching them on the rack of infinity and absoluteness. He may learn from Christ to cultivate and honour these affections for what they are, human and accidental, but ordained and sanctioned in that capacity by the eternal order of things.
From Dominations and Powers
This custom, when it arises, cannot have proved fatal to the race, where it still lasts; but short of that extremity, there is hardly any degree of constraint, cruelty, and ineptitude which may not characterise custom. The stupid moralism which clings to it is like that which assumes the inevitableness of a given language.
Dominations '72 at 70 ("Servitude to Custom") (footnote omitted).
From Dominations and Powers
Now when I say that morals and knowledge (not the truth, but opinions regarding the truth) and all judgments about right and wrong (not all goods) are relative I mean something entirely different [from the Sophists, empiricists, German idealists, and other subjective schools, insofar as each holds that morals and science, goodness and truth, could never be anything but the feeling or thought that each man had of them at each moment]. I mean that opinions and judgments arise in psyches and express the capacity and inevitableness of such opinions and judgments arising at each moment in each psyche; but the degree of their truth depends on the relation that their several deliverances have to the facts that provoke them and that they mean to refer to.
Dominations '72 at 302 ("Relativity of Knowledge and of Morals").
From Dominations and Powers
Nothing could therefore be more false, and willfully ignorant, than to maintain with the Greek Sophists and the British empiricists (when both are radical and consistent) that knowledge and judgment refer to nothing and are always equally true and valid, in the sense that each is equally real—as a sensation when it is felt. Their relativity, properly understood, far from making opinions and judgments worthless renders them capable of some degree of truth and justness, since they express the sensibility of a living psyche, according to its endowment and development, to the influences that reach it, and determine its fate, in the natural world.
Dominations '72 at 303 ("Relativity of Knowledge and of Morals").
From Dominations and Powers
Since it is relative to temporary needs progress cannot last without losing gradually its moral identity; but the very impossibility of an absolute moral standard justifies the relative moral authority of vital Will, in its own sphere, wherever it arises. The contrary values that the same events may have for contrary interests does not obscure the exact value that each event may have for each of those interests.
From Physical Order and Moral Liberty
If such is the natural history of morals, it follows that there is a complete inversion of the order of nature in striving after or preaching any particular type of virtue as if it were divinely imposed upon all men alike, or even upon the cosmos at large . . . . In other words moralism, that takes moral sense for the foundation of religion and even of cosmology, is a radical error. Good and evil are relative to natures already existing and making specific demands . . . .