The Life of Reason bases itself frankly on science, because “science contains all trustworthy knowledge.” Santayana knows the precariousness of reason, and the fallibility of science; he accepts the modern analysis of scientific method as merely a shorthand description of regularities observed in our experience, rather than “laws” governing the world and guaranteed unchangeable. But even so modified, science must be our only reliance; “faith in the intellect . . . is the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits.”10 So Santayana is resolved to understand life, feeling like Socrates that life without discourse is unworthy of a man; he will subject all “the phases of human progress,” all the pageant of man’s interests and history, to the scrutiny of reason.
He is modest enough nevertheless; he proposes no new philosophy, but only an application of old philosophies to our present life; he thinks the first philosophers were the best; and of them all he ranks highest Democritus11 and Aristotle; he likes the plain blunt materialism of the first, and the unruffled sanity of the second. “In Aristotle the conception of human nature is perfectly sound: everything ideal has a natural basis, and everything natural an ideal development. His ethics, when thoroughly digested and weighed, will seem perfectly final. The Life of Reason finds there its classic explication.” And so, armed with the atoms of Democritus and the golden mean of Aristotle, Santayana faces the problems of contemporary life.
In natural philosophy I am a decided materialist—apparently the only one living . . . . But I do not profess to know what matter is in itself . . . . I wait for the men of science to tell me . . . . But whatever matter may be, I call it matter boldly, as I call my acquaintances Smith and Jones without knowing their secrets.12
He will not permit himself the luxury of pantheism, which is merely a subterfuge for atheism; we add nothing to nature by calling it God; “the word nature is poetical enough; it suggests sufficiently the generative and controlling function, the endless vitality and changeful order of the world in which I live.” To be forever clinging to the old beliefs in these refined and denatured forms is to be like Don Quixote, tinkering with obsolete armor. Yet Santayana is poet enough to know that a world quite divested of deity is a cold and uncomfortable home. “Why has man’s conscience in the end invariably rebelled against naturalism and reverted in some form or other to a cultus of the unseen?” Perhaps “because the soul is akin to the eternal and ideal”; it is not content with that which is, and yearns for a better life; it is saddened by the thought of death, and clings to the hope of some power that may make it permanent amid the surrounding flux. But Santayana concludes, bluntly: “I believe there is nothing immortal . . . . No doubt the spirit and energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us; and, cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moved.”13
Mechanism is probably universal; and though “physics cannot account for that minute motion and pullulation in the earth’s crust of which human affairs are a portion,” the best method in psychology is to suppose that mechanism prevails even in the inmost recesses of the soul. Psychology graduates from literature into science only when it seeks the mechanical and material basis of every mental event. Even the splendid work of Spinoza on the passions is merely “literary psychology,” a dialectic of deduction, since it does not seek for each impulse and emotion its physiological and mechanical ground. The “behaviorists” of today have found the right road, and should follow it unfrightened.14
So thoroughly mechanical and material is life that consciousness, which is not a thing but a condition and a process, has no causal efficacy; the efficacy lies in the heat with which impulse and desire move brain and body, not in the light which flashes up as thought. “The value of thought is ideal, not causal”; that is, it is not the instrument of action but the theatre of pictured experience and the recipient of moral and esthetic delights.
Is it the mind that controls the bewildered body and points out the way to physical habits uncertain of their affinities? Or is it not much rather an automatic inward machinery that executes the marvelous work, while the mind catches here and there some glimpse of the operation, now with delight and adhesion, now with impotent rebellion? . . . Lalande, or whoever it was, who searched the heavens with his telescope and could find no God, would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope . . . . Belief in such a spirit is simply belief in magic . . . . The only facts observed by the psychologist are physical facts . . . . The soul is only a fine quick organization within the material animal; . . . a prodigious network of nerves and tissues, growing in each generation out of a seed.15
Must we accept this buoyant materialism? It is astounding that so subtle a thinker and so ethereal a poet as Santayana should tie to his neck the millstone of a philosophy which after centuries of effort is as helpless as ever to explain the growth of a flower or the laughter of a child. It may be true that the conception of the world as “a bisectible hybrid,” half material and half mental, is “the clumsy conjunction of an automation with a ghost”;16 but it is logic and lucidity personified alongside of Santayana’s conception of himself as an automaton automatically reflecting on its own automatism. And if consciousness has no efficacy, why was it evolved, so slowly and so painfully, and why does it survive in a world in which useless things so soon succumb? Consciousness is an organ of judgment as well as a vehicle of delight; its vital function is the rehearsal of response and the coördination of reaction. It is because of it that we are men. Perhaps the flower and its seed, and the child and its laughter, contain more of the mystery of the universe than any machine that ever was on land or sea; and perhaps it is wiser to interpret nature in terms of life rather than try to understand her in terms of death.
But Santayana has read Bergson too, and turns away from him in scorn.
Bergson talks a great deal about life, he feels that he has penetrated deeply into its nature; and yet death, together with birth, is the natural analysis of what life is. What is this creative purpose that must wait for sun and rain to set in motion? What is this life that in any individual can be suddenly extinguished by a bullet? What is this élan vital that a little fall in temperature would banish altogether from the universe?17
4. REASON IN RELIGION
Sainte-Beuve remarked of his countrymen that they would continue to be Catholics long after they had ceased to be Christians. This is the analysis of Renan and Anatole France, and of Santayana too. He loves Catholicism as one may still long for the woman who has deceived him—“I do believe her though I know she lies.” He mourns for his lost faith, that “splendid error, which conforms better to the impulses of the soul” than life itself. He describes himself at Oxford, in the midst of some ancient rituaclass="underline"
Exile that I am,
Exile not only from the wind-swept moor,
Where Guadaranna lifts his purple crest,
But from the spirit’s realm, celestial, sure,
Goal of all hope, and vision of the best.
It is because of this secret love, this believing unbelief, that Santayana achieves his masterpiece in Reason in Religion, filling his sceptical pages with a tender sadness, and finding in the beauty of Catholicism plentiful cause for loving it still. He smiles, it is true, at “the traditional orthodoxy, the belief, namely, that the universe exists and is good for the sake of man or of the human spirit”; but he scorns “the enlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who plume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of religion—something which the blindest half see—but leave unexplored the habits of thought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning and their true function.” Here, after all, is a remarkable phenomenon—that men everywhere have had religions; how can we understand man if we do not understand religion? “Such studies would bring the sceptic face to face with the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so profoundly just.”18