The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human ProgressSantayana, George
Philosophy
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress
Santayana, George
Philosophy
If logic should refuse to make this initial self-sacrifice and to
subordinate itself to impulse and fact, it would immediately become
irrational and forfeit its own justification. For it exists by virtue
of a human impulse and in answer to a human need. To ask a man, in the
satisfaction of a metaphysical passion, to forego every other good is to
render him fanatical and to shut his eyes daily to the sun in order that
he may see better by the star-light. The radical fault of rationalism is
not any incidental error committed in its deductions, although such
necessarily abound in every human system. Its great original sin is its
denial of its own basis and its refusal to occupy its due place in the
world, an ignorant fear of being invalidated by its history and
dishonoured, as it were, if its ancestry is hinted at. Only bastards
should fear that fate, and criticism would indeed be fatal to a bastard
philosophy, to one that does not spring from practical reason and has no
roots in life. But those products of reason which arise by reflection on
fact, and those spontaneous and demonstrable systems of ideas which can
be verified in experience, and thus serve to render the facts calculable
and articulate, will lose nothing of their lustre by discovering their
lineage. So the idea of nature remains true after psychology has
analysed its origin, and not only true, but beautiful and beneficent.
For unlike many negligible products of speculative fancy it is woven out
of recurrent perceptions into a hypothetical cause from which further
perceptions can be deduced as they are actually experienced.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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