Soliloquies in England, and Later SoliloquiesSantayana, George
Philosophy
Soliloquies in England, and Later Soliloquies
Santayana, George
American essays -- 20th century
Ah, why did those early phrenologists, true and typical Englishmen
as they were, denounce the innocent midwife who by a little timely
pressure on the infant skull compressed, as they said, "the oval
of genius into the flatness of boobyism." Let us not be cowed by a
malicious epithet. What some people choose to call boobyism and
flatness may be the simplest, the most British, the most scientific
philosophy. Your true booby may be only he who, having perforce but
a flat view of a flat world, prates of genius and rotundity. Blessed
are they whose eye is single. Only when very drunk do we acknowledge
our double optics; when sober we endeavour to correct and ignore this
visual duplicity and to see as respectably as if we had only one
eye. The Unicorn might well say the same thing of two-horned beasts.
Such double and crooked weapons are wasteful and absurd. You can use
only one horn effectively even if you have two, but in a sidelong
and cross-eyed fashion; else your prey simply nestles between, where
eye cannot see it nor horn probe it. A single straight horn, on the
contrary, is like a lancet; it pierces to the heart of the enemy by a
sure frontal attack: nothing like it for pricking a bubble, or pointing
to a fact and scathingly asking the Government if they are aware of it.
In music likewise every pure melody passes from single note to note, as
do the sweet songs of nature. Away with your demoniac orchestras, and
your mad pianist, tossing his mane, and banging with his ten fingers
and his two feet at once I As to walking on two feet, that also is mere
wobbling and, as Schopenhauer observed, a fall perpetually arrested.
It is an unstable compromise between going on all fours, if you want
to be safe, and standing on one leg, like the exquisite flamingo, if
you aspire to be graceful and spiritually sensitive. There is really no
biped in nature except ridiculous man, as if the prancing Unicorn had
succeeded in always being rampant; your feathered creatures are bipeds
only on occasion and in their off moments; essentially they are winged
beings, and their legs serve only to prop them when at rest, like the
foot-piece of a motor-cycle which you let down when it stops.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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