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 confess that formerly I had some difficulty in sharing the supreme
respect for infinite Being which animates so many saints: it seemed to me
the dazed, the empty, the deluded side of spirituality. Why rest in an
object which can be redeemed from blank negation only by a blank
intensity? But time has taught me not to despise any form of vital
imagination, any discipline which may achieve perfection after any kind.
Intuition is a broadly based activity; it engages elaborate organs and
sums up and synthesises accumulated impressions. It may therefore easily
pour the riches of its ancestry into the image or the sentiment which it
evokes, poor as this sentiment or image might seem if expressed in words.
In rapt or ecstatic moments, the vital momentum, often the moral escape,
is everything, and the achievement, apart from that blessed relief, little
or nothing. Infinite Being may profit in this way by offering a contrast
to infinite annoyance. Moreover, in my own way, I have discerned in pure
Being the involution of all forms. As felt, pure Being may be
indeterminate, but as conceived reflectively it includes all
determinations: so that when deployed into the realm of essence, infinite
or indeterminate Being truly contains entertainment for all eternity.
M. Benda feels this pregnancy of the infinite on the mathematical side;
but he hardly notices the fact, proclaimed so gloriously by Spinoza, that
the infinity of extension is only one of an infinity of infinites. There
is an aesthetic infinite, or many aesthetic infinites, composed of all the
forms which nature or imagination might exhibit; and where imagination
fails, there are infinite remainders of the unimagined. The version which
M. Benda gives us of infinite Being, limited to the mathematical
dimension, is therefore unnecessarily cold and stark. His one infinity is
monochrome, whereas the total infinity of essence, in which an infinity of
outlines is only one item, is infinitely many-coloured. Phenomena
therefore fall, in their essential variety, within and not without
infinite Being: so that in "returning to God" we might take the whole
world with us, not indeed in its blind movement and piecemeal
illumination, as events occur, but in an after-image and panoramic
portrait, as events are gathered together in the realm of truth.
On the whole I think M. Benda's two Gods are less unfriendly to one
another than his aggrieved tone might suggest. This pregnant little book
ends on a tragic note.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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