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

The choice of pleasure for 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 enough word in the mouth of Aristippus, a semi-oriental untouched by the least sense of responsibility, or even on the lips of humanists in the eighteenth century, who, however sordid their lives may sometimes have been, 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 not only expresses better the motive at work, but it points to the distressing presence of misery in the world, to make natural kindness laborious and earnest, and turn it into a legislative system.

Bradley's hostility to pleasure was not fanatical: one's station and its duties might have their agreeable side. "It is probably good for you", he tells us, "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 which 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, and 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, and of the sort which 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, instrumental, and full of respect for variegated facts, and who were probably incapable of tasting pure pleasure at all.

But if pleasure, in its pure essence, might really be the highest good for a mystic who should be lost in it, it would be no guide to a moralist wishing to control events, and to distribute particular pleasures or series of pleasures as richly as possible in the world. For this purpose he would need to understand human nature and its variable functions, in which different persons and peoples may find their sincere pleasures; and this knowledge would first lend to his general love of pleasure any point of application in the governance of life or in benevolent legislation. Some concrete image of a happy human world would take the place of the futile truism that pleasure is good and pain evil. This is, of course, what utilitarian moralists meant to do, and actually did, in so far as their human sympathies extended, which was not to the highest things; but it was not what they said, and Bradley had a clear advantage over them in the war of words. A pleasure is not a programme: it exists here and not there, for me and for no one else, once and never again. When past, it leaves the will as empty and as devoid of allegiance as if it had never existed; pleasure is sand, though it have the colour of gold. But this is evidently true of all existence. Each living moment, each dead man, each cycle of the universe leaves nothing behind it but a void which perhaps something kindred may refill. A Hegel, after identifying himself for a moment with the Absolute Idea, is in his existence no less subject to sleepiness, irritation, and death than if he had been modestly satisfied with the joys of an oyster. It is only their common form, or their common worship, that can give to the quick moments of life any mutual relevance or sympathy; and existence would not come at all within sight of a good, either momentary or final, if it were not inwardly directed upon realising some definite essence. For the rest this essence may be as simple as you will, if the nature directed upon it is unified and simple; and it would be mere intellectual snobbery to condemn pleasure because it has not so many subdivisions in it as an encyclopaedia of the sciences. For the moralist pleasure and pain may even be the better guides, because they express more directly and boldly the instinctive direction of animal life, and thereby mark more clearly the genuine difference between good and evil.

We may well say with Bradley that the good is self-realisation; but what is the self? Certainly not the feeling or consciousness of the moment, nor the life of the world, nor pure spirit. The self that can systematically distinguish good from evil is an animal soul. It grows from a seed; its potentiality is definite and its fate precarious; and in man it requires society to rear it and tradition to educate it. The good is accordingly social, in so far as the soul demands society; but it is the nature of the individual that determines the kind and degree of sociability that is good for him, and draws the line between society that is a benefit and society that is a nuisance. To subordinate the soul fundamentally to society or the individual to the state is sheer barbarism: the Greeks, sometimes invoked to support this form of idolatry, were never guilty of it; on the contrary, their lawgivers were always reforming and planning the state so that the soul might be perfect in it. Discipline is a help to the spirit: but even social relations, when like love, friendship, or sport they are spontaneous and good in themselves, retire as far as possible from the pressure of the world, and build their paradise apart, simple, and hidden in the wilderness; while all the ultimate hopes and assurances of the spirit escape altogether into the silent society of nature, of truth, of essence, far from those fatuous worldly conventions which hardly make up for their tyranny by their instability: for the prevalent moral fashion is always growing old, and human nature is always becoming young again. World-worship is the expedient of those who, having lost the soul that is in them, look for it in things external, where there is no soul: and by a curious recoil, it is also the expedient of those who seek their lost soul in actual consciousness, where it also is not: for sensations and ideas are not the soul but only passing and partial products of its profound animal life. Moral consciousness in particular would never have arisen and would be gratuitous, save for the ferocious bias of a natural living creature, defending itself against its thousand enemies.

Nor would knowledge in its turn be knowledge if it were merely intuition of essence, such as the sensualist, the poet, or the dialectician may rest in. If the imagery of logic or passion ever comes to convey knowledge, it does so by virtue of a concomitant physical adjustment to external things; for the nerve of real or transcendent knowledge is the notice which one part of the world may take of another part; and it is this momentous cognisance, no matter what intangible feelings may supply terms for its prosody, that enlarges the mind to some practical purpose and informs it about the world. Consciousness then ceases to be passive sense or idle ideation and becomes belief and intelligence. Then the essences which form the "content of consciousness" may be vivified and trippingly run over, like the syllables of a familiar word, in the active recognition of things and people and of all the ominous or pliable forces of nature. For essences, being eternal and non-existent in themselves, cannot come to consciousness by their own initiative, but only as occasion and the subtle movements of the soul may evoke their forms; so that the fact that they are given to consciousness has a natural status and setting in the material world, and is part of the same natural event as the movement of the soul and body which supports that consciousness.

There is therefore no need of refuting idealism, which is an honest examination of conscience in a reflective mind. Refutations and proofs depend on pregnant meanings assigned to terms, meanings first rendered explicit and unambiguous by those very proofs or refutations. On any different acceptation of those terms, these proofs and refutations fall to the ground; and it remains a question for good sense, not for logic at all, how far the terms in either case describe anything existent. If by "knowledge" we understand intuition of essences, idealism follows; but it follows only in respect to essences given in intuition: nothing follows concerning the seat, origin, conditions, or symptomatic value of such intuition, nor even that such intuition ever actually occurs. Idealism, therefore, without being refuted, may be hemmed in and humanised by natural knowledge about it and about its place in human speculation; the most recalcitrant materialist (like myself) might see its plausibility during a somewhat adolescent phase of self-consciousness. Consciousness itself he might accept and relish as the natural spiritual resonance of action and passion, recognising it in its proud isolation and specious autonomy, like the mountain republics of Andorra and San Marino.

German idealism is a mighty pose, an attitude always possible to a self-conscious and reflective being: but it is hardly a system, since it contradicts beliefs which in action are inevitable; it may therefore be readily swallowed, but it can never be digested. Neither of its two ingredients—romantic scepticism and romantic superstition—agrees particularly with the British stomach. Not romantic scepticism: for in England an instinctive distrust of too much clearness and logic, a difficulty in drawing all the consequences of any principle, soon gave to this most radical of philosophies a prim and religious air: its purity was alloyed with all sorts of conventions: so much so that we find British Hegelians often deeply engaged in psychology, cosmology, or religion, as if they took their idealism for a kind of physics, and wished merely to reinterpret the facts of nature in an edifying way, without uprooting them from their natural places. This has been made easier by giving idealism an objective, non-psychological turn: events, and especially feelings and ideas, will then be swallowed up in the essences which they display. Thus Bradley maintained that two thoughts, no matter how remote from each other in time or space, were identically the same, and not merely similar, if only they contemplated the same idea. Mind itself ceased in this way to mean a series of existing feelings and was identified with intelligence; and intelligence in its turn was identified with the Idea or Logos which might be the ultimate theme of intelligence. There could be only one mind, so conceived, since there could be only one total system in the universe visible to omniscience.

As to romantic scepticism, we may see by contrast what it would be, when left to itself, if we consider those lucid Italians who have taken up their idealism