Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy: Five EssaysSantayana, George
Philosophy
Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy: Five Essays
Santayana, George
Locke, John, 1632-1704; Philosophy, Modern
I am glad that Freud has resisted the tendency to represent this principle
of Love as the only principle in nature. Unity somehow exercises an evil
spell over metaphysicians. It is admitted that in real life it is not well
for One to be alone, and I think pure unity is no less barren and
graceless in metaphysics. You must have plurality to start with, or
trinity, or at least duality, if you wish to get anywhere, even if you
wish to get effectively into the bosom of the One, abandoning your
separate existence. Freud, like Empedocles, has prudently introduced a
prior principle for Love to play with; not Strife, however (which is only
an incident in Love), but Inertia, or the tendency towards peace and
death. Let us suppose that matter was originally dead, and perfectly
content to be so, and that it still relapses, when it can, into its old
equilibrium. But the homogeneous (as Spencer would say) when it is finite
is unstable: and matter, presumably not being co-extensive with space,
necessarily forms aggregates which have an inside and an outside. The
parts of such bodies are accordingly differently exposed to external
influences and differently related to one another. This inequality, even
in what seems most quiescent, is big with changes, destined to produce in
time a wonderful complexity. It is the source of all uneasiness, of life,
and of love.
"Let us imagine [writes Freud][11] an undifferentiated vesicle of
sensitive substance: then its surface, exposed as it is to the
outer world, is by its very position differentiated, and serves as
an organ for receiving stimuli.... This morsel of living substance
floats about in an outer world which is charged with the most
potent energies, and it would be destroyed ... if it were not
furnished with protection against stimulation. [On the other hand]
the sensitive cortical layer has no protective barrier against
excitations emanating from within.... The most prolific sources of
such excitations are the so-called instincts of the organism....
The child never gets tired of demanding the repetition of a game
... he wants always to hear the same story instead of a new one,
insists inexorably on exact repetition, and corrects each deviation
which the narrator lets slip by mistake.... According to this, _an
instinct would be a tendency in living organic matter impelling it
towards reinstatement of an earlier condition_, one which it had
abandoned under the influence of external disturbing forces--a kind
of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the manifestation
of inertia in organic life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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