The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human ProgressSantayana, George
Philosophy
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress
Santayana, George
Philosophy
This description of the case involves an application or extension of our
theory rather than an argument against it. For where recognition is
instinctive and a familiar action is performed with absent-minded
confidence and without attending to the indications that justify that
action, there is in an eminent degree a qualitative concretion in
experience. Present impressions are merged so completely in structural
survivals of the past that instead of arousing any ideas distinct enough
to be objectified they merely stimulate the inner sense, remain imbedded
in the general feeling of motion or life, and constitute in fact a
heightened sentiment of pure vitality and freedom. For the lowest and
vaguest of concretions in discourse are the ideas of self and of an
embosoming external being, with the felt continuity of both; what Fichte
would call the Ego, the Non-Ego, and Life. Where no particular events
are recognised there is still a feeling of continuous existence. We
trail after us from our whole past some sense of the continuous energy
and movement both of our passionate fancies and of the phantasmagoria
capriciously at work beyond. An ignorant mind believes itself omniscient
and omnipotent; those impulses in itself which really represent the
inertia and unspent momentum of its last dream it regards as the
creative forces of nature.
The first lines of cleavage and the first recognisable bulks at which
attention is arrested are in truth those shadowy Fichtean divisions:
such are the rude beginnings of logical architecture. In its inability
to descry anything definite and fixed, for want of an acquired empirical
background and a distinct memory, the mind flounders forward in a dream
full of prophecies and wayward identifications. The world possesses as
yet in its regard only the superficial forms that appear in revery, it
has no hidden machinery, no third dimension in which unobserved and
perpetual operations are going on. Its only terms, in a word, are
concretions in discourse, ideas combined in their æsthetic and logical
harmonies, not in their habitual and efficacious conjunctions. The
disorder of such experience is still a spontaneous disorder; it has not
discovered how calculable are its unpremeditated shocks. The cataclysms
that occur seem to have only ideal grounds and only dramatic meaning.
Though the dream may have its terrors and degenerate at moments into a
nightmare, it has still infinite plasticity and buoyancy. What
perceptions are retained merge in those haunting and friendly presences,
they have an intelligible and congenial character because they appear as
parts and effluences of an inner fiction, evolving according to the
barbaric prosody of an almost infant mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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