About the Work
Little Essays is a volume of short prose pieces drawn from the writings of the philosopher George Santayana, selected and arranged by the essayist Logan Pearsall Smith with the author’s collaboration. The book gathers passages that stand on their own as brief essays on subjects of general human interest—art, literature, religion, and the history of the human mind as it has manifested itself in different ages and in the work of various men of genius—and presents them as a connected sequence rather than a miscellany. It was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York, with impressions recorded across the 1920s and into the early 1930s, and printed in Great Britain.
The volume’s origin is unusual and worth understanding, because it shapes everything about the book. Smith, by his own account no philosopher, had fallen into the habit of copying out passages from Santayana’s volumes that he found especially appealing—writing that reminded him of the older essayists on large human subjects. He gradually assembled a collection of what he called little essays, and because most of Santayana’s books had not been reprinted in England and were scarcely known to readers on that side of the Atlantic who might have cared for them, he thought it worthwhile to print the collection. He approached Santayana for permission, sending the manuscript along with some misgiving, feeling it impertinent to cut up the life-work of a distinguished philosopher into a disconnected compilation of elegant extracts.
What changed the character of the project was Smith’s own re-reading. With more careful attention he came to see that the estimations and criticisms he had copied were not mere personal and temperamental insights but were bound up with, and dependent upon, a definite philosophy—a rational conception of the world and of man’s allotted place in it—which gave them a unity of interest and importance beyond miscellaneous appreciation or what he called adventures of the soul. He had been taking ornaments from an edifice of reason, and now saw their greater beauty in their appropriate setting. To sift and rearrange the fragments, reconstructing a miniature image of the original edifice, was not a task for him; only the architect could perform it. He therefore persuaded Santayana to undertake the work himself. The result is a book in which the choice of essays is largely Smith’s, while their titles, order, arrangement, and the changes and omissions made in the original texts are due to their author.
The Santayana who emerges from these pages is described in the Preface as by race and temperament a representative of the Latin tradition, his mind a Catholic one. His aim, we are told, has been to reconstruct our modern, miscellaneous, shattered picture of the world and to build—not of clouds but of the materials of this common earth—an edifice of thought, a fortress or temple for the modern mind, in which every natural impulse could find its opportunity for satisfaction and every ideal aspiration its shrine and altar. The book is thus not a treatise but something closer to a portable version of a philosophy: a sequence of short pieces in which a single coherent outlook is brought to bear, one facet at a time, on human nature, religion, art, poetry, the great poets and philosophers, and finally on materialism and morals.
Context
The book belongs to a particular moment in the reception of Santayana’s thought, and its existence is a small chapter in the history of reading. Santayana was a philosopher of wide literary gifts whose books had not been widely reprinted in England and were hardly known to the readers on that side of the Atlantic who might have been interested in them. Smith’s Preface makes this the practical justification for the volume: here was writing of the first order on subjects of general concern, and it was effectively unavailable. The compilation was therefore an act of transmission, an attempt to put a living philosophy into the hands of readers who would not otherwise encounter it.
The Preface also records the intellectual situation the book addresses. Smith speaks of a modern, miscellaneous, shattered picture of the world—a phrase that captures the sense, widespread in the period, that inherited frameworks of meaning had come apart and that no single authoritative system had replaced them. Against this, Santayana’s work is presented as an effort at reconstruction: an attempt to build an edifice of thought out of the materials of common earthly experience, capacious enough to house natural impulse and ideal aspiration alike. The book’s audience, then, is the general reader rather than the specialist—someone curious about art, religion, literature, and the conduct of life, who wants a philosophy that can be read as essays and that treats large human subjects with the seriousness the older essayists brought to them.
There is also a religious and cultural context woven through the volume itself. Much of the book’s energy goes into thinking about Christianity—its origins, its imaginative power, its historical embodiments, its relation to the classical and pagan world, and the character of the movements that broke away from it. The essays on religion are not devotional writing and not polemic in any simple sense; they are attempts to understand what religion is as a phenomenon of the human mind, how it differs from science, and why it has taken the forms it has. Similarly, the essays on poets and philosophers, and on materialism and morals, situate themselves in a long conversation that runs from the ancients through the Christian centuries to the modern age. The book is thus a product of a mind formed by the classical and Catholic traditions and addressing a modern readership that has, in large measure, lost touch with both.
Structure of the Book
The volume is organized into five sequences of short essays, each sequence addressing a broad domain of human experience. The first, Little Essays on Human Nature, opens the book with pieces on spirit as judge, the origin of morals, ideals, intellectual ambition, the suppressed madness of sane men, the birth of reason and the difference reason makes, body and mind, the self, self-consciousness, vanity and fame, false moral perspectives, pain, what people will put up with, the advantage of a long childhood, the transitive force of knowledge, the symbolic character of our knowledge of nature, the relativity of science, mathematics and morals, mind-reading, knowledge of character, comradeship, and love. This opening sequence establishes the book’s fundamental vocabulary—reason and impulse, body and mind, the self and its figments, knowledge and its limits—and it does so by moving from the most general questions about spirit and value down to the concrete textures of friendship and love.
The second sequence, Little Essays on Religion, turns to the imaginative and historical life of religion. It includes the argument that religion is essentially imaginative and poetic rather than scientific; the discussion of ages of faith and Christian unity; the essay on the convert; the treatment of Christian doctrine as a moral allegory; the doctrine of the two cities; the account of the absorption of pagan custom into Christianity; the imaginative construction of Christ and the Virgin; the relation of orthodoxy to heresy; the character of Protestantism; and the essay on piety. This is the longest and most sustained movement in the book, and it carries the reader from the general theory of religion through the historical drama of Christendom to the intimate virtue of piety.
The third sequence, Little Essays on Art and Poetry, gathers the pieces concerned with aesthetic experience and the nature of artistic creation. The fourth, Little Essays on Poets and Philosophers, applies the book’s characteristic method to particular figures and to the temperaments they represent—the poet, the philosopher, the man of genius—and includes the reflections on Lucretius, on psychic phenomena, on a future life, and on ideal immortality. The fifth and final sequence, Little Essays on Materialism and Morals, closes the volume with the pieces that draw the metaphysical and ethical threads together, followed by a brief note.
The order is not arbitrary. The book begins with the constitution of the human mind and its place in nature, moves outward to the great collective imaginative construction that is religion, then to art and poetry as the works of individual genius, then to the poets and philosophers themselves as human types, and finally to the material and moral conditions in which all of this takes place. It is, in effect, a miniature image of the larger edifice Smith described—a sequence in which each part depends on the others, and in which the reader is led from the ground up.
Inside the Book
The Making of the Book
The volume is Little Essays, drawn from the writings of George Santayana by Logan Pearsall Smith, with the author’s collaboration, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York and printed in Edinburgh by R. & R. Clark. Its editions record impressions in 1920, 1921, 1924, and 1931. In the Preface, Smith explains how the book came about. Having grown familiar with Santayana’s writings, he habitually took up one or another of the volumes and found, amid much he did not understand—being no philosopher—passages resembling the older essayists on large human subjects, more interesting and in many ways more important than anything in other contemporary writers. He began copying out what he liked, gradually forming a collection of little essays on subjects of general interest: art, literature, religion, and the history of the human mind as manifested in different men of genius. Because most of Santayana’s books had not been reprinted in England and were hardly known to readers on that side of the Atlantic, Smith thought it worth printing them. He asked the author’s permission, sending the collection for approval with misgiving, feeling it impertinent to cut a distinguished philosopher’s life-work into a disconnected compilation of “elegant extracts.”
Re-reading the books more carefully, Smith saw that the material held something far greater, and that a better use might be made of it. The estimations and criticisms he had copied were not mere personal insights but were bound up with a definite philosophy—a rational conception of the world and man’s allotted place in it—giving them a unity beyond miscellaneous appreciation. Santayana appeared to him by race and temperament a representative of the Latin tradition, his mind a Catholic one; his aim had been to reconstruct our shattered modern picture of the world and to build, not of clouds but of the materials of this common earth, an edifice of thought, a fortress or temple for the modern mind, in which every natural impulse could find satisfaction and every ideal aspiration its shrine. Smith had been taking ornaments from this edifice of Reason and now saw their greater beauty in their proper setting. To sift and rearrange the fragments was a task only the architect could perform; he persuaded Santayana to undertake it. Thus the choice of essays is largely Smith’s, while their titles, order, arrangement, and the changes and omissions in the original texts are due to their author.
Spirit the Judge
The contents fall into five movements: essays on human nature, on religion, on art and poetry, on poets and philosophers, and on materialism and morals. The main text opens with “Spirit the Judge,” which argues that man has a prejudice against himself, treating whatever his mind produces as unreal or insignificant, satisfied only when fancying himself surrounded by objects and laws independent of his nature. Yet from our despised feelings the great world of perception derives all its value; things are interesting because we care about them, important because we need them. Had perceptions no connexion with pleasures, we should close our eyes on the world; if intelligence served no passion, we should doubt whether two and two make four. The popular sense of the unworthiness of purely emotional things has driven those who take moral problems to heart into seeking some external right and beauty of which moral and aesthetic feelings should be perceptions, as intellectual activity is a perception of external fact. But a judgment is not trivial because it rests on human feelings; triviality consists in abstraction from human interests, of which knowledge of truth is one but only one. The works of nature first acquire meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
Reason, Body, and the Self
A person, the next essay argues, is himself only through traditional discipline, not through heats or languors. The perturbed immediate seeks peace in reason, which reveals ideal permanence. When material flux forms an eddy sustained by breathing and nutrition—a life—it affords foothold for thought, like the ark in the desert. The primacy of impulses, irrational but expressive of bodily functions, appears in animals and in dreams and obsessions; reason’s work is undone, and sporadic growths of rationality spring up in a moral wilderness. In love, a cause unknown to the sufferer—the spring-flood of hereditary instincts—checks the young man’s gaiety and finds its cause only in another being’s image, whose character he may not know, yet which dominates him with tragic earnestness. If lasting, the whole life may be reorganized. This madness inspires method; the man has something to live for, and the blind affinity suffuses his faculties with spiritual light. Rationality depends on distinguishing the excellent, a distinction made only by an irrational impulse. As life is a better form given to force, reason is a better form given to interest; the substance remains irrational, and rationality is secondary and relative.
“The Difference Reason Makes” contrasts the dog, moving by inspiration with absolute freedom and helplessness, to systematic living, which is an experiment. The path of reason is one of innumerable courses, the only one human discourse can trace; madness, if harmless, may last forever, and an imaginative life may exist parasitically. Human ideas remain sensuous and trivial, representing personal temperature; languages, mythologies, and metaphysics arise in profusion, then disappear with climate change. The most irresponsible vision has principles of order; we should lead ourselves out of dream as the Israelites were led out of Egypt. “Body and Mind” argues that animals naturally feel and think; mind relates to body as sense inhabits complex bodies, and separating them is violent divorce. The body is an instrument, the mind its function; the connexion is natural, not dialectical. Matter cannot become consciousness, nor mind determine its own march. Consciousness is the expression of bodily life, its place like that of art, religion, or science; thought is a link in the chain of natural events. Matter is the pervasive cause of the distribution of mind, mind the pervasive cause of the discovery and value of matter. Spirit is useless, being the end of things, but not vain. “The Self” defines what we call ourselves as a cycle of vegetative processes with a general direction, developments that may be dialectical like an egg hatching. Man is full of potentiality and impotence; a will never thwarted would think itself omnipotent.
Self-Consciousness, Vanity, and Fame
Ideal society, the next essay proposes, is a drama in imagination, with mythical personages beginning with the “I.” A man’s notion of himself is a figment in discourse; the more reflective he is, the more his experience is absorbed in his perennial “I.” La Rochefoucauld described amour propre as the spring of all human sentiments, and nothing better proves self-consciousness’s mythical character than sensitiveness to alien opinions: the least breath of censure lashes self-esteem, and passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate. The highest form of vanity is the love of fame—easy to mock, hard to understand, nearly impossible to eradicate in imaginative people. Posthumous fame has no practical effect, and its direct object, a name surviving without an adequate idea of its original, seems thin; what comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read him, or to Pindar that he is mentioned in a world from which everything he loved has departed? Yet beneath the desire for nominal longevity may lurk an ideal ambition. Fame, as a noble mind conceives it, is not a monument or a repeated name but the immortality of a man’s work, spirit, and efficacy—the perpetual rejuvenation of his soul in the world.
Religion as Poetry, Not Science
The argument opens by correcting Bacon: the God to whom depth in philosophy brings men back is not the same God from whom a little philosophy estranges them. Mature reflection should breed better conceptions than those muddled by tradition and passion. Traditional conceptions, when felicitous, may be adopted by the poet, but must be purified by the moralist and disintegrated by the philosopher. Each religion necessarily contradicts every other and probably itself; the sciences are allies, but religions, like languages, are rivals. A man’s religion is a historical accident like his language; even a chosen exchange merely adopts a new, equally arbitrary convention.
The attempt to have a religion that is no religion in particular is as hopeless as speaking no particular language. A courier’s speech is a private jargon meaningful only by analogy to conventional languages; likewise travellers between religions retain a neutral residuum of belief, mistaking it for the essence of all religion. Probing shows such conceptions to be vestiges of old beliefs. Later generations will either revert to ancient authority or attach to something wholly novel and positive, promulgated by a fresh genius. Every living religion has a marked idiosyncrasy; its power lies in its special message and the bias it gives to life. Another world to live in is what is meant by having a religion.
Whoever searched the heavens and found no God would not have found the human mind by microscope. God existed in man’s apprehension before mathematics or the vault of heaven, since objectification of the whole mind precedes abstraction of a material world. Failure to find God among the stars indicates atrophy of the imaginative faculty, which could become general, making God disappear as music would with universal deafness. People seldom take a myth as empirical truth; doctrines of immortality have hardly affected men’s natural sentiment before death; Providence has not destroyed natural fears; prayer has never superseded practical effort—proof that expression was never confused with reality. Such confusion would have changed mythology into madness; myths are taken with a grain of salt.
Religions and philosophies are judged by truth, which is seldom their strong point, though the criterion is not unjust since they aspire to truth. Belief belongs to science; myths are conceived and understood, not believed. When religions are dead or remote, they manifest their virtues to the unbeliever as expressions of human genius—true to the eye and spirit that fashioned them. Their errors no longer threaten, and they acquire beauty invisible to their authors. They are a kind of poetry half believed because it intervened in life.
Religious doctrines should withdraw their pretension to deal with matters of fact, which causes conflicts with science and sects, and impurity of religion. Religion’s proper concern is to express the ideal; its dignity lies in ideal adequacy, like poetry. Its function is to draw from reality materials for an image of the ideal to which reality ought to conform.
Mankind divides into Sancho Panzas (sense for reality, no ideals) and Don Quixotes (sense for ideals, but mad). Recognizing facts as facts and ideals as ideals eludes normal discrimination. The liberal school that minimizes religious expression impoverishes symbols and vulgarizes aims, retaining a stark superstition with all the venom of absolute pretensions. A civilized orthodoxy’s respect is limited and external; the mind remains free. But abstract fanaticism poisons liberty, turning philosophy into an obsession. Mythology cannot become science by being reduced.
The positivistic school overlooks the highest function of human nature. The environing world justifies itself only by the free life it fosters. Observation is of brute fact until digested into humane impulses, becoming the basis for ideal constructions in society, religion, and art. Facts are trivial incidents, gossip of the Fates. To regard man’s function as accomplished when happenings are recorded ignores his reason—his privilege of using nature as food for his own life. The best part of human life consists in the gift of creation and government attributed to God as highest ideal. Compared to apathetic naturalism, religion’s errors deserve indulgent sympathy as efforts to interpret experience for moral ends.
Religions and philosophies may assimilate wisdom even if founded on folly. Symbols become beautiful; their loss is a blow while incapacity endures. Religions do not disappear when discredited; they must be replaced. For a thousand years augurs laughed but stood at their posts until monks relieved them. Subsuming the natural order under the moral is like a child governing a parent. Such follies belong to an intelligent, eager creature misled by inadequate information. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root; men become superstitious not from too much imagination but from unawareness of having any.
It is pathetic how lowly are the motives religion attributes to deity—to be given the best morsel, remembered, praised, obeyed—thought points of honour with the gods. Metaphysicians call God universal substance and cause, but primary substance is mere material, first cause the lowest instrument. Sometimes we draw the divine life from good, beauty, and happiness, yet succumb to illusions: we believe happy what it makes us happy to think of. No religion has given a picture of deity men could imitate without grossest immorality, yet these representations have not had bad effects; the deity was opposed to their vices. We know instinctively we deal in myths. Homer’s stories hardly demoralized youths; to give myths moral importance, as Plato tended, takes them too seriously. They float ineffectually, understood by not being pressed, like an idiom. The gods sometimes appear, bringing foretaste of another life.
The Two Cities and the Drama of History
Ages of faith and Christian unity were Christian only superficially: when all men are Christians, only a small element in the average man can actually be Christian. The thirteenth century, reputed Catholicism’s golden age, appears from Dante’s witness to have been filled with bitter racial and religious conflicts, faithless rebellions against the Christian regimen, worldliness in the church, barbarism in the people, and a dawning of pagan scientific and aesthetic passions. Christendom then was no kingdom of God on earth but a conglomeration of incorrigible rascals, intellectually more or less Christian. The Spain of Philip II shows the same: a government labouring for the church to resist Turks, convert pagans, banish Moslems, and crush Protestants, yet the very forces defending the church—army and Inquisition—were alien to the Christian life, embodying chivalry and greed or policy and jealous dominion; the ecclesiastical forces too—theology, ritual, hierarchy—were themselves alien to the gospel. An anti-worldly religion thus faces a dilemma: merely spiritual, developing no material organs, it cannot affect the world; developing organs to operate on the world, those organs become part of the world from which it tries to wean the spirit, so once armed for conflict it has two enemies. It is stifled by its necessary armour and adds treason in its members to hostility in its foes. Hence in every age preaching a supernaturalistic system we must expect the world to stand stubbornly against it, essentially unconverted and hostile whatever name it bears. This insidious revulsion of the natural man against a religion he does not openly discard is what modern Christendom calls the Renaissance—no less radically inimical to Christianity than the Revolution, its later open rebellion. Christianity’s survival means the Renaissance and Revolution are still incomplete; they are living programmes, not past events.
Lucretius and the Case Against Fear
The segment opens with Lucretius, whose argument against the fear of death in the third book of his poem draws its force from its unflinching picture of life’s madness. His philosophy deprecates covetousness, ambition, love, and religion alike—a surrender of everything ardent in life because it is ultimately painful and ignominious. Escape from all this is felt as a great deliverance, and since genius must be ardent, Lucretius pours his enthusiasm into Epicurus, hailing him as a saviour. Yet this was only a beginning: carried further, the same principles would deliver us from the Epicurean life itself—from science, friendship, and healthy bodily pleasures. Had Epicureanism renounced these too, it would have become a thorough system of mortification, a pursuit of death. And to those who sincerely pursue death, death is no evil but the highest good; no elaborate arguments are needed to prove it should not be feared. A fatigued spirit can love death because it is nothing, just as a vigorous animal must hate and fear it for the same reason.
Psychic Phenomena
Among the blind, the rest of the skin is said to recover a primordial sensitiveness to distance and light, giving a clearer premonition of objects than seeing people have in the dark. Similarly, when reason and ordinary sense are in abeyance, a universal sensibility seems to return to the soul, making normally unappreciable influences sensible and allowing automatic reactions to insufficient stimuli. Nature is prodigiously complex; everything leaves almost indelible traces, like buried cities, which an attentive eye can read, recovering the image of an extinct life. Symbols illegible to reason can read themselves out in trance and madness. Real ghosts are such reverberations of the past, exceeding ordinary imagination in vividness and fidelity; they may require subtler material influences and are not discoverable without some derangement of the senses. Such influences are consonant with reason, but only a hankering for superstition or a failure to appreciate religion and science leads to reverence for oracular gibberish. The world is weary of experimenting with magic. Employing such investigations to save religious doctrines founded on moral ideas is a pathetic blunder; the obscene supernatural has nothing to do with rational religion. Echoes of a past life heard from a tomb would teach us more about dying than immortality: the truths would be psycho-physical, implying nothing about a truly disembodied life, which could not betray itself in spectres, rumblings, and spasms. Thunders from Sinai and stone tables would be irrelevant to the moral authority of the ten commandments; no less irrelevant to a supramundane immortality is the length of time human spirits may operate on earth after their bodies are quiet. Spectral survivals would at most enlarge our conception of the soul’s physical basis, spreading out the area of its manifestations; they could not reveal the soul’s disembodied existence.
A Future Life
Many die too soon or are born in the wrong age or station; given the fountain of youth once more, they might do themselves fuller justice. Most people think they have stuff for greater things than time allows, and imagining a second career is a pleasing antidote for ill-fortune. But how should a future life be constituted to satisfy this demand? It would have to go on in an environment closely analogous to earth; one could not write epics in another world if it contained no time, no heroic struggles, or no metrical language—nor is it clear that epics, to be perfect, would need to be endless. If what is foiled is poetic genius and not a tendency toward perpetual motion, it would not help if in heaven one were allowed to beget robust children instead of dreamed-of epics. If hereafter one is to be the same man improved, one must find oneself in the same world corrected. Were one transformed into a cherub or transported into a timeless ecstasy, it is hard to see in what sense one would continue to exist. Such results might enrich the universe but would not prolong one’s life nor retrieve one’s disasters. The universe contains all sorts of experiences, but it is idle to attribute to a particular man a life divorced from his circumstances and body.
For this reason, a future life is best represented by frankly material ideals which most Christians, being Platonists, despise. It would be genuine happiness for a Jew to rise again in the flesh and live for ever in Ezekiel’s New Jerusalem, with its ceremonial glories and civic order. It would be agreeable for any man to sit in well-watered gardens with Mohammed, clad in green silks, drinking delicious sherbets, and transfixed by the gazelle-like glance of some young girl. Amid such scenes a man might remain himself and fulfil hopes he had cherished on earth. He might also find his friends again, which in generous minds is perhaps the thought that chiefly sustains interest in a posthumous existence. But to recognize his friends, a man must find them in their own setting.
Poetry and Philosophy
The philosopher, Santayana grants, is at his best a poet; the poet, however, is at his worst when he tries to be a philosopher. Philosophy is reasoned and heavy, poetry winged and flashing, and in almost any long poem the parts outshine the whole: a poet can assemble a few words, a cadence, an image that renders a moment of high tension, but the next moment the tension relaxes, the sentiment fades, and what follows is usually incongruous or inferior. The thought drifts and is lost in the sands of versification; to be brief is almost a condition of being inspired. Santayana broaches the idea that poetry is essentially short-winded, that only the fleeting moment, mood, or episode can be rapturously rendered, while life as a whole, history, character, and destiny are unfit for imagination. He cannot think so. If we find little things pleasing and great things arid, that is due to lack of faculty—lack of imagination and memory, and above all lack of discipline. The short-winded poet excels the common person not by thinking less but by feeling more; his fleeting intuition has vision, scope, and a symbolic depth. Everything that comes to us must come at some time; the philosopher, too, is confined to the fleeting moment, and each must enrich it with endless vistas. What makes a moment of poetic insight differ from a vulgar one is that its passions have more perspective. The poetic thrill is finding sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as all the lights of the sea might be found in the water of a jewel. A philosophic thought is such an epitome. Focus a little experience, give scope and depth to feeling, and it grows imaginative; focus all experience within it, make it a philosopher’s vision of the world, and it grows imaginative in a superlative degree and is supremely poetical. Poetry is not poetical for being short-winded but for being comprehensive and having range. If too much matter renders it heavy, that is the fault of the poet’s weak intellect, not of the outstretched world. It is the acme of life to understand life; the height of poetry is to speak the language of the gods. There is a kind of sensualism that has decreed that theory is not poetical, as if all images and emotions entering a cultivated mind were not saturated with theory. The life of theory is not less human or less emotional than the life of sense; it is more typically human and more keenly emotional. Philosophy, when a poet is not mindless, enters inevitably into his poetry, since it has entered into his life. To object to theory in poetry would be like objecting to words there; for words, too, are symbols without the sensuous character of the things they stand for, and yet it is only by the net of new connexions which words throw over things that poetry arises at all. Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm’s length. Heard philosophies are sweet, but those unheard may be sweeter, more unmixed and profound for being lived rather than taught.
The Elements of Poetry
Santayana disputes Plato’s claim that poetic dragons wreak havoc in the world. Such poetry is more often absurd than venomous, requires no special legislation, and dies quietly of universal neglect. Ordinary popular poetry is secondary and conventional, propagating established ideas in trite metaphors; popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing ancient divinations to an already converted public. A tree in autumn sheds leaves and seeds together, so ripening experience produces various manifestations—some barren, others fit to carry the parent experience into another mind. Expressiveness in the former is dead, like a fossil; in the latter it is living and efficacious, recreating its original. The first is idle self-manifestation, the second rational art. A poet, as spokesman of his full soul at a given moment, cannot consider eventualities or think of anything but his message. Critics, however, view his momentary ebullition from another side; they do not justify the poet to himself but inquire how significant his expressions are for humanity, registering the social or representative value of his soul. A work of art is a public possession addressed to the world; by taking material embodiment a spirit solicits attention and claims kinship with the prevalent gods. Critics should ask whether it is humane, rational, friendly to the rest of the soul. To its incommunicable charms it must add a kind of courtesy.
The Supreme Poet
Rational art proceeds in two directions on the basis of limited experience: art may buttress a particular form of life or express it. Industry, science, business, and morality buttress life, informing us of conditions and adjusting us to them. This preliminary labour need not be servile; doing it exercises our faculties, which may grow free—as Lucretius’s imagination, tracing atoms, dances and soars congenially. One extension of art would be doing artistically, joyfully, sympathetically whatever we must do. Literature, involved in history, politics, science, and affairs, might throughout be a work of art—not by being ornate but by being appropriate, yielding a sense of precision and justness. The philosophical or comprehensive poet, like Homer, like Shakespeare, would be a poet of business, having a taste for and clean view of the world he lived in. A second form of rational art expresses the ideal towards which we would move under improved conditions. As we react we manifest an inward principle; we have a nature selecting its own direction and the direction in which practical arts shall transform the world. The outer life is for the sake of the inner; discipline for freedom; conquest for self-possession. This inner life is wonderfully redundant—more than consciousness of acts by which the body adjusts to surroundings. Each sense has its arbitrary quality, each language its euphony and prosody, every game its creative laws, every soul its tender reverberations and secret dreams. Life has a margin of play which might grow broader if the sustaining nucleus were more firmly established. To the art of working well a civilized race would add the art of playing well—playing with nature and the overtones of life. This is the ultimate, most artistic sort of art, but it will never succeed while the other sort is backward; for if we do not know our environment, we mistake dreams for part of it, spoiling science by making it fantastic and dreams by making them obligatory. The art and religion of the past, as seen conspicuously in Dante, have fallen into this error. To correct it would establish a new religion and a new art, based on moral liberty and moral courage. The needed poet of this double insight has never existed. It is time some genius should appear to reconstitute the shattered picture of the world—living in the continual presence of all experience and respecting it, understanding nature as the ground of that experience, and having a delicate sense for the ideal echoes of his own passions and the colours of his possible happiness. All that can inspire a poet is contained in this task. We may hail this needed genius from afar; like the poets in Dante’s limbo when Virgil returns among them, we may salute him: “Onorate l’altissimo poeta”—honour the most high poet. But this supreme poet is in limbo still.
Against Prying Biographers
Our ignorance of a great writer’s life is not much to be regretted. His work preserves the part of him he wished to preserve. Perfect conviction ignores itself, proclaiming public truth; reaching this requires a peculiar genius called intelligence—quickness in seeing things as they are.
Shakespeare’s World and Its Limits
Shakespeare’s world, the essay argues, is exclusively the world of human society; the cosmos eludes him, and he never feels the need to frame it. He renders human life richly and variously, yet leaves it without a setting and therefore without a meaning. Asked what the significance of all his passion and beauty might be, he could hardly answer except with Macbeth’s “to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,” ending in “Signifying nothing.” Homer and Dante would have answered differently: their tragedy is illumined by a sense of the divinity of life and beauty, or of the sanctity of suffering and death. Their faith enveloped experience in a world of imagination where reason, fancy, and heart found natural expression, catching in reality the hint of a lovelier fable that completed and idealized it, making it vaster and more intelligible. They dramatized the universe and endowed it with the tragic unities. Shakespeare’s silence and philosophical incoherence, by contrast, seem still heathen, suggesting a northern mind morose and barbarous at its core.
Romantic Ignorance and the Barbarian
The common people are far from any corrupt desire to be primitive; they look toward a more exalted life of distinction and pleasure, filling them with hope, envy, or humble admiration. A barbarous ideal demands tasks and dangers incompatible with happiness, and education frees us from such prejudices. The barbarian treats his passions as their own excuse for being, domesticating them neither by understanding their cause nor by conceiving their ideal goal; he feels and acts, valuing force and filling while careless of purpose and form, delighting in abundance and vehemence, respecting quantity and splendour of materials. His scorn for the weaker is surpassed only by his ignorance of what is higher. Framing solid ideals belongs not to the irritable poet but to the master-workman who models given substance to given use. In romantic drama, accidents make the meaningless happiness or unhappiness of a supersensitive adventurer; chivalry is a fine emblazoning of the original impulse to fight every man and love every woman. Something drives the youth afield into solitude and alien friendships, where alone, before nature and an indifferent world, he can become himself—a flight that grows urgent when real conflict of temper or conscience divides him from what is established at home, since even beneficent conventions must ignore the nicer sensibilities of living souls. Common men accept these spiritual tyrannies, weak men repine, and great men break them down.
The picture of life as an eternal war for illusory ends was first drawn by satirists with too much justification in the facts; grosser minds mistook that satire for a sober account of the universe, and others made it the ideal itself. A barbarous mind cannot conceive life as health—a harmony continually preserved or restored; never having tasted order, it identifies progress with new conflicts and life with continual death. Its deification of unreason and strife comes partly from piety, partly from inexperience: there is piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux, and inexperience in not seeing that wherever interests and judgments exist, the flux has created a natural good, a cumulative life, an ideal purpose. Art, science, government, and human nature itself are self-defining and self-preserving; to confuse means with ends and mistake disorder for vitality is not unnatural to minds that hear the hum of mighty workings but imagine neither cause nor fruits. The barbarian’s intensity is without seriousness and his passion without joy; his philosophy betrays a rudimentary impulse to follow every beckoning hand. When limits are gradually discovered and an authoritative ideal is born of the marriage of human nature with experience, happiness becomes definite and attainable. Such incoherences may be preserved by superstition, and perpetual servile employments may render people incapable of conceiving a liberal life; like the prisoner of Chillon, after long captivity they would regain freedom with a sigh, until the wholesome influences of nature revived their wills and a vision of perfection arose upon breathing a purer air. Freedom and perfection are synonymous with life.
Romanticism, Faust, and the Romantic Will
The romantic poet is a novelist in verse, a philosopher of experience as it comes to the individual. The zest of romanticism consists in taking what you know to be an independent and ancient world as if it were material for your private emotions. The savage or animal could not be romantic; the romanticist should be a civilized man, so that his primitiveness and egotism may have something paradoxical and conscious about them, yet in his inmost genius a barbarian, a child, a transcendentalist, so that his life may seem absolutely fresh, self-determined, unforeseen. He believes he creates a new heaven and a new earth with each revolution in his moods, ignoring the conditions of life until by living he discovers them. Like Faust, he flouts science and is minded to try—the notes break off here, but the portrait of the romantic will as unteachable and self-defeating carries forward into the later critique of intrinsic values.
Emerson: Truth Without System
Emerson greeted the world each morning with fresh sincerity, noting how things seemed or what they suggested to his spontaneous fancy—a fancy guided by the habits and training of a preacher’s mind, yet never hardened into settled dogmas, since he felt in his bones that his notions were myths. Occasionally the bad example of other transcendentalists, pressing questions, or the universal instinct to think one’s ideas final led him near system-making, but he stopped short; had he systematized his ideas of compensation, the over-soul, or spiritual laws, the result would have been as thin and forced as other transcendental systems. He coveted truth and returned to experience, history, poetry, and the natural science of his day for new starting-points.
To covet truth is a distinguished passion. Every philosopher claims to pursue it, but this is seldom so; those genuinely concerned with discovering what is true are men of science, naturalists, and historians, whose truths, never complete, are integral parts of truth no later interpretation can invalidate. Professional philosophers are usually apologists, absorbed in defending some vested illusion or eloquent idea, like lawyers studying the case for which they are retained; they covet victory and the dispelling of their own doubts, not truth. What they defend is some system—a view about the totality of things, of which men are actually ignorant. No system would ever have been framed if people were simply interested in knowing what is true; what produces systems is the interest in maintaining that some favourite or inherited idea is sufficient and right. A system may contain many true details, but as a system covering infinite possibilities it must be a work of imagination and human soliloquy.
Emerson had no system, and his coveting truth had another consequence: he was detached, unworldly, contemplative. Coming out of the conventicle, reform meeting, or lecture-room, he heard nature whispering: “Why so hot, little sir?” The spirit of the world acts in us as the sea rises in every wave, but it passes through us and moves on; our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves, and our dignity lies not in what we do but in what we understand. Within us is silent observation, the speculative eye before which all passes; on this side Emerson represented nothing except intelligence itself.
Emerson’s Nature, Shelley, and Idealism
Another element in Emerson was his love and respect for nature.
Intuitive Ethics and the Limits of Fanaticism
Intuitive ethics, when it meets genuine discord, has nothing to offer but force and physical sanctions; it can start the battle of nations and religions but cannot settle it. Rival societies burn with identical zeal, patriotism, and readiness for martyrdom, each as uncompromising as the other, so swapping one historical allegiance for another is idle or cruel—both are equally arbitrary, and the inherited one is dearer to those born under it. To feel such aggression as criminal demands imagination and justice, precisely what sectaries lack by definition. Truly religious minds may want to extirpate every rival faith yet often rise above national jealousies, since spirituality is universal; politicians, like the Romans, may grasp the religious situation and leave conquered peoples free to worship. Yet those same politicians commit a patent iniquity, substituting their own language, commerce, soldiers, and tax-gatherers for their neighbours’—one country being as much a country as another and equally dear to its people. Religious and national fanaticism thus each stand for an internal good while producing outward evil. Perhaps agents are so different they can only poison or crush one another; more probably humanity is definable by a partially identical function and intent, so by studying their own nature people could rise above mutual opposition.
A widespread consciousness of the relativity of values would make people more truly social than belief in intrinsic, unchangeable values. Moral warfare would continue, but not with poisoned arrows: our private sense of justice would carry only relative authority, and while we must follow it, we should meet incompatible aims as physical inconveniences rather than insult them as morally vile. Real unselfishness means sharing others’ interests; beyond actual unanimity, the only possible unselfishness is chivalry—recognizing the inward right of enemies fighting against us. Long practised on the battlefield, chivalry might extend to all human conflicts and to the warring elements within each breast. Policy, hypnotization, and surgery may be practised without exorcisms. Ethical absolutism, a mental grimace of passion, refutes by what it is what it says. The philosophy of Homer breathes the conviction that what is beautiful or precious has no right to existence—nothing has such a right—nor may we absolutely condemn any force, god or man, that destroys what is beautiful, for it has something beautiful of its own to achieve. If sure of our ground, we should acquiesce in others’ different feelings, as a man conscious of speaking his language with the capital’s accent confesses its arbitrariness gaily. It is unmeaning to say what is beautiful to one ought to be beautiful to another; that obligation is conditioned on possessing the same faculties, and no two men have exactly the same. Incapacity to appreciate certain beauties may be the condition for appreciating another kind; the greatest capacity for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized, and the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. If animals could speak, the Inquisition would have had a pretty work on its hands. Nothing need be refuted, for the will behind all ideals and most dogmas cannot itself be refuted; but it may be enlightened and led to reconsider its intent. The age of controversy is past; that of interpretation has succeeded.
Reason as the Ultimate Conscience
The objects of human desire, until reason has compared and experience tested them, are a miscellaneous assortment of goods, unstable and incompatible. Intuitive morality suffices while it enforces obvious, universal laws indispensable to any society, which impose themselves under pain of quick extinction—a penalty many individuals and nations prefer to pay. But when intuitive morality tries to guide progress, its magic fails; ideals are tentative and must be critically viewed. A moralist resting in his intuitions may be a good preacher but hardly deserves the name of philosopher, for he cannot find authority for his maxims that opposite maxims may not equally invoke. To settle the relative merits of rival authorities and hostile consciences, one must appeal to the only real authority: experience, reason, and human nature in the living man. No good man would consent to regard as divine or binding an authority that essentially contradicted his own conscience. Yet a conscience irreflective and incorrigible is too hastily satisfied with itself and not conscientious enough; it needs cultivation by dialectic, neglecting to extend to all human interests that principle of synthesis and justice by which conscience itself arose. So soon as conscience summons its own dicta for revision in the light of experience and universal sympathy, it is no longer called conscience but reason; and when the spirit summons its traditional faiths to similar examination, that exercise is not called religion but philosophy. It is true, in a sense, that philosophy is the purest religion and reason the ultimate conscience; but so to name them would be misleading, for the things commonly called by those names have seldom consented to live at peace with sincere reflection.
Value, Pleasure, and the Voluptuary
Although pain and pleasure are involved in all deliberate forecast and volition, they are not the ultimate sources of value. When Petrarch says a thousand pleasures are not worth one pain, he establishes an ideal deeper than either, one that makes a life of satisfaction marred by a single pang an offence and a horror to his soul. If our demand for rationality is less acute, we may call a single pang only the thousandth part of a thousand pleasures and judge such a balanced life nine hundred and ninety-nine times better than nothing; but this judgment, despite its mathematical air, expresses a choice as irrational as Petrarch’s—it merely means the mixed prospect attracts our wills vehemently. The only possible criterion for relative values of pains and pleasures is the will that chooses among them. All beliefs about future experience rest on actual impulse and feeling; the source of estimation is the inner fountain of life and imagination, and the object of pursuit is the ideal counterpart of the present demand. Abstract satisfaction is not pursued, but if will and environment are constant, satisfaction will necessarily be felt in achieving the object desired.
Rejecting hedonistic psychology does not oppose eudaemonism in ethics; eudaemonism is another name for wisdom, and there is no other moral morality. Any system absolving itself from good-will toward all creatures and making it a duty to secure their misery would be disloyal to reason, humanity, and justice. Happiness is the only sanction of life; where it fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. What happiness shall consist in can only be determined by reference to natural demands and capacities; natural disposition is the principle of preference and makes morality and happiness possible. The polemic of certain moralists against pleasure and for pain is intelligible when we remember their chief interest is edification, and that ability to resist pleasure and pain alike is valuable in a world where action and renunciation are the twin keys to happiness. But denying pleasure is a good and pain an evil is grotesque affectation. A man who without necessity deprived any person of a pleasure or imposed a pain would be a contemptible knave; the injured person would be first to declare it, nor could the highest celestial tribunal, if just, reverse that sentence. It suffices that one being, however weak, loves or abhors anything, however slightly, for that thing to acquire a proportionate value no chorus of contradiction can wholly abolish. An experience good or bad in itself remains so for ever; its inclusion in a more general order changes that totality proportionately to the ingredient absorbed. The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things equal, the more beneficent its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper.
Main Arguments
The book’s central claim, announced in its opening essay and elaborated throughout, is that value is not a property of things independent of human feeling but arises from the relation between the world and the mind that cares about it. The first essay, “Spirit the Judge,” states the case with unusual directness. Man has a prejudice against himself, regarding anything produced by his mind as unreal or insignificant, satisfied only when fancying himself surrounded by objects and laws independent of his nature. Yet from our despised feelings the great world of perception derives all its value; things are interesting because we care about them, important because we need them. Had perceptions no connexion with pleasures, we should close our eyes on the world; if intelligence served no passion, we should doubt whether two and two make four. The popular sense of the unworthiness of purely emotional things has led those who take moral problems to heart into attempts to discover some external right and beauty of which moral and aesthetic feelings should be perceptions or discoveries, as intellectual activity is a perception of external fact. These philosophers feel that unless moral and aesthetic judgments express objective truth, they stand condemned of hopeless triviality. But a judgment is not trivial because it rests on human feelings; triviality consists in abstraction from human interests, of which knowledge of truth is one but only one. The works of nature first acquire meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
From this foundation the book develops a second argument about reason. Reason is not a faculty that stands above impulse and judges it from outside; it is a form given to impulse, a better form given to force, as life is a better form given to matter. The essay on the difference reason makes contrasts the dog, who moves by inspiration with absolute freedom and helplessness, to systematic living, which is an experiment. Rationality depends on distinguishing the excellent, and that distinction is made only by an irrational impulse. The substance remains irrational; rationality is secondary and relative. When definite interests are recognized and values estimated, and action veers in harmony with them, reason is born and a moral world arises. This is not a debunking of reason but a naturalization of it: reason is real, but it is the reason of a living creature with needs and loves, not the reason of a disembodied calculator.
A third argument concerns the relation of body and mind. Animals naturally feel and think; mind relates to body as sense inhabits complex bodies, focussed on preservation and reproduction. Separating them is violent divorce. The body is an instrument, the mind its function; mind is the entelechy of the body. The connexion is natural, not dialectical. Matter cannot become consciousness; mind cannot determine its own march. Nature lives; perception is a private echo. Consciousness is the expression of bodily life, and its place is like art, religion, or science. Thought is a link in the chain of natural events, with antecedents in brain and senses. The world has seemed a bisectible hybrid, half material and half mental, but matter is the pervasive cause of the distribution of mind, and mind the pervasive cause of the discovery and value of matter. Spirit is useless, being the end of things, but not vain.
A fourth argument, developed at length in the essays on religion, holds that religion is essentially imaginative and poetic rather than scientific. The God to whom depth in philosophy brings men back is not the same God from whom a little philosophy estranges them; mature reflection should breed better conceptions than those muddled by tradition and passion. Each religion necessarily contradicts every other and probably itself; the sciences are allies, but religions, like languages, are rivals. A man’s religion is a historical accident like his language. The attempt to have a religion that is no religion in particular is as hopeless as speaking no particular language. Every living religion has a marked idiosyncrasy; its power lies in its special message and the bias it gives to life. Another world to live in is what is meant by having a religion. Religious doctrines should withdraw their pretension to deal with matters of fact, which causes conflicts with science and sects, and impurity of religion. Religion’s proper concern is to express the ideal; its dignity lies in ideal adequacy, like poetry. Its function is to draw from reality materials for an image of the ideal to which reality ought to conform.
A fifth argument, running through the essays on poets and philosophers and culminating in the essays on immortality, concerns the eternity that belongs to things not in duration but in status. Nothing is eternal in duration; the tide of evolution carries everything before it—thoughts, bodies, persons, nations. Yet all things are eternal in their status, as truth is. The place an event fills in history is inalienable; the character an act or feeling possesses in passing is inalienable. The human mind is not merely animal, absorbed in felt transition; it is partly synthetic, intellectual, contemplative, able to see fleeting things in mutual relations—or, as Spinoza expressed it, under the form of eternity. To see things under the form of eternity is to see them in their historic and moral truth, not as they seemed in passing but as they remain when over. When a man’s life is over, it remains true that he has lived and been one sort of man, not another. In the infinite mosaic of history that bit has its unfading colour and perpetual function. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality eternally belonging to him and knows he cannot wholly die even if he would; when his life’s movement is over, the truth of his life remains.
A sixth argument, developed in the essays on morals and on false moral perspectives, concerns the way values are assigned. Sea-sickness, child-birth, the pangs of despised love, and the travail of sin all melt away once over. Merely remembered pleasures count for nothing when gone; the memory of them cannot cure melancholy or reconcile one to foul weather. An ode of Horace, a scientific monograph, or a well-written page of music is a better antidote to melancholy than thinking on all the happiness one’s life or the universe may have contained. There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world. Utilitarians have attempted to show that conscience commends actions securing general happiness and that notions of justice and virtue vary with social economy. The book admits that precepts of obligatory morality bear this relation to general welfare—virtue means courage in a soldier, probity in a merchant, chastity in a woman. But turning from required morality to the perfect and ideal type, we find no such correspondence. The selfish imagination attributes an absolute and irrational value to figures that entertain it with absorbing emotions. The character of Christ, held up as a perfect model, is not that of a benefactor but of a martyr, a spirit from a higher world lacerated in its passage through this uncomprehending existence, healing and forgiving out of sheer compassion, sustained by inner affinities to the supernatural, and disenchanted with all earthly or political goods. The great figures of art or religion, together with all historic and imaginative ideals, advance insensibly on the values they represent. The image has more lustre than the original and is often the more important fact. Things are called great because they are memorable, not remembered because they were great.
Key Concepts
Several concepts recur throughout the book and give it its distinctive vocabulary. The first is the idea of spirit as judge—the notion that the mind is not a passive receiver of a world already furnished with value, but the source of all the interest and importance the world possesses for us. This is not subjectivism in any crude sense; it is the claim that value is relational, arising from the commerce between a living creature and its environment, and that the attempt to locate value in things apart from that commerce is a philosophical mistake with real consequences for how we live.
The second is the concept of reason as a form given to impulse. Reason is not opposed to passion; it is the organization of passion, the discovery of a coherent way of living among the things we care about. The primacy of impulses, irrational but expressive of bodily functions, appears in animals and in dreams, obsessions, and primary passions that lay bare human nature’s obscure groundwork. In love, a cause unknown to the sufferer—the spring-flood of hereditary instincts—checks the young man’s gaiety, dispels curiosity, arrests breath; he finds its cause only in another being’s presence or image. If strong, no previous interest or duty is remembered; if lasting, the whole life may be reorganized, imposing new habits, manners, and religion. This madness inspires method; the man has something to live for, and the blind affinity, like a magnet, suffuses faculties with spiritual light. This illustrates the life of reason—unity given to existence by a mind in love with the good.
The third is the concept of the self as a cycle of vegetative processes with a general direction. What we call ourselves is not a simple spiritual atom but a developing pattern, full of potentiality and impotence. A will in harmony with active forces may profess to be almighty; the sphere of the self’s power is what happens well. A man lucky at dice prides himself. A will never thwarted would think itself omnipotent. The self, in this account, is real but not sovereign; it is one of the things that happens in nature, and its freedom is the freedom of a well-functioning part within a whole it did not create.
The fourth is the concept of the ideal society as a drama in imagination, with mythical personages beginning with the “I.” A man’s notion of himself is a figment in discourse. The more reflective a man, the more his experience is absorbed in his perennial “I.” The egoist peoples the desert with mythical counterparts. Interest in one’s social figure is partly material, but imagination refines upon worldly interest. Nothing better proves self-consciousness’s mythical character than sensitiveness to alien opinions. The least breath of censure lashes self-esteem. Passions grafted on wounded pride are most inveterate. We crave support in vanity as in religion.
The fifth is the concept of the two cities—the City of God and the City of Satan—as the framework within which Christian history understands itself. The City of Satan, whatever its artifices in art, war, or philosophy, was essentially corrupt and impious; its joy was but a comic mask and its beauty the whitening of a sepulchre. It stood condemned before God and before man’s better conscience by its vanity, cruelty, and secret misery. Lost within this Babylon, or visible only in its obscure and forgotten purlieus, lived on at the same time the City of God, the society of all the souls God predestined to salvation. All history was henceforth essentially nothing but the conflict between these two cities: two moralities, one natural, the other supernatural; two philosophies, one rational, the other revealed; two beauties, one corporeal, the other spiritual; two glories, one temporal, the other eternal; two institutions, one the world, the other the church.
The sixth is the concept of piety—man’s reverent attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of his life by that attachment. A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world. To live associated with permanent racial interests we must plant ourselves on a broad historic and human foundation, absorbing and interpreting the past which made us, handing down its heritage reinforced, not undermined or denaturalized. This consciousness that the human spirit is derived and responsible, its functions heritages and trusts, involves gratitude and duty called piety. Piety esteems things apart from intrinsic worth, on account of their relation to the agent’s person and fortune; such esteem is rational, since partiality in affections and allegiance is justified by the partial nature and local status of life. Piety is the spirit’s acknowledgment of its incarnation.
The seventh is the concept of ideal immortality—the eternity that belongs to things in their status rather than their duration. This takes several forms in the book. There is the Epicurean consolation that though delight was brief and uncertain, the past was safe and the present sure; Horace lives happy and master of himself who can say daily, “I have lived.” There is the immortality of contemplation, in which the mind absorbed in timeless objects becomes, so far as its own deliverance goes, a timeless existence. There is the immortality of influence, in which a man who realizes the ideal helps others live nobly and vanquishes time by his rationality. And there is the final, most comprehensive sense: the fact of a man’s life remains forever part of the infinite context of facts, and the man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality eternally belonging to him.
Themes
The deepest theme of the book is the relation between the natural and the ideal—between the world as it is given to sense and science, and the world as it is constituted by human aspiration. Santayana refuses both of the easy resolutions. He will not say that the ideal is merely a projection, a comforting fiction with no purchase on reality; nor will he say that the ideal is a realm of being independent of human life, to which our moral and aesthetic judgments are more or less adequate perceptions. Instead he holds that the ideal arises from nature—from the needs and loves of living creatures—and that it is nonetheless real, with a reality that belongs to it as the expression of what those creatures are and seek. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of superstition; men become superstitious not from too much imagination but from unawareness of having any. Religion’s errors deserve indulgent sympathy as efforts to interpret experience for moral ends. The best part of human life consists in the gift of creation and government attributed to God as highest ideal. Not to see this is to leave human nature half unread.
A second theme is the imaginative character of religion and the consequent necessity of distinguishing its proper function from the claims of science. Religions and philosophies are judged by truth, which is seldom their strong point, though the criterion is not unjust since they aspire to truth. Belief belongs to science; myths are conceived and understood, not believed. When religions are dead or remote, they manifest their virtues to the unbeliever as expressions of human genius—true to the eye and spirit that fashioned them. Their errors no longer threaten, and they acquire beauty invisible to their authors. They are a kind of poetry half believed because it intervened in life. Religious doctrines should withdraw their pretension to deal with matters of fact, which causes conflicts with science and sects, and impurity of religion. Religion’s proper concern is to express the ideal; its dignity lies in ideal adequacy, like poetry. Its function is to draw from reality materials for an image of the ideal to which reality ought to conform.
A third theme is the historical drama of Christianity and its aftermath. The book treats the Christian centuries not as a simple triumph of faith but as a long and complicated conflict between two irreconcilable principles—the world and the spirit—in which the world is never fully converted and the spirit is never fully victorious. The Renaissance and the Revolution are not past events but living programmes, incomplete attempts to restore pagan standards in polite learning, philosophy, sentiment, and morals. Protestantism is presented as the exact opposite of the gospel: convinced of success and prosperity, abominating the disreputable, viewing contemplation as idleness, solitude as selfishness, poverty as dishonourable punishment; constrained and punctilious in righteousness, regarding married and industrious life as typically godly. Its Evangelicalism lacks the gospel’s disillusion, humility, and speculative detachment; its benevolence is optimistic, aiming at conventional well-being, missing Christian charity’s inner appeal, which begins by renunciation and looks to spiritual freedom and peace. The patristic systems, weak in foundations, were extraordinarily wise and comprehensive in working out; while they inverted life they preserved it. Dogma added fabulous perspectives and innumerable incidents and powers, giving a new dimension to experience. The old world remained standing in its strange setting, like the Pantheon in modern Rome.
A fourth theme is the nature of knowledge and its limits—particularly our knowledge of other minds. Insight into another mind extends only to the limits of similar structure and common occupation. The distortion of insight begins very near home, starting with constitutional divergence and deteriorating into false imputations and absurd myths. It is hard to understand the minds of children unless one retains unusual plasticity and capacity to play. Men and women do not really understand each other; what rules between them is not sympathy but habitual trust, idealization, or satire. Foreigners’ minds are pure enigmas, and those attributed to animals are a grotesque compound of Aesop and physiology. In religion, the ineptitude of feelings attributed to nature or the gods is egregious; a sober critic can look to such fables only for a pathetic expression of human sentiment and need. Language is described as an artificial means of establishing unanimity and transferring thought; every symbol or phrase throws the observer into an attitude to which a certain idea corresponded in the speaker. Language, like all art, becomes pale with years; words and figures of speech lose their contagious and suggestive power. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
A fifth theme is the relation between the great figures of art and religion and the values they represent. The image has more lustre than the original and is often the more important fact. Things are called great because they are memorable, not remembered because they were great. Fortunate was Achilles that Homer sang of him, and fortunate the poets who make a public titillation out of their sorrows. The favours of memory are extended to feeble realities and denied to the massive substance of daily experience. When life dies and what was present becomes a memory, its ghost flits among the living, feared or worshipped not for the experience it once possessed but for the aspect it now wears. This injustice in representation, speculatively offensive, is practically excusable; it is right and useful that all things should be valued at each moment only by their present function and utility.
A sixth theme, closely related, is the nature of fame and its relation to genuine worth. The highest form of vanity is the love of fame, a passion easy to mock but hard to understand and nearly impossible to eradicate in imaginative people. Posthumous fame has no practical effect on one’s fortunes, and its direct object—a name surviving without an adequate idea of its original—seems a thin satisfaction. Yet beneath this desire for nominal longevity may lurk an ideal ambition.
