The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human ProgressSantayana, George
Philosophy
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress
Santayana, George
Philosophy
The amount of wealth man can produce is apparently limited only by time,
invention, and the material at hand. It can very easily exceed his
capacity for enjoyment. As the habits which produce wealth were
originally spontaneous and only crystallised into reasonable processes
by mutual checks and the gradual settling down of the organism into
harmonious action, so also the same habits may outrun their uses. The
machinery to produce wealth, of which man’s own energies have become a
part, may well work on irrespective of happiness. Indeed, the industrial
ideal would be an international community with universal free trade,
extreme division of labour, and no unproductive consumption. Such an
arrangement would undoubtedly produce a maximum of riches, and any
objections made to it, if intelligent, must be made on other than
universal economic grounds. Free trade may be opposed, for instance
(while patriotism takes the invidious form of jealousy and while peace
is not secure), on the ground that it interferes with vested interests
and settled populations or with national completeness and
self-sufficiency, or that absorption in a single industry is
unfavourable to intellectual life. The latter is also an obvious
objection to any great division of labour, even in liberal fields; while
any man with a tender heart and traditional prejudices might hesitate to
condemn the irresponsible rich to extinction, together with all paupers,
mystics, and old maids living on annuities.
Such attacks on industrialism, however, are mere skirmishes and express
prejudices of one sort or another. The formidable judgment industrialism
has to face is that of reason, which demands that the increase and
specification of labour be justified by benefits somewhere actually
realised and integrated in individuals. Wealth must justify itself in
happiness. Someone must live better for having produced or enjoyed these
possessions. And he would not live better, even granting that the
possessions were in themselves advantages, if these advantages were
bought at too high a price and removed other greater opportunities or
benefits. The belle must not sit so long prinking before the glass as to
miss the party, and man must not work so hard and burden himself with so
many cares as to have no breath or interest left for things free and
intellectual. Work and life too often are contrasted and complementary
things; but they would not be contrasted nor even separable if work were
not servile, for of course man can have no life save in occupation, and
in the exercise of his faculties; contemplation itself can deal only
with what practice contains or discloses. But the pursuit of wealth is a
pursuit of instruments. The division of labour when extreme does
violence to natural genius and obliterates natural distinctions in
capacity. What is properly called industry is not art or self-justifying
activity, but on the contrary a distinctly compulsory and merely
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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