In order to discern this healthy life, for the soul no less than for the body, not much learning is required; only a little experience, a little reflection, and a little candor.

· A conception of something called human nature arises not unnaturally on observing the passions of men, passions which under various disguises seem to reappear in all ages and countries. The tendency of Greek philosophy, with its insistence on general concepts, was to define this idea of human nature still further and to encourage the belief that a single and identical essence, present in all men, determined their powers and ideal destiny. Christianity, while it transposed the human ideal and dwelt on the super-human affinities of man, did not abandon the notion of a specific humanity. On the con­trary, such a notion was implied in the Fall and Redemption, in the Sacraments, and in the universal validity of Christian doctrine and precept. For if human nature were not one, there would be no propriety in requiring all men to preserve una­nimity in faith or conformity in conduct. Human nature was likewise the entity which the English psychologists set them­selves to describe; and Kant was so entirely dominated by the notion of a fixed and universal human nature that its con­stancy, in his opinion, was the source of all natural as well as moral laws. Had he doubted for a moment the stability of human nature, the foundations of his system would have fallen out; the forms of perception and thought would at once have lost their boasted necessity, since tomorrow might dawn upon new categories and a modified a priori intuition of space or time; and the avenue would also have been closed by which man was led, through his unalterable moral sentiments, to assumptions about metaphysical truths.

The force of this long tradition has been broken, however, by two influences of great weight in recent times, the theory of evolution and the revival of pantheism. The first has re­introduced flux into the conception of existence and the second into the conception of values. If natural species are fluid and pass into one another, human nature is merely a name for a group of qualities found by chance in certain tribes of animals, a group to which new qualities are constantly tending to attach themselves while other faculties become extinct, now in whole races, now in sporadic individuals. Human nature is therefore a variable, and its ideal cannot have a greater constancy than the demands to which it gives expression. Nor can the ideal of one man or one age have any authority over another, since the harmony existing in their nature and interests is accidental and each is a transitional phase in an indefinite evolution.

· The true philosopher, who is not one chiefly by profession, must be prepared to tread the wine-press alone. He may indeed flourish like the bay-tree in a grateful environment, but more often he will rather resemble a reed shaken by the wind. Whether starved or fed by the accidents of fortune he must find his essential life in his own ideal.

· The living mind cannot surrender its rights to any physical power or subordinate itself to any figment of its own art without falling into manifest idolatry.

· In imagination, not in per­ception, lies the substance of experience, while knowledge and reason are but its chastened and ultimate form.

· To be nourished and employed, intelligence must have developed such structure and habits as will enable it to assimilate what food comes in its way; so that the persistence of any intellectual habit is a proof that it has

some applicability, however partial, to the facts of sen­tience. This applicability, the prerequisite of significant thought, is also its eventual test; and the gathering of new experiences, the consciousness of more and more facts crowding into the memory and demanding co-ordination, is at once the presentation to reason of her legitimate problem and a proof that she is already at work. It is a presentation of her problem, because reason is not a faculty of dreams but the art of living.

· The best part of wealth is to have worthy heirs, and mind can be transmitted only to a kindred mind.

· Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when ex­perience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that hap­pens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile re-adaptation. In a moving world re-adaptation is the price of longevity. The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a genera­tion plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its les­sons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

· I am not sure that a humanity such as we know, were it destined to exist for ever, would offer a more exhilarating prospect than a humanity having indefinite elasticity together with a precarious tenure of life. Mortality has its compensations: one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

· The human savage craves a freedom and many a danger inconsistent with civilization, because independent of reason. He does not yet identify his interests with any persistent and ideal harmonies created by reflection. And when reflection is absent, length of life is no benefit: a quick succession of generations, with a small chance of reach­ing old age, is a beautiful thing in purely animal economy, where vigor is the greatest joy, propagation the highest function, and decrepitude the sorriest woe. The value of safety, accordingly, hangs on the question whether life has become reflective and ra­tional.

· Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.

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REASON IN SOCIETY

· Parental functions in nature are limited to nursing the ex­tremely young. This phase of the instinct, being the most primitive and fundamental, is most to be relied upon even in man. Especially in the mother, care for the children's physical well-being is unfailing to the end. She understands the vegetative soul, and the first lispings of sense and sentiment in the child have an absorbing interest for her. In that region her skill and delights are miracles of nature; but her insight and keenness gradually fade as the children grow older. Seldom is the private and ideal life of a young son or daughter a matter in which the mother shows particular tact or for which she has instinctive respect. Even rarer is any genuine community in life and feeling between parents and their adult children. Often the parents' influence comes to be felt as a dead constraint, the more cruel that it cannot be thrown off with­out unkindness; and what makes the parents' claim at once unjust and pathetic is that it is founded on passionate love for a remem­bered being, the child once wholly theirs, that no longer exists in the man.

· It is no loss of liberty to subordinate ourselves to a natural leader.

· There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.

· Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods. There can be no philosophic interest in disguising the animal basis of love, or in denying its spiritual sublimations, since all life is animal in its origin and spiritual in its possible fruits.

· The being to whom significant thoughts come is the most widely based and synthetic of her creatures. The mind spreads and soars in proportion as the body feeds on the surround­ing world. Noble ideas, although rare and difficult to attain, are not naturally fugitive.

· An individual's concern for the attitude society takes toward him is firstly concern for his own welfare. But imagination here refines upon worldly interest. What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves. Nothing could better prove the mythical char­acter of self-consciousness than this extreme sensitiveness to alien opinions; for if a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation. Indeed, those opinions would hardly seem to him directed upon the reality at all, and he would laugh at them as he might at the stock fortune-telling of some itinerant gypsy.

· The tie that in contemporary society most nearly resembles the ancient ideal of friendship is a well-assorted marriage. In spite of intellectual disparity and of divergence in occupation, man and wife are bound together by a common dwelling, common friends, common affection for children, and, what is of great importance, common financial interests. These bonds often suffice for substantial and lasting unanimity, even when no ideal passion preceded; so that what is called a marriage of reason, if it is truly reasonable, may give a fair promise of happiness, since a normal married life can produce the sympathies it requires.

· Discipleship and hero-worship are not stable relations. Since the meaning they embody is ideal and radiates from within outward, and since the image to which that meaning is attributed is controlled by a real external object, meaning and image - as time goes on - will necessarily fall apart. The idol will be discredited. An ideal, ideally conceived and known to be an ideal, a spirit worshipped in spirit and in truth, will take the place of the pleasing phenomenon; and in regard to every actual being, however noble, discipleship will yield to emulation, and worship to an admiration more or less selec­tive and critical.

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REASON IN RELIGION

· Religion remains an imaginative achievement, a symbolic representation of moral reality which may have a most im­portant function in vitalizing the mind and in transmitting, by way of parables, the lessons of experience. But it becomes at the same time a continuous incidental deception; and this deception, in proportion as it is strenuously denied to be such, can work indefinite harm in the world and in the conscience.

· As the Middle Ages advanced, the newborn human genius which constituted their culture grew daily more playful, curi­ous, and ornate. It was naturally in the countries formerly pagan that this new paganism principally flourished. Religion began in certain quarters to be taken philosophically; its relation to life began to be understood, that it was a poetic ex­pression of need, hope, and ignorance. Here prodigious vested interests and vested illusions of every sort made dangerous the path of sincerity. Genuine moral and religious impulses could not be easily dissociated from a system of thought and discipline with which for a thousand years they had been intimately interwoven. Skepticism, instead of seeming, what it naturally is, a moral force, a tendency to sincerity, economy, and fine adjustment of life and mind to experience - skeptcism seemed a temptation and a danger. This situation, which still prevails in a certain measure, strikingly shows into how artificial a posture Christianity has thrown the mind.

· If you have seen the world, if you have played your game and won it, what more would you ask for? If you have tasted the sweets of existence, you should be satisfied; if the experience has been bitter, you should be glad that it comes to an end.

· Piety is the spirit's acknowledgment of its incarnation --- happiness and utility are possible nowhere to a man who represents nothing and who looks out on the world without a plot of his own to stand on, either on earth or in heaven. He wanders from place to place, a voluntary exile, always querulous, always uneasy, always alone. His very criticisms express no ideal. His experience is without sweetness, without cumulative fruits, and his children, if he has them, are without morality. For reason and happiness are like other flowers - they wither when plucked.

· What establishes superstitions is haste to understand, rash confidence in the moral intelligibility of things. It turns out in the end, as we have laboriously discovered, that understanding has to be circuitous and cannot fulfil its function until it applies naturalistic categories to existence. A thorough philosophy will become aware that moral intelligibility can only be an incidental ornament and partial harmony in the world. For moral significance is relative to particular interests and to natures having a constitutional and definite bias, and having consequently special preferences which it is chimerical to expect the rest of the world to be determined by. The attempt to subsume the natural order under the moral is like attempts to establish a government of the parent by the child - something children are not averse to. But such follies are the follies of an intelligent and eager creature, restless in a world it cannot at once master and comprehend. They are the errors of reason, wanderings in the by-paths of philosophy, not due to lack of intelligence or of faith in law, but rather to a premature vivacity in catching at laws, a vivacity misled by inadequate information. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy. The mind's reactions anticipate in such cases its sufficient nourishment; it has not yet matured under the rays of experience, so that both materials and guidance are lacking for its precocious organizing force. Superstitious minds are penetrating and narrow, deep and ignorant. They apply the higher categories before the lower - an inversion which in all spheres produces the worst and most pathetic disorganization, because the lower functions are then deranged and the higher con­taminated. Poetry anticipates science, on which it ought to follow, and imagination rushes in to intercept memory, on which it ought to feed. Hence superstition and the magical function of religion; hence the deceptions men fall into by cogitating on things they are ignorant of and arrogating to themselves powers which they have never learned to exercise.

· Mythical thinking has its roots in reality, but, like a plant, touches the ground only at one end. It stands unmoved and flowers wantonly into the air, transmuting into unexpected and richer forms the substances it sucks from the soil. It is therefore a fruit of experience, an ornament, a proof of organic vitality; but it is no ve­hicle for knowledge; it cannot serve the purposes of transitive thought or action. Science, on the other hand, is constituted by those fancies which, arising like myths out of perception, retain a sensuous language and point to further perceptions of the same kind; so that the suggestions drawn from one object perceived are only ideas of other objects similarly perceptible. A scientific hy­pothesis is one which represents something continuous with the observed facts and conceivably existent in the same medium. Science is a bridge touching experience at both ends, over which practical thought may travel from act to act, from perception to perception.

· Piety is the spirit's acknowledgment of its incarnation. So, in filial and parental affection, which is piety in an elementary form, there is a moulding of will and emotion, a check to irresponsible initiative, in harmony with the facts of animal reproduction. Every living crea­ture has an intrinsic and ideal worth; he is the center of actual and yet more of potential interests. But this moral value, which even the remotest observer must recognize in both parent and child, is not the ground of their specific affection for each other, which no other mortal is called to feel in their regard. This affection is based on the incidental and irrational fact that the one has this particular man for a father, and the other that particular man for a son. Yet, con­sidering the animal basis of human life, an attachment resting on that circumstance is a necessary and rational attachment.

· Only order can beget a world or evoke a sensation. Chaos is something secondary, com­posed of conflicting organizations interfering with one another. It is compounded like a common noise out of jumbled vibrations, each of which has its period and would in itself be musical. The problem is to arrange these sounds, naturally so tuneful, into concerted music.

· Prayer is a soliloquy; but being a soliloquy expressing need, and being furthermore - like sacrifice - a desperate expedient which men fly to in their impotence, it looks for an effect: to cry aloud, to make vows, to contrast eloquently the given with the ideal situation, is certainly as likely a way of bringing about a change for the better as it would be to chastise one's self severely, or to destroy what one loves best, or to perform acts altogether trivial and arbitrary. Prayer also is magic, and as such it is expected to do work. The answer looked for, or one which may be accepted instead, very often ensues and it is then that mythology begins to enter in and seeks to explain by what machinery of divine passions and purposes that answering effect was produced.

Magic is in a certain sense the mother of art, art being the magic that succeeds and can establish itself. For this very reason mere magic is never appealed to when art has been found, and no unsophisticated man prays to have that done for him which he knows how to do for himself. When his art fails, if his necessity still presses, he appeals to magic, and he prays when he no longer can control the event, provided this event is momentous to him. Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is a desperate effort to work further and to be efficient beyond the range of one's powers. It is not the lazy who are most inclined to prayer; those pray most who care most, and who, having worked hard, find it intolerable to be defeated.

What rational religion really should pass into is contemplation, ideality, poetry, in the sense in which poetry includes all imagina­tive moral life. That this is what religion looks to is very clear in prayer and in the efficacy which prayer consistently can have. In rational prayer the soul may be said to accomplish three things important to its welfare: it withdraws within itself and defines its good, it accommodates itself to destiny, and it grows like the ideal which it conceives.

· Not only is man's original effort aimed at living for ever in his own person, but, even if he could renounce that desire, the dream of being represented perpetually by posterity is no less doomed. Reproduction, like nutrition, is a device not ultimately successful. If extinction does not defeat it, evolution will. Doubtless the fertility of whatever substance may have produced us will not be exhausted in this single effort; a potentiality that has once proved efficacious and been actualized in life, though it should sleep, will in time revive again. In some form and after no matter what intervals, nature may be expected always to restore consciousness.

· Existence is essentially temporal and life foredoomed to be mortal, since its basis is a process and an opposition; it floats in the stream of time, never to return, never to be recovered or repossessed. But ever since substance became at some sensitive point intelligent and reflective, ever since time made room and pause for memory, for history, for the consciousness of time, a god, as it were, became incarnate in mortality and some vision of truth, some self-forgetful satisfaction, became a heritage that moment could transmit to moment and man to man. This heritage is humanity itself, the presence of immortal reason in creatures that perish. Apprehension, which makes man so like a god, makes him in one respect immortal; it quickens his numbered moments with a vision of what never dies, the truth of those moments and their inalienable values. To participate in this vision is to participate at once in humanity and in divinity, since all other bonds are material and perishable, but the bond between two thoughts that have grasped the same truth, of two instants that have caught the same beauty, is a spiritual and imperishable bond. It is imperishable simply because it is ideal and resident merely in import and intent.

· If nature has added intelligence to animal life it is because they belong together. Intelligence is a natural emanation of vitality. If eternity could exist otherwise than as a vision in time, eternity would have no meaning for men in the world, while the world, men, and time would have no status in eternity.

By having a status in eternity is not meant being parts of an eternal existence, petrified or congealed into something real but motionless. What is meant is only that whatever exists in time, when bathed in the light of reflection, reveals an indelible character and discloses irreversible relations; every fact, in being recognized, takes its place in the universe of discourse, in that ideal sphere of truth which is the common and unchanging standard for all assertions. Language, science, art, religion, and all ambitious dreams are compacted of ideas. Life is as much a mosaic of notions as the firmament is of stars; and these ideal and transpersonal objects, bridging time, fixing standards, establishing values, consti­tuting the true history of all living, are the very furniture of eternity, the goals and playthings of that reason which is an instinct in the heart as vital and spontaneous as any other.

· The happy filling of a single hour is so much gained for the universe at large, and to find joy and sufficiency in the flying moment is perhaps the only means open to us for increasing the glory of eternity.

· He who lives in the ideal and leaves it expressed in society or in art enjoys a double immortality. The eternal has absorbed him while he lived, and when he is dead his influence brings others to the same absorption, making them, through that ideal identity with the best in him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he could rationally hope to rescue from destruction. He can say, without any subterfuge or desire to delude himself, that he shall not wholly die; for he will have a better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes his being. By becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death and of universal mutation, he will have identified himself with what is spiritual in all spirits and masterful in all apprehension; and so conceiving himself, he may truly feel and know that he is eternal.

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REASON IN ART

· Ideals which cannot be realized, and are not fed at least by partial realizations, soon grow dormant.

· Mind grows self-perpetuating only by its extension in matter.

[Commentary by D. Runes - Matter is in flux. Mind, conceived by Santayana as "simply

sensibility in bodies", is existentially carried along the movement of that flux but is

capable of arresting some datum, different from what the stimulated sensibility can

articulate. This datum is essence in whose language alone mind can express its experiences.]

· Arts are instincts bred and reared in the open, creative habits acquired in the light of reason. Consciousness ac­companies their formation; a certain uneasiness or desire and a more or less definite conception of what is wanted often precedes their full organization. That the need should be felt before the means for satisfying it have been found has led the unreflecting to imagine that in art the need produces the discovery and the idea the work. Causes at best are lightly assigned by mortals, and this particular superstition is no worse than any other. The data - the plan and its execution - as conjoined empirically in the few interesting cases which show successful achievement, are made into a law, in oblivion of the fact that in more numerous cases such conjunction fails wholly or in part, and that even in the suc­cessful cases other natural conditions are present, and must be present, to secure the result.

In a matter where custom is so ingrained and supported by a constant apperceptive illu­sion, there is little hope of making thought suddenly exact, or exact language not paradoxical. We must observe, how­ever, that only by virtue of a false perspective do ideas seem to govern action, or is a felt necessity the mother of inven­tion. In truth invention is the child of abundance, and the genius or vital premonition and groping which achieve art simultaneously achieve the ideas which that art embodies; or, rather, ideas are themselves products of an inner move­ment which has an automatic extension outwards; and this extension manifests the ideas.

Mere craving has no lights of its own to prophesy by, no prescience of what the world may contain that would satisfy, no power of imagining what would allay its unrest. Images and satisfactions have to come of themselves; then the blind craving, as it turns into an incipient pleasure, first recognizes its object. The pure will's impotence is absolute, and it would writhe forever and consume itself in darkness if perception gave it no light, and experience no premonition.

· Lying is a privilege of poets because they have not reached the level on which truth and error are discernible. Veracity and significance are not ideals for a primitive mind; we learn to value them as we learn to live, when we discover that the spirit cannot be wholly free and solipsistic. To have to distinguish fact from fancy is so great a violence to the inner man that not only poets, but theologians and philosophers still protest against such a distinction.

· Truth is a jewel that should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.

· Irrational hopes, irrational shames, irrational indecencies, make man's chief desolation.

· Art springs so completely from the heart of man that it makes everything speak to him in his own languages; it reaches, nevertheless, so truly to the heart of nature that it co-operates with her, becomes a parcel of her creative material energy, and builds by her instinctive hand.

· A refined mind finds as little happiness in love without friendship as in sensuality without love; it may succumb to both, but it accepts neither.

· To impress a meaning and a rational form on matter is one of the most masterful of actions.

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LIFE OF REASON: Phases Of Human Progress

· The functional good is the ideal that a vital and energizing soul carries with it as it moves. It is identical, as Socrates taught, with the useful, the helpful, the beneficent. It is the complement needed to perfect every art and every activity after its own kind.

· Early pagan sacrifice evolved into spiritual sacrifice rituals - via identification of the negative components of the self which one wants to give back (sacrifice) to the deity, through rituals of confession and prayer.

· A form of immortality exists in man in that memory, while it confirms mortality (in recognizing the death of past relatives) also extends our existence via the virtual reality of past events and historical truths - e. g. the memory of father/grandfather can enhance/context/enrich the present moment. The form of immortality issuing from memory is that expression of our own individual mortality by sharing in the species life-line, again via learning/wisdom derived from shared experiences and memories.

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DOMINATIONS AND POWERS

· The crowd compels us to adopt its language, manners, morals, and religion; and it is a rare freedom in human life when even a slight personal originality in any of these matters - or even in dress - is not crushed at once by universal obloquy and persecution. This is not because the public is wicked but because it is the public - which is hardly its own fault. Society suffocates liberty merely by existing, and it must exist, and all its mem­bers are equally its slaves.

· One of the inspirations of man is his conscience; but if you give this inspiration free rein, it may end by persuading you that it is murder to boil an egg.

· There is a sort of subterranean chaos, sometimes bursting through the crust of civilization; and something in the indi­vidual heart rejoices at that eruption, feels that at last the moment has come to break through its own crust, and build it­self, as well as the world, on some different plan. Not a better plan, since there is no deeper organism to pronounce on the matter or to have any stake in it; but simply a relief from this plan, from this routine and this morality, from these sur­roundings, and these prospects. It is what Descartes called the infinity of the will, contrasted with the finitude of reason. A sort of self-hatred and self-contempt: a wild throw for some­thing different, and a deep, dark impulse to challenge and to destroy everything that has the impertinence to exist.

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DIALOGUES IN LIMBO

· The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.

· The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

· All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

So the mother of the first tailless child - for men formerly had tails - wept bitterly and consulted the soothsayers, elders conspicuous for their long and honorable tails, who gave out oracles from the hollow of ancient trees; and she asked what unwitting impiety she or her husband could have committed, that the just gods should condemn their innocent child to such eternal disgrace.

When, however, other tailless births began to occur, at first the legislators had the little monsters put rigorously to death; but soon, as the parents began to offer resistance, they suffered a scapegoat to be sacrificed instead; and persons with­out a tail were merely condemned to pass their lives in slavery, or at least without the rights of citizenship; because the phi­losophers, who all belonged to the elder generation with ample tails, declared that without a tail no man was really human or could be admitted after death into the company of the gods.

Yet later, when that hinder ornament had become rare, opinion was reversed, until the priests, legislators, and sages gathered in council and decreed, by a majority vote, that a tail in man was unnatural, and that the tradition that such things had existed was an invention of ignorant poets, and absurd.

When, however, by a casual reversion and sport of nature, a child with a tail was born here and there, not only was the infant instantly dispatched, but the mother was burned alive for having had commerce with a devil.

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REASON IN SCIENCE

· A fable about matter and form.

In order to live - if such a myth may be allowed - the Titan Matter was eager to disguise his incorrigible vagueness and pretend to be something. He accordingly addressed himself to the beautiful company of Forms, sisters whom he thought all equally beautiful, though their number was endless, and equally fit to satisfy his heart. He wooed them hypocritically, with no intention of wedding them; yet he uttered their names in such seductive accents (called by mortals intelligence and toil) that the virgin goddesses offered no resistance - at least such of them as happened to be near or of a facile disposition. They were presently deserted by their unworthy lover; yet they, too, in that moment's union, had tasted the sweetness of life. The heaven to which they returned was no longer an infinite mathematical paradise. It was crossed by memories of earth, and a warmer breath lingered in some of its lanes and grottoes. Henceforth its nymphs could not forget that they had awakened a passion and that, unmoved themselves, they had moved a strange indomitable giant to art and love.

· Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if - like Buddhism - it had looked only to peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God. These were rival baits to those which the world fishes with, and were snapped at, when seen, with no less avidity. Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and more disappointing. Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire.

· That a cosmos underlies the superficial play of sense and opinion is what all practical reason must assume and what all comprehended experience bears witness to. A cosmos does not mean a disorder with which somebody happens to be well pleased; it means a regularity from which every one must draw his happiness. Mechanical processes are not like mathematical relations, because they happen. What they express the form of is a flux, not a truth or an ideal necessity. The situation may therefore always be new, though produced

from the preceding situation by rules which are invariable, since the preceding situation was itself novel.

· If the total flux is continuous and naturally intelligible, why is the part felt by man so disjointed and opaque? An answer to this question may perhaps be drawn from the fact that consciousness apparently arises to express the functions only of extremely complicated organisms. The basis of thought is vastly more elaborate than its deliverance. It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas. The mind starts, therefore, with a tremendous handicap. Its existence is intermittent and its visions unmeaning. It fails to conceive its own interests or the situations that might support or defeat those interests. If it pictures anything clearly, it is only some fantastic image in no way adequate to its own complex basis.

· Thus the parasitical human mind, finding what clear knowledge it has laughably insufficient to interpret its destiny, takes to neglecting knowledge altogether and to hugging instead various irrational ideas. On the one hand it lapses into dreams which, while obviously irrelevant to practice, express the mind's vegetative instincts; hence poetry and mythology, which substitute play-worlds for the real one on correlation with which human prosperity and dignity depend.

· On the other hand, the mind becomes wedded to conventional objects which mark, perhaps, the turning-points of practical life and plot the curve of it in a schematic and disjointed fashion, but which are themselves entirely opaque and, as we say, material. Now as matter is commonly a name for things not understood, men materially minded are those whose ideas, while practical, are meager and blind, so that their knowledge of nature, if not invalid, is exceedingly fragmentary. This grossness in common sense, like irrelevance in imagination, springs from the fact that the mind's representative powers are out of focus with its controlling conditions.

· We may perhaps entangle our friends in their own words, and force them for the moment to say what they do not mean, and what it is not in their natures to think; but the bent bow will spring back, per­haps somewhat sharply, and we shall get little thanks for our labour. There would be more profit in taking one another frankly by the arm and walking together along the outskirts of real knowl­edge, pointing to the material facts which we all can see - nature, the monuments, the texts, the actual ways and institutions of men; and in the presence of such a stimulus, with the contagion of a common interest, the plastic mind would respond of itself to the situation, and we should be helping one another to understand whatever lies within the range of our fancy, be it in antiquity or in the human heart.

· The circumstances, open to science, which surround conscious­ness are the real attributes of a man by which he is truly known and distinguished. Appearances are the qualities of reality, else realities would be without place, time, character, or interrelation.

· Intent is one of many evidences that the intellect's essence is practical. Intent is action in the sphere of thought; it corresponds to transition and derivation in the natural world. Analytic psychol­ogy is obliged to ignore intent, for it is obliged to regard it merely as a feeling; but while the feeling of intent is a fact like any other, intent itself is an aspiration, a passage, the recognition of an object which not only is not a part of the feeling given but is often incapable of being a feeling or a fact at all.

· Moral energy, so closely analogous to physical interplay, is of course not without a material basis. Spiritual sublimation does not consist in not using matter but in using it up, in making it all useful. When life becomes rational it continues to be mechanical and to dramatize room and energy in the natural world. In its most intimate and supernatural functions, intellect has natural con­ditions. In dreams and madness, intent is confused and wayward, in idiocy it is suspended altogether; nor has discourse any other pledge that it is addressing kindred interlocutors except that which it receives from the disposition and habit of bodies. People who have not yet been born into the world have not yet begun to think about it.

· Every theme or motive in the Life of Reason expresses some instinct rooted in the body and incidental to natural organization. The intent by which memory refers to past or reported experience, or the intent by which perception becomes recognition, is a tran­script of relations in which events actually stand to one another. Such intent represents modifications of structure and action im­portant to life, modifications that have responded to forces on which life is dependent.

Both desire and meaning translate into cognitive or ideal energy, into intent, material relations subsisting in nature. These material relations give practical force to the thought that expresses them, and the thought in turn gives sig­nificance and value to the forces that subserve it. Fulfillment is mutual, in one direction bringing material potentialities to the light and making them actual and conscious, and in the other direc­tion embodying intent in the actual forms of things and manifesting reason. Nothing could be more ill-considered than the desire to disembody reason. Reason cries aloud for reunion with the material world which she needs not only for a basis but, what concerns her even more, for a theme.

· Rational ethics is an embodiment of volition, not a description of it. It is the expression of living interest, preference, and cate­gorical choice. It leaves to psychology and history a free field for the description of moral phenomena. It has no interest in slipping far-fetched and incredible myths beneath the facts of nature, so as to lend a non-natural origin to human aspirations.

· Devotion and single-mindedness, perhaps possible in the cloister, are hard to establish in the world; yet a rational morality requires that all lay activities, all sweet temptations, should have their voice in the conclave. Morality becomes rational precisely by refusing either to accept human nature, as it sprouts, altogether without harmony, or to mutilate it in the haste to make it harmonious. The art of making a beginning in good friendships is to find a set of people with well-knit character and cogent traditions, so that there may be a firm soil to cultivate and that labour may not be wasted in ploughing the quick-sands.

· Christianity, even in its orthodox forms, covers various kinds of morality, and its philosophical incoherence betrays itself in dis­ruptive movements, profound schisms, and total alienation on the part of one Christian from the inward faith of another. Trappist or Calvinist may be practicing a heroic and metaphysical self-surrender while the busy-bodies of their respective creeds are fos­tering, in God's name, all their hot and miscellaneous passions.

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PERSONS AND PLACES

· Body, character and mind are formed together by that single hereditary organizing power which the ancients called psyche or soul; so that however much the mind or the body may be distorted by accident influences, at bottom they must always correspond; and the innocent eye often catches this profound identity. We are arrested by a beautiful body because the sight of it quickens in ourselves the same vital principle that fashioned that body.

· They say dying animals go into hiding; and I could understand that instinct. There are phases of distress when help is neither possible nor desired. It is simpler, easier, more honest to be seasick alone, and to die alone. The trouble then seems something fated, not to be questioned, like life itself; and nature is built to face it and to see it out.

· The worst symptoms of infidelity that I saw in that family were in the women. Not unintelligibly. It was they who had suffered most from poverty, since there had always been enough to eat, but not enough to appear in the world as women like to appear. And it was they who had suffered most from the latent disgrace of their position, and the dread of gossip and insults. They owed society a grudge for making their life difficult. They had not sinned against nature, but the world had sinned against them by its cruel tyranny and in­justice. They were therefore rebels, impotent rebels, against all the powers that be, celestial and earthly.

· I was as convinced as I am now of the steady march of cosmic forces that we may - in a measure - enlist in our service and thereby win the prize of life in the process of living - without laying any claims to dominate the universe - either physically or morally. But this is a comparatively mature, though very ancient, conclusion; and it is as well to become aware in the first place of the uncertainty and blindness of human opinion.

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LITTLE ESSAYS

440

· In imagination, not in perception, lies the substance of ex­perience, while science and reason are but its chastened and ultimate form.

· If we must speak, therefore, of causal relations between mind and body, we should say that matter is the pervasive cause of the distribution of mind, and mind the pervasive cause of the discovery and value of matter. To ask for an efficient cause, to trace back a force or investigate origins, is to have already turned one's face in the direction of matter and mechanical laws: no success in that undertaking can fail to be a triumph for materialism.

· All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected men's natural sentiment in the face of death, a sentiment which those doctrines, if taken seriously, ought wholly to have reversed.

· Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.

· Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end; a proof that the sphere of expression was never really confused with that of reality.

· 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 ideals, but mad.

· A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.

· The purpose of education is to free us from prejudices. For the barbarian is the man who regards his passions as their own excuse for being; who does not domesticate them by under­standing their cause or by conceiving their ideal goal. He is the man who does not know his derivations nor perceive his tendencies, but who merely feels and acts, valuing in his life its force and its filling, but being careless of its purpose and its form. His delight is in abundance and vehemence; his art, like his life, shows an exclusive respect for quantity and splen­dor of materials. His scorn for what is poorer and weaker than himself is only surpassed by his ignorance of what is higher.

· Materialism has its distinct aesthetic and emotional colour, though this may be strangely affected and even reversed by contrast with systems of an incongruous hue, jostling it acci­dentally in a confused and amphibious mind. If you are in the habit of believing in special providences, or of expecting to continue your romantic adventures in a second life, material­ism will dash your hopes most unpleasantly, and you may think for a year or two that you have nothing left to live for.

But a thorough materialist, one born to the faith and not half-plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold water, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher. His delight in a mechanism that can fall into so many marvelous and beauti­ful shapes, and can generate so many exciting passions, should be of the same intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in a museum of natural history, where he views the myr­iad butterflies in their cases, the flamingoes and shell-fish, the mammoths and gorillas. Doubtless there were pangs in that incalculable life, but they were soon over; and how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitely interesting the uni­versal interplay, and how foolish and inevitable those abso­lute little passions. Somewhat of that sort might be the senti­ment that materialism would arouse in a vigorous mind, active, joyful, impersonal, and in respect to private illusions not with­out a touch of scorn.

· What matters is quality. The reasonable and humane demand to make of the world is that such creatures as exist should not be unhappy, and that life - whatever its quantity - should have a quality that may justify it in its own eyes.

· There is nothing cheaper than idealism. It can be had by merely not observing the ineptitude of our chance prejudices, and by declaring that the first rhymes that have struck our ear are the eternal and necessary harmonies of the world.

· It is war that wastes a nation's wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation. Internecine war, foreign and civil, brought about the greatest setback that the life of reason has ever suffered; it exterminated the Greek and Italian aristocracies. Instead of being descended from heroes, modern nations are descended from slaves; and it is not their bodies only that show it.

· Individualism is in one sense the only possible ideal; for whatever social order may be most valuable can be valuable only for its effect on conscious individuals.

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PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE SANTAYANA

· The true skeptic merely analyses belief, discovering the risk and the logical uncertainty inherent in it. He finds that alleged knowledge is always faith.

· My skepticism remains merely the confession that faith is faith, without any rebellion against the physical necessity of believing. It enables me to believe in common-sense and in materialism and, like Landor, to warm both hands before the fire of life; and at the same time it gives me the key to the realms of dialectic and fancy, which I may enter with­out illusion.

· I everywhere insist that mental events have physical grounds.

· Idolatry is also common in morals, when certain precepts are felt to coerce the conscience by their intrinsic authority, without any vital or rational backing.

· We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past remembering that once it was all that was humanly possible.

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SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL MIND

· The more perfect the dogmatism, the more insecure. A great high topsail that can never be reefed nor furled is the first carried away by a gale.

· It was the fear of illusion that originally disquieted the honest mind, congenitally dogmatic, and drove it in the direc­tion of skepticism.

· Thus a mind enlightened by skepticism and cured of noisy dogma, a mind discounting all reports, and free from all tor­menting anxiety about its own fortune or existence, finds in the wilderness of essence a very sweet and marvelous soli­tude. The ultimate reaches of doubt and renunciation open out for it, by an easy transition, into fields of endless variety and peace, as if through the gorges of death it had passed into a paradise where all things are crystallized into the image of themselves, and have lost their urgency and their venom.

· Belief in experience is the beginning of that bold instinctive art, more plastic than the instinct of most animals, by which man has raised himself to his earthly eminence: it opens the gates of nature to him, both within and without, and enables him to transmute his apprehension - at first merely aesthetic - into mathematical science. This is so great a step that most minds cannot take it. They stumble, and remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom. Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in the glamour of intuition, not hav­ing the courage to believe in experience.

· I myself have no passionate attachment to existence, and value this world for the intuitions it can suggest, rather than for the wilderness of facts that compose it. To turn away from it may be the deepest wisdom in the end. What better than to blow out the candle, and to bed! But at noon this pleasure is premature. I can always hold it in reserve, and perhaps nihil­ism is a system - the simplest of all - on which we shall all agree in the end.

· The universe is a novel of which the ego is the hero. (R)

· I do not know what matter is in itself: but what metaphysi­cal idealists call spirit, if it is understood to be responsible for what goes on in the world and in myself, and to be the "reality" of these appearances, is, in respect to my spiritual existence, precisely what I call matter; and I find the descrip­tion of this matter which the natural sciences supply much more interesting than that given by the idealists, much more beautiful, and much more likely to be true.

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OBITER SCRITA

· Social institutions must always remain questionable and op­pressive in varying degrees, because they are not innate in the human race but are imposed upon us by circumstances.

· Society exists by a conspiracy of psychological, physiological forces; however rigid you may make its machinery, its breath of life must come from the willing connivance of a myriad fleeting, inconstant, half rational human souls.

· The playful and godlike mind of philosophers has always been fascinated by intuition: for philosophers - I mean the great ones - are the infant prodigies of reflection.

· I have sometimes wondered at the value ladies set upon jewels: as centers of light, jewels seem rather trivial and monotonous. And yet there is an unmistakable spell about these pebbles; they can be taken up and turned over; they can be kept; they are faithful possessions; the sparkle of them, shifting from moment to moment, is constant from age to age. They are substances.

The same aspects of light and colour, if they were homeless in space, or could be spied only once and irrecoverably, like fireworks, would have a less comfortable charm. In jewels there is the security, the mystery, the inexhaustible fixity proper to substance. After all, perhaps I can understand the fascination they exercise over the ladies; it is the same that the eternal feminine exercises over us. Our contact with them is unmistakable, our contemplation of them gladly renewed, and pleasantly pro­longed; yet in one sense they are unknowable; we cannot fathom the secret of their constancy, of their hardness, of that perpetual but uncertain brilliancy by which they dazzle us and hide themselves.

These qualities of the jewel and of the eternal feminine are also the qualities of substance and of the world. The existence of this world - unless we lapse for a moment into an untenable skepticism - is certain, or at least it is unquestioningly to be assumed. Experience may explore it adventurously, and science may describe it with precision; but after you have wandered up and down in it for many years, and have gathered all you could of its ways by report, this same world - because it exists substantially and is not invented - remains a foreign thing and a marvel to the spirit; unknowable as a drop of water is unknowable, or unknowable like a person loved.

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SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND AND LATER

· Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots.

· Compromise is odious to passionate natures because it seems a surrender, and to intellectual natures because it seems a confusion; but to the inner man, to the profound Psyche within us, whose life is warm, nebulous and plastic, compromise seems the path of profit and justice.

· Protestant faith does not vanish into the sunlight as Cath­olic faith does, but leaves a shadowy ghost haunting the night of the soul.

· And yet the Protestant can hardly go back - as the Catholic does easily on occasion - out of habit, or fatigue, or disappoint­ment in life, or metaphysical delusion, or the emotional weak­ness of the death-bed. No, the Protestant is more in earnest, he carries his problem and his religion with him.

· Christ and Buddha are called saviors of the world; I think it must be in irony, for the world is just as much in need of salvation as ever. Death and insight and salvation are personal. The world springs up unregenerate every morn­ing in spite of all the Tabors and Calvaries of yesterday.

· Since, as a matter of fact, birth and death actually occur, and our brief career is surrounded by vacancy, it is far better to live in the light of the tragic fact, rather than to forget or deny it, and build everything on a fundamental lie.

· The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.

· Each generation breaks its egg-shell with the same haste and assurance as the last, pecks at the same indigestible pebbles, dreams the same dreams, or others just as absurd, and if it hears anything of what former men have learned by experience, it corrects their maxims by its first impres­sions, and rushes down any un-trodden path which it finds alluring, to die in its own way, or become wise too late and to no purpose.

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MY HOST - THE WORLD

· The full-grown human soul should respect all traditions and understand all passions; at the same time it should possess and embody a particular culture, without any unmanly relaxa­tion or mystical neutrality. Justice is one thing, indecision is another, and weak. If you allow all men to live according to their genuine natures, you must assert your own genuine nature and live up to it.

· Oh, no: I had never wished to teach. I had nothing to teach. I wished only to learn, to be always the student, never the pro­fessor. And with being eternally a student went the idea of be­ing free to move, to pass from one town and one country to another, at least while enough youth and energy remained for me to love exploration and to profit by it.

· People do not grow better when they grow older; they remain the same, - but later circumstances cause them to exhibit their character sometimes in a minor key with the soft pedal, so that they seem to us to have grown sweeter, and sometimes more harshly and disagreeably, when we think them soured or de­praved. No: we are no longer charmed by their virtues or interested in their vices.

· I am profoundly selfish in the sense that I resist human con­tagion, except provisionally, on the surface, and in matters in­different to me. For pleasure, and convivially, I like to share the life about me, and have often done it; but never so as, at heart, to surrender my independence. On the other hand, I am not selfish in a competitive way. I don't want to snatch money or position or pleasures from other people, nor do I attempt to dominate them, as an unselfish man would say, for their own good. I sincerely wish them joy in their native ways of living, as if they were wild animals; but I decidedly refuse to hunt with them unless the probable result recommends itself to me independently.

To heartlessness of this kind I am ready to plead guilty, and see clearly that it is unhuman. Sympathy with nature, however, is the source of it, and not any aggressive selfishness.

· Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable; precisely the balance and wisdom that comes from long per­spectives and broad foundations.

· What is required for living rationally? I think the conditions may be reduced to two: First, knowledge of the world to per­ceive what alternatives are open to you and secondly, to perceive which of them are favorable to your true interests.

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OTHER SOURCES:

· Immediate feeling, pure experience, is the only reality, the only fact. (Winds of Doctrine)

· The first man was a great man for this reason: having been an ape perplexed and corrupted by his multiplying instincts, he suddenly found a new way of being decent, by harnessing all those instincts together, through memory and imagination, and giving each in turn a measure of its due; which is what we call being rational.

(ibid)

· No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privi­lege is to have perceived it as it moves. Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. (ibid)

· America is all one prairie, swept by a universal tornado. Although it has always thought itself in an eminent sense the land of freedom, even when it was covered with slaves, there is no country in which people live under more overpowering compulsions. (Character and Opinion in USA)

· The human world was so horrible to the human mind, that it could be made to look at all decent and interesting only by ignoring one half the facts, and putting a false front on the other half. Hence all that brood of fables. (The Last Puritan)

· Better not travel, if you wished to admire the world; if you wished to think highly of your fellow men, better not hug them too close.
(ibid)

· Thought is never sure of its contacts with reality; action must intervene to render the rhetoric of thought harmless and its emotions sane.
(ibid)

· Every act initiates a new habit and may implant a new in­stinct. We see people even late in life carried away by political or religious contagions or developing strange vices; there would be no peace in old age, but rather a greater and greater obsession by all sorts of cares, were it not that time - in ex­posing us to many adventitious influences - weakens or dis­charges our primitive passions; we are less greedy, less lusty, less hopeful, less generous. But these weakened primitive im­pulses are naturally by far the strongest and most deeply rooted in the organism: so that although an old man may be converted or may take up some hobby, there is usually some­thing thin in his elderly zeal. (Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy)

· That the end of life should be death may sound sad: yet what other end can anything have? The end of an evening party is to go to bed; but its use is to gather congenial people together, that they may pass the time pleasantly. An invitation to the dance is not rendered ironical because the dance can­not last for ever; the youngest of us and the most vigorously wound up, after a few hours, has had enough of sinuous stepping and prancing. The transience of things is essential to their physical being, and not at all sad in itself; it becomes sad by virtue of a sentimental illusion, which makes us imagine that they wish to endure, and that their end is always untimely; but in a healthy nature it is not so. (ibid)

· The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it. (The Realm of Truth)

· Conviction always abounds in its own sense, as in theology: but what breaks at last through such a charmed circle is wild nature, within and without. A thousand contrary facts, a thousand rebel emotions, drive us from our nest. We find that there can be no peace in delusion: and perhaps in this negative and moral guise the idea of truth first insinuates itself into the mind. (ibid)

· With a world so full of stuff before him, I can hardly conceive what morbid instinct can tempt a man to look else­where for wider vistas, unless it be unwillingness to endure the sadness and the discipline of the truth.

(Poetry and Religion)

· Men became superstitious not because they had too much imagination, but because they were not aware that they had any.
(ibid)

· The influences and practices that tend to awaken inspiration are those that liberate and stimulate the inner man: therefore images and words that then come forward will rise from a relatively deeper and purer level and will reveal the native affinities of the psyche. (Ideas of Christ in The Gospels)

· Avoiding, then, this poetical word, the soul, laden with so many equivocations, I will beg the reader to distinguish sharply two levels of life in the human body, one of which I call the spirit and the other the psyche. By spirit I understand the actual light of consciousness falling upon anything - the ultimate invisible emotional fruition of life in feeling and thought. On the other hand by the psyche I understand a system of tropes, inherited or acquired, displayed by living bodies in their growth and behaviour. This psyche is the specific form of physical life, present and potential, assert­ing itself in any plant or animal. (The Realm of Matter)

· I find that in the psychological sphere, apart from pure feeling or intuition, everything is physical. There is no such thing as mental substance, mental force, mental ma­chinery, or mental causation. If actual feelings or intuitions have any ground at all this ground is physical; if they have a date, place, or occasion they have it only in the physical world. (ibid)

· Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms, but do not let it deceive you (-Atlantic, Dec., 1948.)

· Doubtless nobody is quite sane; but nature, against our reasonings and expectations, continually redresses the balance, killing off the worst fools; and the non-theoretical strain in us keeps us alive, with only our more harmless illusions. (reviewing Russell's "Religion and Science" in Mercury magazine)