About the Work
Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy is a collection of five essays by George Santayana, published under the auspices of The Royal Society of Literature and printed in Great Britain. The essays gathered here are “Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense,” a paper read before the Royal Society of Literature for the tercentenary of John Locke’s birth and accompanied by supplementary notes; “Fifty Years of British Idealism,” which takes as its occasion the republication of F. H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies; “Revolutions in Science,” a set of comments on the theory of relativity and the new physics; “A Long Way Round to Nirvana,” which develops a suggestion drawn from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle; and “The Prestige of the Infinite,” a review of Julien Benda’s Sketch of a Consistent Theory of the Relations between God and the World. In his acknowledgments Santayana thanks the editors of The New Adelphi, The Dial, and the Journal of Philosophy, where several of these pieces first appeared. The volume belongs to the early 1930s and reflects a philosopher in late career turning a sceptical, historically informed eye on the intellectual fashions of his moment—British empiricism and idealism, the new physics, psychoanalysis, and the mathematical theology of a French man of letters.
“A good portrait of Locke would require an elaborate background.”
Context
The book sits at a particular crossroads in twentieth-century thought. Its first essay was written for a public commemoration of Locke, and Santayana uses that occasion to take the measure of the whole tradition of modern philosophy that descends from Locke—the tradition of common sense, of psychology conceived as the analysis of ideas, of liberal and moderate opinion in religion and politics. The second essay engages the school of British Idealism at the moment when its founding text, Bradley’s Ethical Studies, was being reissued in a revised second edition from the Clarendon Press at Oxford. The third essay responds to the upheaval in physics that had followed the theory of relativity, at a time when, as Santayana puts it, science had gained expertness but lost authority, and inventors could no longer explain what they had learned of nature’s depths. The fourth essay takes up Freud’s speculative biology of the instincts, treating it as a new myth about life and death. The fifth reviews a contemporary French argument that the world, precisely because it is complex and determinate, is impious, and that only the infinite deserves a philosopher’s allegiance. Together the essays register the intellectual weather of the period: the prestige of science and its new uncertainties, the decline of idealist metaphysics, the rise of psychoanalysis, and the recurring temptation of philosophers to measure the world against something beyond it.
Structure of the Book
The volume is a collection of five essays, each relatively self-contained but arranged so that they speak to one another. The opening essay, on Locke, is the longest and most historical; it reconstructs Locke’s intellectual temperament, his debts to common sense and to the new science, and the momentous shift in the meaning of the word “idea” that turned psychology into the study of private mental states. Supplementary notes attached to this essay carry the argument further, particularly on the mind–body relation and on Berkeley’s system and its fate. The second essay turns from Locke to the idealists who inherited and transformed the empiricist legacy, examining Bradley’s ethical thought and its quarrel with utilitarianism. The third essay shifts ground entirely to the natural sciences, tracing the revolution in physics from the older, home-like cosmology of common perception to the relativistic treatment of space, time, and light. The fourth essay moves to the philosophy of life, following Freud’s broadening of libido into a general principle of attraction in matter and his conclusion that the goal of all life is death. The fifth and final essay examines Benda’s theology of the infinite, in which the determinate world is judged unholy and God, defined as infinite Being, cannot be its creator. The book thus moves from the foundations of modern philosophy, through its idealist and scientific developments, to two contemporary attempts—psychoanalytic and metaphysical—to say what life and the world ultimately come to.
Inside the Book
The Volume and Its Occasion
The book opens as a collection of five essays, published in 1933 under the auspices of the Royal Society of Literature and printed in Great Britain. The first, “Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense,” was read before the Society for the tercentenary of Locke’s birth and is accompanied by supplementary notes. It is followed by “Fifty Years of British Idealism,” reflections prompted by the republication of Bradley’s Ethical Studies; “Revolutions in Science,” comments on relativity and the new physics; “A Long Way Round to Nirvana,” which develops a suggestion from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle; and “The Prestige of the Infinite,” a review of Julien Benda’s sketch of a consistent theory of the relations between God and the world. The author thanks the editors of The New Adelphi, The Dial, and the Journal of Philosophy, where several of the essays first appeared.
The Portrait of Locke
Santayana begins by imagining how a proper portrait of Locke would have to be painted. Not a statuesque figure set in a void, but a scene in the manner of the Dutch masters: a sunny interior furnished with the implements of domestic comfort and philosophic enquiry. The Holy Bible lies open before him; beside it rests a terrestrial globe; his hand perhaps points to a microscope set for examining the internal constitution of a beetle, while his eye wanders through the window to the market-place, where thrift and liberty are on display, and then to carved ships bound for the Indies or savage America. Locke had travelled, knew many nations and the false religions lodged on this round earth—itself only a speck in the universe—had read ingenious authors, tested philosophical instruments, and understood and prized Newton’s recent discoveries. Yet a certain uneasiness in his frame and a knitting of his brows suggest that his thoughts might come to a stand. The visible scene did not exhaust his problem, for there was also “the scene of ideas,” immaterial and private, often more crowded than the public scene. Locke was the father of modern psychology, and the birth of this airy monster, this half-natural changeling, was not altogether easy or fortunate.
Locke as the Voice of His Age
Santayana wishes his erudition allowed him to trace home the sources of Locke’s opinions and their immense influence, but he can consider him only as a pure philosopher—for had Locke’s mind been more profound, it might have been less influential. Locke sympathized with the coming age and guided it: an age confiding in easy, eloquent reasoning, proposing to be saved in this world and the next with as little philosophy and religion as possible. He played in the eighteenth century much the part that fell to Kant in the nineteenth; when quarrelled with no less than when embraced, his opinions became a point of departure for universal developments. He is called the father of psychology, of the criticism of knowledge, of theoretical liberalism, and the god-father at least of the American political system, of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedia; at home he stands as the ancestor of that school of polite moderate opinion which united liberal Christianity with mechanical science and psychological idealism. He was rooted in prudential morality, rationalised Protestantism, and respect for liberty and law, and was convinced “that the handsome conveniences of life are better than nasty penury.” Locke still speaks through many a modern mind when most sincere; two hundred years before Queen Victoria he was a Victorian in essence.
The Denial of Presuppositions
A chief element in Locke’s modernness was a tendency, common in religion but hardly before in pure philosophy, to deny one’s own presuppositions—not inadvertently but proudly and triumphantly. Presuppositions are imposed by life itself, such as that life is to continue and is worth living; belief is born on the wing and awakes to tacit commitments. In reflection we may wonder at finding these presuppositions on our hands and, ignorant of the natural causes imposing them on the animal mind, be offended, condemning them and assuming that the analysis undermining them is justified and fruitful. But this critical assurance itself relies on a dubious presupposition: that human opinion must always evolve in a single line, dialectically, providentially, irresistibly. It is at least conceivable that the opposite should sometimes be the case: some primitive presuppositions of human reason might have been correct and inevitable, while the tendency to deny them sprang from a plausible misunderstanding or exaggeration of a half-truth, so that the critical opinion itself, after destroying the spontaneous assumptions on which it rested, might be incapable of subsisting.
The Plain Historical Method
In Locke the central presuppositions, embraced heartily and without question, were those of common sense. He adopted a plain, historical method, fit to be brought into well-bred company and polite conversation. Men, barely by the use of their natural faculties, might attain all knowledge possible or worth having. All children born into this world, being surrounded with bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them, have a variety of ideas imprinted on their minds. External material things as objects of sensation, and the operations of our own minds as objects of reflection, are, Locke says, the only originals from which all our ideas take their beginnings. Every act of sensation, duly considered, gives us an equal view of both parts of nature, the corporeal and the spiritual; for whilst I know by seeing or hearing that there is some corporeal being without me, the object of that sensation, I do more certainly know that there is some spiritual being within me that sees and hears. Resting on these clear perceptions, Locke’s natural philosophy falls into two parts: one strictly physical and scientific, the other critical and psychological. On the composition of matter he accepted the most advanced theory of his day—which happened to be very old—the theory of atomism.
Ideas as the Only Certain Knowledge
Locke’s characteristic simplicity and intensity allowed him to retain insulated sympathies across various quarters. A further instance of his many-sidedness was his fidelity to pure intuition and his respect for the infallible revelation of ideal being, such as we have of sensible qualities or mathematical relations. Although dreams and hallucinations may deceive us and objects we think we see may not exist, Locke holds that in suffering an illusion we must entertain an idea, and the manifest character of these ideas is that of which alone we can have certain knowledge. He distinguishes perceiving and knowing the idea of white or black from examining what particles and arrangements make an object appear white or black; and he asserts that a man infallibly knows, as soon as he has them in mind, that the ideas he calls white and round are the very ideas they are, and not other ideas called red or square—the mind always perceives this at first sight, and any doubt concerns names, not ideas themselves.
Imagination and the Claims of Truth
This sounds like high Platonic doctrine for a philosopher of the Left, but Locke’s utilitarian temper soon reasserted itself. Mathematical ideas were not only lucid but true, and Locke demanded this truth, which he called reality, of all ideas worthy of consideration; mere ideas would be worthless. He likely forgot, in his philosophic puritanism, that fiction and music might have an intrinsic charm. Spinoza is cited as indicating where the frontier of human wisdom should be drawn: if the mind, keeping non-existent things present to imagination, were aware those things did not exist, it would regard this gift of imagination as a virtue in its own constitution, not a vice, especially if such imaginative faculty depended on nothing except the mind’s own nature—that is, if this mental faculty of imagination were free. But Locke had not so firm a hold on truth that he could afford to play with fancy; as he pushed the claims of human jurisdiction too far in physics by assuming current science literally true, so in the realm of imagination he retrenched somewhat illiberally our legitimate possessions. It is strange that as modern philosophy transfers the visible wealth of nature more and more to the mind, the mind should seem to lose courage and become ashamed of its own fertility. The hard-pressed natural man will not indulge his imagination unless it poses for truth; being half aware of this imposition, he is more troubled at the thought of being deceived than at the fact of being mechanised or bored, and would wish to escape imagination altogether, murmuring that a good God could not have made us poets against our will.
The Momentous Shift in Psychology
Against his will, however, Locke was drawn to enlarge the subjective sphere. The actual existence of mind was evident: one had only to notice the fact that one was thinking. Conscious mind, known to exist directly and independently of the body, was a primary constituent of reality—a fact on its own account. Common sense seemed to testify to this, not only when confronted with Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am,” but whenever a thought produced an action. Since mind and body interacted, each must be as real as the other and on the same plane of being. Locke, like a good Protestant, felt the right of the conscious inner man to assert himself; and when he looked into his own mind, he found nothing to define this mind except the ideas which occupied it. The existence he was so sure of in himself was therefore the existence of his ideas. Here, by an insensible shift in the meaning of the word “idea,” a momentous revolution had taken place in psychology. Ideas had originally meant objective terms distinguished in thought—images, qualities, concepts, propositions. But now ideas began to mean living thoughts, moments or states of consciousness. They became atoms of mind, constituents of experience, much as material atoms were conceived to be constituents of natural objects. Sensations became the only objects of sensation, and ideas the only objects of ideas; so that the material world was rendered superfluous, and the only scientific problem was now to construct a universe in terms of analytic psychology. Locke himself did not go so far, and continued to assign physical causes and physical objects to some at least of his mental units; indeed sensations and ideas could not very well have other than physical causes, the existence of which this new psychology was soon to deny, so that about the origin of its data it was afterwards compelled to preserve a discreet silence. But as to their combinations and reappearances, it was able to invoke the principle of association: a thread on which many shrewd observations may be strung, but which also, when pressed, appears to be nothing but a verbal mask for organic habits in matter.
Two Sorts of Unobjectionable Psychology
There are two sorts of unobjectionable psychology, neither of which describes a mechanism of disembodied mental states, such as the followers of Locke developed into modern idealism, to the confusion of common sense. One unobjectionable sort is biological, studying life from the outside. The other relies on memory and dramatic imagination, reproduces life from the inside, and is literary. If the literary psychologist is a man of genius, by the clearness and range of his memory, by quickness of sympathy and power of suggestion, he may come very near to the truth of experience as it has been or might be unrolled in a human being. The ideas with which Locke operates are simply high lights picked out by attention in this nebulous continuum, and identified by names. Ideas, in the original ideal sense of the word, are indeed the only definite terms which attention can discriminate and rest upon.
Locke’s Polemic Against Descartes
Locke’s polemic against Descartes was tireless and very characteristic. He defended outraged plain facts against sweeping and arbitrary theories. Three specific protests stand out: there are no innate ideas or maxims—children are not born murmuring that things equal to the same thing are equal to one another, and an urchin knows pain comes from the paternal slipper before reflecting that everything must have a cause; extension is not the essence of matter, which must also be solid to be distinguished from empty space; and thinking is not the essence of the soul, since a man might lose consciousness without dying—something a definition framed by a French philosopher could not prevent. These protests are evidently justified by common sense, yet they miss the speculative radicalism and depth of Cartesian doctrines, which struck the keynotes of all modern philosophy and science by assuming, for the first time in history, the transcendental point of view. Locke could not do justice to this novelty; Descartes himself ignored his subjective first principles in developing his system; only when adopted by Kant, or rather by Fichte, did the transcendental method show its true colours. Even today philosophers fumble with it, patching soliloquy with physics and physics with soliloquy. Locke’s misunderstandings were partly justified by Descartes’s verbal concessions to tradition and authority—an aristocratic man, courteous and disdainful, may conform to usage in language and sentiment without taking either seriously.
Reinterpreting the Cartesian Doctrines
The innate ideas are reinterpreted as categories employed unwittingly, like grammar followed without awareness. As to extension being the essence of matter: since matter is substance, it would always be more than its essence—a sort of ether whose parts might move with calculable dynamic values. This definition cleared the decks for scientific calculation by removing the moral density and moral magic with which Socratic philosophy had encumbered nature. Modern physics realises Descartes’s ideal, tracing a mathematical dynamism sufficient for exact prevision and mechanical art. Saying the soul’s essence is to think detached consciousness from organic or invented mental mechanisms—an immense clarification—but this pure consciousness was not a soul, not the animal psyche or principle of organisation, life, and passion, which Descartes held to be material. Calling such a material principle “soul” would have shocked Christian conceptions; had Descartes abstained, he need not have made consciousness intermittent. He was driven to say the soul never stops thinking by desire to placate orthodox opinion, attributing to consciousness a substantial independence and directive physical force incongruous with it but congruous with the Platonic soul—a mythological being, supernatural spirit or daemon or incubus, incarnate in nature and partly dominating it. Such questions became matters for theology or a moralistic theory of the universe, remote from the modern mind, yet neither Locke nor Descartes could clear their fresh conceptions altogether from those ancient dreams.
Locke on Matter, Experience, and the Soul
Locke’s position on matter was pictorially that of ordinary atomism, scientifically that of Newton’s physics. On the other two points his convictions were implicit rather than speculative; he resisted Cartesian theories without much developing his own, natural in a critic proving our faculties were not intended for speculation. All knowledge came from experience; no man could know the savour of a pineapple without tasting it. Yet this savour did not reside first in the pineapple but was generated in the process of gustation, or in the mind on occasion of that process. Thus for secondary qualities and moral values, the terms of knowledge came not from objects but from an innate sensibility proper to body or mind. Experience—the lifelong train of ideas making a man’s moral being—was not a source of knowledge but knowledge or illusion itself, produced by organs with native sensibility in contact with stimuli. This would not contradict but exactly express the doctrine of innate categories. As to the soul, which might exist without thinking, Locke still called it an immaterial substance—not so immaterial as not to be conveyed bodily with him in his coach from London to Oxford. Like Hobbes, Locke believed in English clarifying the intellect, yet here ignored Hobbes’s advice to turn the befuddling Latin phrase into plain English: substance meant body, immaterial meant bodiless, therefore immaterial substance meant bodiless body. Substance had not meant body for Aristotle or the Schoolmen, but who now cared? Locke scornfully refused to consider what a substantial form signified; in maintaining he had a soul and calling it spiritual substance, he probably protested that there was something living and watchful within his breast, the invisible moral agent in all his thoughts and actions. It was he that had them and did them; this self was far from a merely logical impersonal subject, an “I think” presupposed in all thought—for what would this “I think” become when not thinking? It mattered little what the substance of a thinking being might be: God might have endowed the body with the faculty of thinking and generating ideas on certain impacts. Yet a man was a man for all that; Locke was satisfied he knew, well enough for an honest Englishman, what he was. He was what he felt himself to be: this inner man was not merely the living self throbbing in his heart; it was all his moral past, all he remembered having been. If from moment to moment the self was a spiritual energy astir within, in retrospect the living present extended its tentacles and communicated its subjectivity to his whole personal past. The limits of his personality were those of his memory, and his experience included everything his living mind could appropriate and re-live. In a word, he was his idea of himself: this insight opens a new chapter in his philosophy and in the history of human self-estimation.
Mind, Body, and the Nature of Interaction
The ostensible interaction between mind and body is reconsidered. There are no purely mental ideas or intentions followed by material effects, nor material events followed by purely mental sensations or ideas. Mental events are always elements within total natural events that also contain material elements; these material elements form the organ, the stimulus, and probably the object of mental sensations or ideas. The physical strand alone is continuous and traceable, whereas the conscious strand flares up and dies down daily or hourly, and its immediate features—images, words, moods—juxtapose China and Peru, past and future, irresponsibly. Yet in human life, conscious elements—intentions, affections, plans, reasonings—explain the course of action. Dispersed in time, dominant thoughts contain the reason for continuous behaviour and seem to guide it. They are not minute consecutive causes; an idea or act of will often takes time to work and works posthumously. Rather they are general overarching moral inspirations and resolves, which the body’s machinery executes in its own way, often making thoughts more precise or transforming them. We roughly do what we meant, barring accidents. Reasons lie deep in our compound nature, probably inarticulate; action fragmentarily betrays moral disposition—betrays in both senses: revealing it unawares and disappointing it. The reader is left to decide whether this cohabitation should be called interaction or rather sympathetic concomitance, self-annotation, and partial prophetic awakening to a life led automatically.
Berkeley, Common Sense, and the Material World
Berkeley and his followers sometimes claim common sense is on their side, that they merely analyse experience of the material world, and that any paradox in their idealism is verbal and disappears with familiarity. They say all reality, force, obduracy, and fertility of nature subsist undiminished once we discover this reality resides only in the fixed order of our experience. This is rejected: analysis of immediate experience never discloses any fixed order; without materialistic interpretation, the surface of experience is an inextricable dream. Berkeley and his followers, looking toward nature and the rationale of experience and science, look away from their own system and rely on human nature’s automatic propensity to routine—so we prepare to repeat actions, not experience, and anticipate their occasions, biased by dominant rhythms of the psyche to assume a future not so much similar to the past as better. Developed, this becomes trust in natural or divine laws; but it is contrary to common sense to expect such laws to operate apart from matter and material continuity of external occasions. This appears in trust in persons—a radical animal propensity—consonant with common sense when persons are living bodies, but superstitious or highly speculative when they are disembodied spirits.
The Fate of Berkeley’s System
It is a pity Berkeley’s beautiful system appeared in an unspiritual age, when religion was mundane and perfunctory and free spirit was romantic and wilful. The system was essentially religious: it put spirit face to face with God everywhere, always, turning experience into a divine language for monition and expression of the inner man. In spiritual hands it might have dispelled natural illusions and affections and disinfected spirit of worldliness and egotism. But Berkeley and his followers had no such thought; they wished to substitute a social for a material world, because a merely social world might make worldly interests loom larger and induce mankind, against the senses and the still small voice, to live as if worldly interests were absolute and must dominate spirit. Morally the system sanctioned human servitude to material things that ancient materialists would have scorned; theoretically it did not escape the dogmatic commitments of common sense it protested against. Far from withdrawing into private spirit, it professed to describe universal experience and the evolution of all human ideas. This notion of experience originally presupposed a natural agent or subject to endure it and profit by learning better harmony with external circumstances. Each agent might become an object of experience; all formed part of a material world they might envisage in common. Criticism repudiating this common material medium is secondary and partial: it continues operating with all the assumptions of common sense save the one expressly criticised. So repudiating the material world, this philosophy retains various agents or subjects gathering experience; we are not expected to doubt there are as many streams of experience without a world as there were people when the world existed. But the number and nature of these experiences become undiscoverable, material persons having been removed who were placed to gather easily imagined experiences and communicate them; the very notion of experience is emptied of meaning when no external common world imposes the same experience on everybody. It was not knowledge of existing experiences in vacuo that led common sense to assume a material world, but knowledge of an existing material world led it to assume existing, regularly reproducible experiences. Thus the whole social convention posited by empirical idealism is borrowed without leave and rests on the belief in nature for which it is substituted.
Experience and the Limits of Science
Experience cannot be an object of science: it is essentially invisible, immeasurable, fugitive, private. Although it may be shared or repeated, evidence for repetition or unanimity cannot be found by comparing a present experience with another by hypothesis absent. Both the absent experience and its agreement with the present must be imagined freely and credited instinctively, in view of known circumstances in which the absent experience is conceived to have occurred. The only instrument for conceiving experience at large is private imagination; such imagination cannot be tested, though it may be guided and recast by fresh observations or reports concerning the action and language of other people.
The Idealist’s Quarrel with Utilitarianism
The discussion turns to why an idealist like Bradley should bother with ethical studies at all, given that his moral judgments dissolve in prospect. Since every phase of life was equally necessary to enrich an infinite consciousness that must know both good and evil in order to merge and transcend them, Bradley could hardly feel intense enthusiasm for giving a different complexion to human lives. His moral passion, caustic and burning clear, was purely intellectual: it was shame that in England the moral consciousness should have been expressed in systems dialectically as primitive as those of the positivists and utilitarians. He acknowledged, somewhat superciliously, that their hearts were in the right place; yet if ethics is to exist, were not their thoughts also in the right place? They were concerned not with analysis of the moral consciousness but with the conduct of affairs and the reform of institutions. Human wretchedness profoundly moved them; their minds were bent on transforming society so that a man’s station and its duties might cease to be what a decayed feudal organisation and an inhuman industrialism had made of them. They revolted against the miserable condition of the masses and against the miserable consolations offered by official religion or by a philosophy like Bradley’s. The utilitarians were intent on existence and the course of events; they wished to transform institutions to fit human nature better and to educate human nature by those new institutions so it might better realise its latent capacities. These are matters a man may modify by his acts, hence the proper concern of the moralist. Were they much to blame if they neglected to define pleasure or happiness and used catch-words, dialectically vague, to indicate a politically unmistakable direction of effort? Their political action, like their philosophical nomenclature, was revolutionary and relied too much on wayward feelings ignorant of their own causes. Revolution, no less than tradition, is but a casual and clumsy expression of human nature in contact with circumstances; yet pain and pleasure and spontaneous hopes, however foolish, are direct expressions of that contact and speak for the soul, whereas a man’s station and its duties are purely conventional and may altogether misrepresent his native capacities. The protest of human nature against the world and its oppressions is the strong side of every rebellion; it was the moral side of utilitarianism, of the rebellion against irrational morality.
Unfortunately the English reformers were themselves idealists of a sort, entangled in the vehicles of perception, talking about sensations and ideas, pleasures and pains, as if these were the elements of human nature or even of nature at large; only the most meagre and artificial verbal systems can be constructed from such materials. Moreover they spoke much of pleasure and happiness and hardly at all of misery and pain, whereas it would have been wiser and truer to their real inspiration to lay all emphasis on evils to be abated, leaving the good to shape itself in freedom. Suffering is the instant and obvious sign of some outrage done to human nature; without this natural recoil, actual or imminent, no morality would have any sanction and no precept could be imperative. What silliness to command me to pursue pleasure or avoid it, if in any case everything would be well! Save for some shadow of dire repentance looming in the distance, I am deeply free to walk as I will. The choice of pleasure as a principle of morals was particularly unfortunate in the British utilitarians; it lent them an air of frivolity absurdly contrary to their true character. Pleasure might have been a fit word in the mouth of Aristippus, a semi-oriental untouched by the least sense of responsibility, or on the lips of humanists in the eighteenth century, who, however sordid their lives, could still move in imagination to the music of Mozart, in the landscape of Watteau or of Fragonard. But in the land and age of Dickens the moral ideal was not so much pleasure as kindness: this tenderer word better expresses the motive at work and points to the distressing presence of misery in the world, making natural kindness laborious and earnest and turning it into a legislative system.
Bradley’s hostility to pleasure was not fanatical: one’s station and its duties might have their agreeable side. He tells us it is probably good for you to have, say, not less than two glasses of wine after dinner; six on ordinary occasions is perhaps too many; but as to three or four, they are neither one way nor the other. If the voluptuary was condemned, it was for the commonplace reason a hedonist too might invoke, that a life of pleasure soon palls and becomes unpleasant. Bradley’s objection to pleasure was merely speculative: he found it too “abstract”. To call a pleasure when actually felt an abstraction is an exquisite absurdity; but pleasure in its absolute essence is certainly simple and indefinable. If instead of enjoying it on the wing, as an earnest of the soul’s momentary harmony, we attempt to arrest and observe it, we find it strangely dumb; we are not informed by it concerning its occasion, nor carried from it by any logical implication to the natural object in which it might be found. A pure hedonist ought therefore to be rather relieved if all images lapsed from his consciousness and he could luxuriate in sheer pleasure, dark and overwhelming. True, such bliss would be rather inhuman, of the sort we rashly assign to the oyster; but why should a radical and intrepid philosopher be ashamed of that? The condition of Bradley’s Absolute—feeling in which all distinctions are transcended and merged—seems to be something of that kind; but there would be a strange irony in attributing this mystical and rapturous ideal to such ponderous worthies as Mill and Spencer, whose minds were nothing if not anxious, perturbed, and instrumental.
Revolutions in Science
The book then turns to a new chapter, opening with a bibliographic citation for F. H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies, second edition revised, published by The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1927. The chapter argues that since the beginning of the twentieth century, science has gained expertness but lost authority. While inventions bombard us, inventors cannot explain what they have learned of nature’s depths; they may chew gum, joke that a fast enough aeroplane would arrive home before starting, or invite us into dark rooms to commune with the departed. This division of labour—inventors working, professors talking—may be practically harmless, since experts may be inarticulate, sceptical, or too busy. Yet skill and understanding are best united. Modern science until lately realised this ideal, being an extension of common perception and common sense, trustworthy like a map or calendar. Geography accompanied travel; Copernican astronomy accompanied circumnavigation; evolution and the historical sciences were continuous with liberal reform. Nature was our home, science our home knowledge. Persuasion comes not from intrinsic clarity but from connection with action or readiness to act—a sense of on-coming fate producing the illusion of perfect knowledge.
This is an illusion, though our contact with things may be real: it is always illusory to suppose our images are the intrinsic qualities of things. The Ptolemaic system was perfectly scientific, based on careful observation and just reasoning, but modelled on the spherical blue dome proper only to an earthly observer, not transferable to a diffuse, centreless, fluid, perhaps infinite universe. When imagination is peopled with such images, modern astronomy becomes more persuasive. Even Einstein, it is suspected, is an imperfect relativist, retaining Euclidean space and absolute time at the bottom of his calculations and recovering them at the end, yet the effort to express nature as it would appear from any station and any sensorium seems enlightening.
Theory and practice in the latest science remain allied but have leapt apart, each becoming unintelligible. We roll and fly at dizzy speeds, hear at incredible distances, imagine and calculate to incredible depths. Technique has become a thing in itself; science often seems less the study of things than the study of science—more scholastic than philosophy ever was. We are invited to conceive organisms within organisms, so minute and dynamic that matter’s heart explodes into endless fireworks. The theatre of science is transformed no less than actors and play: upright walls of space and the steady tread of time bend to our perspectives; we carry them with us. We seem to have reverted from Copernicus to Ptolemy, except the centre is now any geometrical point chosen for calculation. Time is measured by any “clock”—any recurrent rhythm. Each chosen centre’s existence hangs on other centres of force, whose only witness and known property is their “radio-activity,” or physical light. Light is accordingly the measure of all things; it is the only medium revealing remote or minute particles to science.
These reforms come from within, triumphs of method. We advance in logic and parsimony by refusing to assign given terms and relations to any prior medium like absolute time or space. Observable spaces and times are given separately and desultorily. Initially there are as many spaces and times as observers—the specious times and spaces of dreams, sensuous life, romantic biography. Each is centred here and now. When objects and events are posited as self-existent, and a “clock” and co-ordinates established, a single mathematical space and time may be deployed, giving the cosmos of classical physics. But this involves the uncritical notion of light and matter travelling through pre-existing media, carried by flowing time. In reality each “clock” and landscape is self-centred and initially absolute; its time and space are irrelevant to others unless objects or events actually coincide. Only by travelling along its own path at its own rate can experience or light reach a point on another path, so two observations may coincide at their ultimate terms. Positions are not independent of the journey terminating in them; dates are not independent of the events distinguishing them. The flux of existence comes first: matter and light distend time by their pulses, space by their deployments.
This is one half the new theory; the other half is not less acceptable. Newton described motion by two principles: inertia, supposed inherent in bodies, and gravity, incidental to their co-existence. Yet inherent inertia can only be observed relatively; it makes no difference whether I am said to move at great speed or be absolutely at rest, if I am not jolted and my environment does not change. Inertia, as intrinsic, seems another name for substance or the principle of existence; as the first law of motion, it seems relative to an environment. It would be preferable to combine inertia and attraction in a single formula expressing bodies’ behaviour towards one another without inherent forces or absolute measures. This seems done by Einstein, or impressively suggested; the new calculations correspond to certain delicate observations more accurately than the old.
This revolution seems perfectly legal and ought to be welcomed, but only under one moral condition and with a paradoxical result. The moral condition is that science’s pride should turn to humility, no longer imagining it lays bare the intrinsic nature of things. The paradoxical result is that the forms of science are optional, like languages or notations. One may be more convenient according to place, senses, interests, and scope of the explorer; a reform may render old theories antiquated, like wearing togas or going naked, but cannot render them false or itself true. Science, when more than gossip, yields practical assurances in symbolic terms but no ultimate insight—so the expert’s intellectual vacancy is explained and, in a measure, justified.
Death as the Goal of Life
The next chapter opens by calling it a truism that the end of life is death, since no conceivable immortality would abolish death; at best it would weave life and death into a more comprehensive destiny. If the Creator composed his work like a dramatic poet, death would be the cue ending each speech and summoning the next personage; if a single supernatural Spirit assumed all characters in endless improvisation, death would be a change of scene or metre, while in a real comedy it would be a change of actors. In either case every voice is silenced sooner or later.
The relapse of created things into nothing is no violent fatality but something naturally smooth and proper. Professor Sigmund Freud is credited with setting this forth in a novel way, broadening his conception of sexual craving or libido into a general principle of attraction or concretion in matter, like the Eros of the ancient poets Hesiod and Empedocles. The windows of the stuffy clinic are thrown open; the troubles of the sick soul, and their cure, flow from the stars.
It is gladdening that Freud resisted representing Love as nature’s only principle, since unity exercises an evil spell over metaphysicians; plurality, trinity, or at least duality is needed to get anywhere. Freud, like Empedocles, introduced a prior principle for Love to play with—not Strife (only an incident in Love) but Inertia, or the tendency towards peace and death. Matter was originally dead and content to be so, still relapsing into equilibrium. The homogeneous, when finite, is unstable; matter, not co-extensive with space, necessarily forms aggregates with an inside and outside, whose parts are differently exposed to external influences. This inequality is the source of all uneasiness, of life, and of love.
A long quotation from Freud follows: an undifferentiated vesicle of sensitive substance, its surface differentiated as an organ for receiving stimuli; the living substance floating in an outer world charged with potent energies, needing protection against stimulation; the sensitive cortical layer lacking protection against excitations from within, chiefly the instincts; the child demanding exact repetition of games and stories; hence an instinct as a tendency in living organic matter impelling it towards reinstatement of an earlier condition—organic elasticity, or inertia in organic life. If all organic instincts are conservative and regressive, all results of organic development must be credited to external disturbing influences; the rudimentary creature would not have wanted to change. It would be counter to instinct if life’s goal were a state never reached; it must be an ancient starting point. The goal of all life is death. Living substance long had death within easy reach until external influences compelled ever greater deviations and more circuitous routes to death—these circuitous ways, retained by conservative instincts, being the phenomena of life.
Freud puts these suggestions modestly, admitting they are vague, uncertain, and mythical in terms, yet they are an admirable counterblast to prevalent follies. Claims of an Élan vital or general impulse toward a single ideal use terms no less vague and mythical, but convey something false to the organic source of life; Freud’s speculations convey truth. Myths and metaphors can be true or false in the sense that, drawn from moral predicaments or literary psychology, they may report the general movement and pertinent issue of material facts, inspiring wise sentiment. Thus Greek mythology was true and Calvinist theology false. Psycho-analysis’s chief terms—”unconscious wishes”, “the pleasure-principle”, “the Oedipus complex”, “Narcissism”, “the censor”—are metaphorical, yet open profound vistas. Freud says the shortcomings of description would disappear if psychological terms could be replaced by physiological or chemical ones, themselves metaphorical but familiar longer and perhaps simpler. All human discourse is metaphorical, perceptions and thoughts being adventitious signs, not copies; yet as the sportsman’s eye traces a bird’s flight well enough to shoot it, so a wise philosopher’s myths may reveal nature’s pertinent movement and kindle true expectations—his own soul being the bird.
Freud’s new myths about life, like his old ones about dreams, enlighten and chasten us about ourselves. The human spirit awakes in trouble, burdened with anxieties about food, pressures, pricks, noises, pains—born, as another wise myth has it, in original sin. Passions and ambitions only complicate this burden. Whence this fatality, and whither? It comes from heredity and leads to propagation. Our ignorance reduces us to silence or wild conjectures about how heredity started. Something—call it matter—must always have existed; some parts, under pressure, got tied into knots like a watch’s mainspring, violently and unhappily, so that when pressure relaxes they fly open and unravel with vast relief. Hence longing to satisfy latent passions, with fugitive pleasure. External agencies never cease operating; every fresh stimulus gives another turn until it snaps, grows flaccid, or is unhinged. External agencies may encrust the primary organ with minor organs. Every impression leaves a trace or seed, a fresh charge tending to repeat the impressed motion. Hence docility in living substance enabling it to learn tricks, remember facts, and imagine new experiences. Every act initiates a habit and may implant an instinct. People late in life are carried away by political or religious contagions or develop strange vices; time weakens primitive passions—we are less greedy, lusty, hopeful, generous. Weakened primitive impulses remain strongest and deepest, so an old man’s zeal is thin compared with youth’s heartiness; a soul with extinct plain passions becomes a hotbed of chance delusions.
Benda and the Infinite
The final chapter opens with M. Julien Benda’s startling claim that the more complex the world becomes and the more it rises above the indeterminate, the farther it is removed from God and the more impious it is. Benda is not led to this by any political or sentimental grudge: not by the late war, the peace of Versailles, the parlous state of the arts, or the decay of morality and prosperity. What disgusts him with the confused world is simply overmastering respect for the infinite. His earlier work, La Trahison des Clercs, in which he upbraided the intellectuals of his time, now appears to consist precisely in coveting a part in this world’s inheritance and forgetting that the inheritance of the Levites is the Lord—which, philosophically interpreted, means a philosopher is bound to measure all things by the infinite.
This infinite is not rhetorical but physico-mathematical. Benda holds that nothing but number seems intelligible to him. Time, space, volume, and complexity stretch in a series of units, positions, or degrees to infinity, as number does; in such homogeneous series, infinite in both directions, there is no fixed point of origin and no predominant scale. Every position is essentially identical with every other; every suggested structure is collapsible and reversible; the position and relations of every unit are indistinguishable from those of every other. In the infinite, the parts have no identity: each number in the scale, as we begin counting from different points of origin, bears also every other number.
This is no mere mathematical puzzle; it has a strange moral eloquence. Seen in their infinite setting, all things lose their central position and dominant emphasis. The contrary of what we first think—for instance that we are alive while they are dead or unborn—is also true. Egotism becomes absurd; pride and shame become the vainest of illusions. If it be repugnant to reason that the series of numbers, moments, positions, and volumes should be limited—and the human spirit has a great affinity to the infinite—then all specific quality and variety in things must be superficial and deeply unreal. They are masks in the carnival of phenomena, to be observed without conviction and secretly dismissed as ironical by those who have laid up their treasure in the infinite.
This mathematical dissolution of particulars is reinforced by more familiar moral considerations. Existence—any specific fact asserting itself in any particular place or moment—is inevitably contingent, arbitrary, gratuitous, and insecure. A sense of insecurity is likely to be the first wedge by which repentance penetrates into the animal heart. If a man did not foresee death and fear it, he might never come to the unnatural thought of renouncing life. He does not often remember death, yet his whole gay world is secretly afraid of being found out, of being foiled in the systematic bluff by which it lives as if its life were immortal; far more than the brave young man fears death in his own person, the whole life of the world fears to be exorcised by self-knowledge and lost in air. With good reason: every fact, every laborious beloved achievement of man or of nature, has come to exist against infinite odds. In the dark grab-bag of Being, this chosen fact was surrounded by innumerable possible variations or contradictions of it; each of those possibilities, happening not to be realised here and now, yet possesses intrinsically exactly the same aptitude or claim to existence. Nor are these claims merely imaginary and practically contemptible. The flux of existence is continually repenting of its choices and giving everything actual the lie, by continually substituting something else, no less specific and no less nugatory. This world, any world, exists only by an unmerited privilege. Its glory is offensive to the spirit, like the self-sufficiency of some obstreperous nobody who happens to have drawn the big prize in a lottery. Benda writes that the world inspires him with a double sentiment: he feels it full of grandeur because it has succeeded in asserting itself and coming to exist, and pitiful when he considers how it hung on a mere nothing that this particular world should never have existed. Though this accidental world, by its manifold beauties and excitements, may arouse romantic enthusiasm, it is fundamentally an unholy world. Its creation, he adds in italics, “is something which reason would wish had never taken place“.
God, defined as infinite Being, cannot be the creator of the world. Such a notion would hopelessly destroy the coherence in thought to which Benda aspires. The infinite cannot be selective; it cannot possess a particular structure nor a particular quality. It cannot exert power or give direction. Nothing can be responsible for the world except the world itself. It has created, or is creating, itself perpetually by its own arbitrary act, by a groundless self-assertion which may be called, somewhat metaphorically, will, or even original sin: the original sin of existence, particularity, selfishness, or separation from God. Existence, being absolutely contingent and ungrounded, is perfectly free; if it ties itself up in its own habits or laws and becomes a terrible nightmare to itself by its automatic monotony, that still is only its own work and, figuratively speaking, its own fault. Nothing save its own arbitrary and needless pressure keeps it going in that round. This fatality is impressive, and popular religion has symbolised it in the person of a deity far more often recognised and worshipped than infinite Being itself.
Main Arguments
Santayana’s central argument across these essays is that modern philosophy, for all its technical advances, has repeatedly mistaken its own abstractions for the intrinsic nature of things, and has paid for that mistake by losing contact with the common world it set out to explain. In the Locke essay he shows how a philosopher of plain, historical method, committed to the testimony of the senses and to the reality of the inner man, inadvertently inaugurated a psychology in which ideas ceased to be objective terms distinguished in thought and became instead atoms of mind, moments of consciousness. Once sensations became the only objects of sensation and ideas the only objects of ideas, the material world was rendered superfluous, and the only remaining scientific problem was to construct a universe out of analytic psychology. Locke himself did not go so far, but his followers did, and the result was a system that could not account for the fixed order of experience without secretly borrowing the material world it had professed to abolish.
The essay on British Idealism argues that Bradley’s moral passion was purely intellectual—a shame that English moral consciousness should have been expressed in systems as dialectically primitive as those of the positivists and utilitarians—and that his own ethical judgments dissolve in prospect, since all phases of life were equally necessary to enrich an infinite consciousness that must know both good and evil in order to merge and transcend them. Against the utilitarians, Santayana grants that their protest of human nature against the world and its oppressions was the strong side of every rebellion, and that suffering is the instant and obvious sign of some outrage done to human nature; but he faults them for speaking of pleasure and happiness rather than misery and pain, and for entangling themselves in the vehicles of perception, talking about sensations and ideas as if these were the elements of human nature.
The essay on science contends that the new physics, for all its triumphs of method, should teach science humility rather than pride. The reforms that replace absolute space and time with self-centred clocks and landscapes, and that combine inertia and attraction in a single formula, are perfectly legal and ought to be welcomed—but only on the moral condition that science no longer imagine it lays bare the intrinsic nature of things. The paradoxical result is that the forms of science become optional, like languages or notations; one may be more convenient according to place, senses, interests, and scope of the explorer, but a reform cannot render an old theory false or a new one true. Science, when more than gossip, yields practical assurances in symbolic terms but no ultimate insight.
The essay on Freud argues that death is the natural and proper end of life, and that Freud’s revised theory of instinct confirms this. Santayana credits Freud with broadening the conception of sexual craving into a general principle of attraction or concretion in matter, like the Eros of the ancient poets, and with resisting the temptation to represent Love as nature’s only principle. By introducing a prior principle for Love to play with—not Strife, which is only an incident in Love, but Inertia, or the tendency towards peace and death—Freud arrives at the conclusion that the goal of all life is death. Santayana finds these suggestions modest, vague, and mythical in terms, yet an admirable counterblast to prevalent follies, because myths and metaphors can be true or false in the sense that they may report the general movement and pertinent issue of material facts.
The final essay examines Benda’s claim that the more complex the world becomes and the more it rises above the indeterminate, the farther it is removed from God and the more impious it is. Santayana stresses that Benda is not led to this by any political or sentimental grudge, but by overmastering respect for the infinite. In the infinite, the parts have no identity; every position is essentially identical with every other, and all specific quality and variety in things must be superficial and deeply unreal. Benda concludes that God, defined as infinite Being, cannot be the creator of the world, and that nothing can be responsible for the world except the world itself, which has created or is creating itself perpetually by its own arbitrary act, by a groundless self-assertion which may be called will, or even original sin.
Key Concepts
Several named ideas and motifs recur through the volume. The most important is the shift in the meaning of “idea” that Santayana identifies in Locke: ideas had originally meant objective terms distinguished in thought—images, qualities, concepts, propositions—but came to mean living thoughts, moments or states of consciousness, atoms of mind, constituents of experience. This is the hinge on which the whole history of modern psychology turns.
Related to this is the notion of the “scene of ideas,” immaterial and private, often more crowded than the public scene, which Santayana uses to characterise Locke’s inner life. The “plain, historical method” is Locke’s own phrase for his procedure, fit to be brought into well-bred company and polite conversation. The “frontiers of common sense” of the essay’s title mark the boundary between what common sense assumes and what criticism can justify.
In the science essay, the key concepts are the “clock” and co-ordinates, the self-centred landscape, the flux of existence that comes first and distends time by its pulses and space by its deployments, and the idea that light is the measure of all things—the only medium revealing remote or minute particles to science. The “specious times and spaces” of dreams, sensuous life, and romantic biography are contrasted with the single mathematical space and time of classical physics.
In the Freud essay, the key concepts are libido, Eros, Inertia, the pleasure-principle, the unconscious wish, the Oedipus complex, Narcissism, and the censor—all of them, Santayana notes, metaphorical terms that nevertheless open profound vistas. The “goal of all life is death” is the central formula. The “circuitous ways” to death, retained by conservative instincts, are the phenomena of life.
In the Benda essay, the key concepts are the infinite, the physico-mathematical series, the dissolution of particulars, the contingency and insecurity of existence, the “unholy” world, and original sin as the self-assertion of existence, particularity, selfishness, or separation from God.
Themes
The deepest theme of the book is the relation between the human spirit and the world it inhabits—whether that world is conceived as the common material world of sense, as the private scene of ideas, as the self-centred landscape of the new physics, as the organic matter of Freud’s biology, or as the determinate and therefore impious world of Benda’s theology. Santayana returns repeatedly to the question of what it means to be at home in nature, and to the various ways philosophy has made that home uninhabitable.
A second theme is the ambiguity of criticism. Locke’s tendency to deny his own presuppositions—not inadvertently but proudly and triumphantly—is presented as a chief element in his modernness, and Santayana suggests that the critical assurance which undermines spontaneous assumptions may itself rest on a dubious presupposition: that human opinion must always evolve in a single line, dialectically, providentially, irresistibly. It is at least conceivable that some primitive presuppositions of human reason were correct and inevitable, while the tendency to deny them sprang from a plausible misunderstanding or exaggeration of a half-truth.
A third theme is the moral eloquence of the infinite. Benda’s mathematical dissolution of particulars is not merely a puzzle; it has a strange moral eloquence, making egotism absurd and pride and shame the vainest of illusions. The sense of insecurity that accompanies any specific fact—its contingency, its gratuitousness, its existence against infinite odds—is presented as the first wedge by which repentance penetrates into the animal heart. The world, though it may arouse romantic enthusiasm by its manifold beauties and excitements, is fundamentally unholy, and its creation is something which reason would wish had never taken place.
A fourth theme is the relation between myth and truth. Santayana insists that myths and metaphors can be true or false in the sense that, drawn from moral predicaments or literary psychology, they may report the general movement and pertinent issue of material facts, inspiring wise sentiment. Greek mythology was true and Calvinist theology false; Freud’s new myths about life, like his old ones about dreams, enlighten and chasten us about ourselves. All human discourse is metaphorical, perceptions and thoughts being adventitious signs, not copies; yet as the sportsman’s eye traces a bird’s flight well enough to shoot it, so a wise philosopher’s myths may reveal nature’s pertinent movement and kindle true expectations—his own soul being the bird.
A fifth theme, running through the Locke essay and the essay on idealism, is the fate of common sense in modern philosophy. Berkeley and his followers sometimes claim that common sense is on their side, that they merely analyse experience of the material world, and that any paradox in their idealism is verbal and disappears with familiarity. Santayana rejects this: analysis of immediate experience never discloses any fixed order; without materialistic interpretation, the surface of experience is an inextricable dream. The whole social convention posited by empirical idealism is borrowed without leave and rests on the belief in nature for which it is substituted.
The Author’s Conclusions
Santayana’s conclusions are dispersed through the essays rather than gathered into a single system, but they cohere around a few convictions. On Locke, he concludes that the philosopher’s simplicity and intensity allowed him to retain insulated sympathies across various quarters, and that his fidelity to pure intuition and his respect for the infallible revelation of ideal being were genuine, even if his utilitarian temper soon reasserted itself. Locke was drawn against his will to enlarge the subjective sphere, and in the insight that a man is his idea of himself—that the limits of his personality are those of his memory, and his experience includes everything his living mind could appropriate and re-live—a new chapter opens in philosophy and in the history of human self-estimation.
On the mind–body relation, Santayana concludes that mental events are always elements within total natural events that also contain material elements, and that the physical strand alone is continuous and traceable, whereas the conscious strand flares up and dies down daily or hourly. Conscious elements—intentions, affections, plans, reasonings—explain the course of action, not as minute consecutive causes but as general overarching moral inspirations and resolves, which the body’s machinery executes in its own way. The reader is left to decide whether this cohabitation should be called interaction or rather sympathetic concomitance, self-annotation, and partial prophetic awakening to a life led automatically.
On science, he concludes that the revolution in physics is legal and welcome, but that it should teach humility rather than pride, and that the forms of science are optional, like languages or notations. On Freud, he concludes that the new myths about life enlighten and chasten us, and that the goal of all life is death—a conclusion he finds truer to the organic source of life than the claims of an élan vital or a general impulse toward a single ideal. On Benda, he concludes that the infinite cannot be selective, cannot possess a particular structure or quality, cannot exert power or give direction, and that nothing can be responsible for the world except the world itself, which creates itself perpetually by a groundless self-assertion. The book ends with the observation that this fatality is impressive, and that popular religion has symbolised it in the person of a deity far more often recognised and worshipped than infinite Being—a deity whose character and claims the final pages go on to examine.
Significance
The book’s significance lies in its demonstration that a philosopher can be at once deeply learned in the history of his subject and unillusioned about its pretensions. Santayana writes as a critic of modern philosophy from within the tradition, using Locke, Berkeley, Bradley, Mill, Spencer, Einstein, Freud, and Benda as occasions for a sustained meditation on what philosophy can and cannot do. His treatment of the shift in the meaning of “idea” remains a classic diagnosis of how empiricism turned into idealism; his account of the new physics as a set of optional notations rather than a revelation of intrinsic nature anticipates later debates about scientific realism; his reading of Freud as a myth-maker whose myths may be true in the sense of reporting the pertinent movement of material facts offers a model for taking psychoanalysis seriously without literalising it; and his engagement with Benda raises, in a particularly sharp form, the question of whether the infinite is a standard by which the world is judged or a temptation from which the world must be defended. For readers interested in the intellectual history of the early twentieth century, the volume is a compact and eloquent record of a philosopher taking the measure of his age—and finding it, on the whole, too confident in its science, too vague in its morals, and too ready to trade the common world for a private scene of ideas.
