Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - George Santayana (ebook reader screen .txt) 📗

the transcendental point of view. No wonder that Locke could not do justice to this great novelty: Descartes himself did not do so, but ignored his subjective first principles in the development of his system; and it was not until adopted by Kant, or rather by Fichte, that the transcendental method showed its true colours. Even today philosophers fumble with it, patching soliloquy with physics and physics with soliloquy. Moreover, Locke's misunderstandings of Descartes were partly justified by the latter's verbal concessions to tradition and authority. A man who has a clear head, and like Descartes is rendered by his aristocratic pride both courteous and disdainful, may readily conform to usage in his language, and even in his personal sentiments, without taking either too seriously: he is not struggling to free his own mind, which is free already, nor very hopeful of freeing that of most people. The innate ideas were not explicit thoughts but categories employed unwittingly, as people in speaking conform to the grammar of the vernacular without being aware that they do so. As for extension being the essence of matter, since matter existed and was a substance, it would always have been more than its essence: a sort of ether the parts of which might move and might have different and calculable dynamic values. The gist of this definition of matter was to clear the decks for scientific calculation, by removing from nature the moral density and moral magic with which the Socratic philosophy had encumbered it. Science would be employed in describing the movements of bodies, leaving it for the senses and feelings to appreciate the cross-lights that might be generated in the process. Though not following the technique of Descartes, the physics of our own day realises his ideal, and traces in nature a mathematical dynamism, perfectly sufficient for exact prevision and mechanical art.

Similarly, in saying that the essence of the soul was to think, Descartes detached consciousness, or actual spirit, from the meshes of all unknown organic or invented mental mechanisms. It was an immense clarification and liberation in its proper dimension: but this pure consciousness was not a soul; it was not the animal psyche, or principle of organisation, life, and passion—a principle which, according to Descartes, was material. To have called such a material principle the soul would have shocked all Christian conceptions; but if Descartes had abstained from giving that consecrated name to mere consciousness, he need not have been wary of making the latter intermittent and evanescent, as it naturally is. He was driven to the conclusion that the soul can never stop thinking, by the desire to placate orthodox opinion, and his own Christian sentiments, at the expense of attributing to actual consciousness a substantial independence and a directive physical force which were incongruous with it: a force and independence perfectly congruous with the Platonic soul, which had been a mythological being, a supernatural spirit or daemon or incubus, incarnate in the natural world, and partly dominating it. The relations of such a soul to the particular body or bodies which it might weave for itself on earth, to the actions which it performed through such bodies, and to the current of its own thoughts, then became questions for theology, or for a moralistic theory of the universe. They were questions remote from the preoccupations of the modern mind; yet it was not possible either for Locke or for Descartes to clear their fresh conceptions altogether from those ancient dreams.

What views precisely did Locke oppose to these radical tendencies of Descartes?

In respect to the nature of matter, I have indicated above the position of Locke: pictorially he accepted an ordinary atomism; scientifically, the physics of Newton.

On the other two points Locke's convictions were implicit rather than speculative: he resisted the Cartesian theories without much developing his own, as after all was natural in a critic engaged in proving that our natural faculties were not intended for speculation. All knowledge came from experience, and no man could know the savour of a pineapple without having tasted it. Yet this savour, according to Locke, did not reside at first in the pineapple, to be conveyed on contact to the palate and to the mind; but it was generated in the process of gustation; or perhaps we should rather say that it was generated in the mind on occasion of that process. At least, then, in respect to secondary qualities, and to all moral values, the terms of human knowledge were not drawn from the objects encountered in the world, but from an innate sensibility proper to the human body or mind. Experience—if this word meant the lifelong train of ideas which made a man's moral being—was not a source of knowledge but was knowledge (or illusion) itself, produced by organs endowed with a special native sensibility in contact with varying external stimuli. This conclusion would then not have contradicted, but exactly expressed, the doctrine of innate categories.

As to the soul, which might exist without thinking, Locke still called it an immaterial substance: not so immaterial, however, as not to be conveyed bodily with him in his coach from London to Oxford. Although, like Hobbes, Locke believed in the power of the English language to clarify the human intellect, he here ignored the advice of Hobbes to turn that befuddling Latin phrase into plain English. Substance meant body: immaterial meant bodiless: therefore immaterial substance meant bodiless body. True, substance had not really meant body for Aristotle or the Schoolmen; but who now knew or cared what anything had meant for them? Locke scornfully refused to consider what a substantial form may have signified; and in still maintaining that he had a soul, and calling it a spiritual substance, he was probably simply protesting 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; and this self of his was far from being reducible to a merely logical impersonal subject, an "I think" presupposed in all thought: for what would this "I think" have become when it was not thinking? On the other hand it mattered very little what the substance of a thinking being might be: God might even have endowed the body with the faculty of thinking, and of generating ideas on occasion of certain impacts. Yet a man was a man for all that: and Locke was satisfied that he knew, at least well enough for an honest Englishman, what he was. He was what he felt himself to be: and this inner man of his was not merely the living self, throbbing now in his heart; it was all his moral past, all that he remembered to have been. If, from moment to moment, the self was a spiritual energy astir within, in retrospect the living present seemed, as it were, to extend its tentacles and to communicate its subjectivity to his whole personal past. The limits of his personality were those of his memory, and his experience included everything that his living mind could appropriate and re-live. In a word, he was his idea of himself: and this insight opens a new chapter not only in his philosophy but in the history of human self-estimation. Mankind was henceforth invited not to think of itself as a tribe of natural beings, nor of souls, with a specific nature and fixed possibilities. Each man was a romantic personage or literary character: he was simply what he was thought to be, and might become anything that he could will to become. The way was opened for Napoleon on the one hand and for Fichte on the other.

III Page 9. All ideas must be equally conditioned.

Even the mathematical ideas which seem so exactly to describe the dynamic order of nature are not repetitions of their natural counterpart: for mathematical form in nature is a web of diffuse relations enacted; in the mind it is a thought possessed, the logical synthesis of those deployed relations. To run in a circle is one thing; to conceive a circle is another. Our mind by its animal roots (which render it relevant to the realm of matter and cognitive) and by its spiritual actuality (which renders it original, synthetic, and emotional) is a language, from its beginnings; almost, we might say, a biological poetry; and the greater the intellectuality and poetic abstraction the greater the possible range. Yet we must not expect this scope of speculation in us to go with adequacy or exhaustiveness: on the contrary, mathematics and religion, each in its way so sure, leave most of the truth out.

IV Page 9. He cannot be aware of what goes on beyond him, except as it affects his own life.

Even that spark of divine intelligence which comes into the animal soul, as Aristotle says, from beyond the gates, comes and is called down by the exigencies of physical life. An animal endowed with locomotion cannot merely feast sensuously on things as they appear, but must react upon them at the first signal, and in so doing must virtually and in intent envisage them as they are in themselves. For it is by virtue of their real constitution and intrinsic energy that they act upon us and suffer change in turn at our hands; so that whatsoever form things may take to our senses and intellect, they take that form by exerting their material powers upon us, and intertwining them in action with our own organisms.

Thus the appearance of things is always, in some measure, a true index to their reality. Animals are inevitably engaged in self-transcending action, and the consciousness of self-transcending action is self-transcendent knowledge. The very nature of animal life makes it possible, within animal consciousness, to discount appearance and to correct illusion—things which in a vegetative or aesthetic sensibility would not be distinguishable from pure experience itself. But when aroused to self-transcendent attention, feeling must needs rise to intelligence, so that external fact and impartial truth come within the range of consciousness, not indeed by being contained there, but by being aimed at.

V Page 19. Conscious mind was a fact on its own account.

This conscious mind was a man's moral being, and personal identity could not extend further than possible memory. This doctrine of Locke's had some comic applications. The Bishop of Worcester was alarmed. If actions which a hardened sinner had forgotten were no longer his, a short memory would be a great blessing in the Day of Judgment. On the other hand, a theology more plastic than Stillingfleet's would one day find in this same doctrine a new means of edification. For if I may disown all actions I have forgotten, may not things not done or witnessed by me in the body be now appropriated and incorporated in my consciousness, if only I conceive them vividly? The door is then open to all the noble ambiguities of idealism. As my consciousness expands, or thinks it expands, into dramatic sympathy with universal experience, that experience becomes my own. I may say I have been the agent in all past achievements. Emerson could know that he was Shakespeare and Caesar and Christ. Futurity is mine also, in every possible direction at once; and I am one with the spirit of the universe and with God.

Locke reassured the Bishop of Worcester, and was humbly confident that Divine Justice would find a way of vindicating Itself in spite of human wit. He might have added that if the sin of Adam could not only be imputed to us juridically but could actually taint our consciousness—as it certainly does if by Adam we understand our whole material heritage—so surely the sins done