The Life of Reason Part 12

The hard sh.e.l.l, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

[Sidenote: Limits of variation. Spirit a heritage.]

Not all readaptation, however, is progress, for ideal ident.i.ty must not be lost. The Latin language did not progress when it pa.s.sed into Italian. It died. Its amiable heirs may console us for its departure, but do not remove the fact that their parent is extinct. So every individual, nation, and religion has its limit of adaptation; so long as the increment it receives is digestible, so long as the organisation already attained is extended and elaborated without being surrendered, growth goes on; but when the foundation itself s.h.i.+fts, when what is gained at the periphery is lost at the centre, the flux appears again and progress is not real. Thus a succession of generations or languages or religions const.i.tutes no progress unless some ideal present at the beginning is transmitted to the end and reaches a better expression there; without this stability at the core no common standard exists and all comparison of value with value must be external and arbitrary.

Retentiveness, we must repeat, is the condition of progress.

The variation human nature is open to is not, then, variation in any direction. There are transformations that would destroy it. So long as it endures it must retain all that const.i.tutes it now, all that it has so far gathered and worked into its substance. The genealogy of progress is like that of man, who can never repudiate a single ancestor. It starts, so to speak, from a single point, free as yet to take any direction. When once, however, evolution has taken a single step, say in the direction of vertebrates, that step cannot be retraced without extinction of the species. Such extinction may take place while progress in other lines is continued. All that preceded the forking of the dead and the living branch will be as well represented and as legitimately continued by the surviving radiates as it could have been by the vertebrates that are no more; but the vertebrate ideal is lost for ever, and no more progress is possible along that line.

[Sidenote: Perfectibility.]

The future of moral evolution is accordingly infinite, but its character is more and more determinate at every step. Mankind can never, without peris.h.i.+ng, surrender its animal nature, its need to eat and drink, its s.e.xual method of reproduction, its vision of nature, its faculty of speech, its arts of music, poetry, and building. Particular races cannot subsist if they renounce their savage instincts, but die, like wild animals, in captivity; and particular individuals die when not suffered any longer to retain their memories, their bodies, or even their master pa.s.sions. Thus human nature survives amid a continual fluctuation of its embodiments. At every step twigs and leaves are thrown out that last but one season; but the underlying stem may have meantime grown stronger and more luxuriant. Whole branches sometimes wither, but others may continue to bloom. Spiritual unity runs, like sap, from the common root to every uttermost flower; but at each forking in the growth the branches part company, and what happens in one is no direct concern of the others. The products of one age and nation may well be unintelligible to another; the elements of humanity common to both may lie lower down. So that the highest things are communicable to the fewest persons, and yet, among these few, are the most perfectly communicable. The more elaborate and determinate a man's heritage and genius are, the more he has in common with his next of kin, and the more he can transmit and implant in his posterity for ever. Civilisation is c.u.mulative. The farther it goes the intenser it is, subst.i.tuting articulate interests for animal fumes and for enigmatic pa.s.sions. Such articulate interests can be shared; and the infinite vistas they open up can be pursued for ever with the knowledge that a work long ago begun is being perfected and that an ideal is being embodied which need never be outworn.

[Sidenote: Nature and human nature.]

So long as external conditions remain constant it is obvious that the greater organisation a being possesses the greater strength he will have. If indeed primary conditions varied, the finer creatures would die first; for their adaptation is more exquisite and the irreversible core of their being much larger relatively; but in a constant environment their equipment makes them irresistible and secures their permanence and multiplication. Now man is a part of nature and her organisation may be regarded as the foundation of his own: the word nature is therefore less equivocal than it seems, for every nature is Nature herself in one of her more specific and better articulated forms. Man therefore represents the universe that sustains him; his existence is a proof that the cosmic equilibrium that fostered his life is a natural equilibrium, capable of being long maintained. Some of the ancients thought it eternal; physics now suggests a different opinion. But even if this equilibrium, by which the stars are kept in their courses and human progress is allowed to proceed, is fundamentally unstable, it shows what relative stability nature may attain. Could this balance be preserved indefinitely, no one knows what wonderful adaptations might occur within it, and to what excellence human nature in particular might arrive. Nor is it unlikely that before the cataclysm comes time will be afforded for more improvement than moral philosophy has ever dreamed of. For it is remarkable how inane and unimaginative Utopias have generally been. This possibility is not uninspiring and may help to console those who think the natural conditions of life are not conditions that a good life can be lived in. The possibility of essential progress is bound up with the tragic possibility that progress and human life should some day end together. If the present equilibrium of forces were eternal all adaptations to it would have already taken place and, while no essential catastrophe would need to be dreaded, no essential improvement could be hoped for in all eternity. I am not sure that a humanity such as we know, were it destined to exist for ever, would offer a more exhilarating prospect than a humanity having indefinite elasticity together with a precarious tenure of life. Mortality has its compensations: one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

[Sidenote: Human nature formulated.]

Human nature, then, has for its core the substance of nature at large, and is one of its more complex formations. Its determination is progressive. It varies indefinitely in its historic manifestations and fades into what, as a matter of natural history, might no longer be termed human. At each moment it has its fixed and determinate entelechy, the ideal of that being's life, based on his instincts, summed up in his character, brought to a focus in his reflection, and shared by all who have attained or may inherit his organisation. His perceptive and reasoning faculties are parts of human nature, as embodied in him; all objects of belief or desire, with all standards of justice and duty which he can possibly acknowledge, are transcripts of it, conditioned by it, and justifiable only as expressions of its inherent tendencies.

[Sidenote: Its concrete description reserved for the sequel.]

This definition of human nature, clear as it may be in itself and true to the facts, will perhaps hardly make sufficiently plain how the Life of Reason, having a natural basis, has in the ideal world a creative and absolute authority. A more concrete description of human nature may accordingly not come amiss, especially as the important practical question touching the extension of a given moral authority over times and places depends on the degree of kins.h.i.+p found among the creatures inhabiting those regions. To give a general picture of human nature and its rational functions will be the task of the following books. The truth of a description which must be largely historical may not be indifferent to the reader, and I shall study to avoid bias in the presentation, in so far as is compatible with frankness and brevity; yet even if some bias should manifest itself and if the picture were historically false, the rational principles we shall be trying to ill.u.s.trate will not thereby be invalidated. Ill.u.s.trations might have been sought in some fict.i.tious world, if imagination had not seemed so much less interesting than reality, which besides enforces with unapproachable eloquence the main principle in view, namely, that nature carries its ideal with it and that the progressive organisation of irrational impulses makes a rational life.

*** End of Volume One ***

REASON IN SOCIETY

Volume Two of "The Life of Reason"

GEORGE SANTAYANA

he gar noy enhergeia zohe

This Dover edition, first published in 1980, is an unabridged republication of volume two of _The Life of Reason; or The Phases of Human Progress_, originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons, N.Y., in 1905.

CONTENTS

BOOK II.--REASON IN SOCIETY

CHAPTER I

LOVE

Fluid existences have none but ideal goals.--Nutrition and reproduction.--Priority of the latter.--Love celebrates the initial triumph of form and is deeply ideal.--Difficulty in describing love.--One-sided or inverted theories about it.--s.e.xual functions its basis.--Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty.--Glory of animal love.--Its degradation when instincts become numerous and compet.i.tive.--Moral censure provoked.--The heart alienated from the world.--Childish ideals.--Their light all focussed on the object of love.--Three environments for love.--Subjectivity of the pa.s.sion.--Machinery regulating choice.--The choice unstable.--Instinctive essence of love.--Its ideality.--Its universal scope.--Its euthanasia. Pages 3-34

CHAPTER II

THE FAMILY

The family arises spontaneously.--It harmonises natural interests.--Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth.--The naturally dull achieve intelligence.--It is more blessed to save than to create.--Parental instinct regards childhood only.--Handing on the torch of life.--Advent.i.tious functions a.s.sumed by the family.--Inertia in human nature.--Family tyrannies.--Difficulty in abstracting from the family.--Possibility of subst.i.tutes.--Plato's heroic communism.--Opposite modern tendencies.--Individualism in a sense rational.--The family tamed.--Possible readjustments and reversions.--The ideal includes generation.--Inner values already lodged in this function.--Outward beneficence might be secured by experiment Pages 35-59

CHAPTER III

INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR

Patriarchal economy.--Origin of the state.--Three uses of civilisation.--Its rationality contingent.--Sources of wealth.--Excess of it possible.--Irrational industry.--Its jovial and ingenious side.--Its tyranny.--An impossible remedy.--Basis of government.--How rationality accrues.--Ferocious but useful despotisms.--Occasional advantage of being conquered.--Origin of free governments.--Their democratic tendencies.--Imperial peace.--Nominal and real status of armies.--Their action irresponsible.--Pugnacity human.--Barrack-room philosophy.--Military virtues.--They are splendid vices.--Absolute value in strife.--Sport a civilised way of preserving it.--Who shall found the universal commonwealth? Pages 60-87

CHAPTER IV

THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL

Eminence, once existing, grows by its own operation.--Its causes natural and its privileges just.--Advantage of inequality.--Fable of the belly and the members.--Fallacy in it.--Theism expresses better the aristocratic ideal.--A heaven with many mansions.--If G.o.d is defined as the human ideal, apotheosis the only paradise.--When natures differ perfections differ too.--Theory that stations actually correspond to faculty.--Its falsity.--Feeble individuality the rule.--Sophistical envy.--Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is.--Mutilation by crowding.--A hint to optimists.--How aristocracies might do good.--Man adds wrong to nature's injury.--Conditions of a just inequality Pages 88-113

CHAPTER V

DEMOCRACY

Democracy as an end and as a means.--Natural democracy leads to monarchy.--Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege.--Ideals and expedients.--Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, if rational, would serve common interests.--People jealous of eminence.--It is representative, but subject to decay.--Ancient citizens.h.i.+p a privilege.--Modern democracy industrial.--Dangers to current civilisation.--Is current civilisation a good?--Horrors of materialistic democracy.--Timocracy or socialistic aristocracy.--The difficulty the same as in all Socialism.--The ma.s.ses would have to be plebeian in position and patrician in feeling.--Organisation for ideal ends breeds fanaticism.--Public spirit the life of democracy. Pages 114-136

CHAPTER VI

FREE SOCIETY

Primacy of nature over spirit.--All experience at bottom liberal.--Social experience has its ideality too.--The self an ideal.--Romantic egotism.--Vanity.--Ambiguities of fame.--Its possible ideality.--Comrades.h.i.+p.--External conditions of friends.h.i.+p.--Ident.i.ty in s.e.x required, and in age.--Const.i.tuents of friends.h.i.+p.--Personal liking.--The refracting human medium for ideas.--Affection based on the refraction.--The medium must also be transparent.--Common interests indispensable.--Friends.h.i.+p between man and wife.--Between master and disciple.--Conflict between ideal and natural allegiance.--Automatic idealisation of heroes Pages 137-159

CHAPTER VII

PATRIOTISM