The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human ProgressSantayana, George
Philosophy
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress
Santayana, George
Philosophy
In approaching the subject afresh we should do well to remember that
crude experience knows nothing of the distinction between subject and
object. This distinction is a division in things, a contrast
established between masses of images which show different
characteristics in their modes of existence and relation. If this truth
is overlooked, if subject and object are made conditions of experience
instead of being, like body and mind, its contrasted parts, the revenge
of fate is quick and ironical; either subject or object must immediately
collapse and evaporate altogether. All objects must become modifications
of the subject or all subjects aspects or fragments of the object.
[Sidenote: Objects originally soaked in secondary and tertiary
qualities.]
Now the fact that crude experience is innocent of modern philosophy has
this important consequence: that for crude experience all data whatever
lie originally side by side in the same field; extension is passionate,
desire moves bodies, thought broods in space and is constituted by a
visible metamorphosis of its subject matter. Animism or mythology is
therefore no artifice. Passions naturally reside in the object they
agitate—our own body, if that be the felt seat of some pang, the stars,
if the pang can find no nearer resting-place. Only a long and still
unfinished education has taught men to separate emotions from things and
ideas from their objects. This education was needed because crude
experience is a chaos, and the qualities it jumbles together do not
march together in time. Reflection must accordingly separate them, if
knowledge (that is, ideas with eventual application and practical
transcendence) is to exist at all. In other words, action must be
adjusted to certain elements of experience and not to others, and those
chiefly regarded must have a certain interpretation put upon them by
trained apperception. The rest must be treated as moonshine and taken no
account of except perhaps in idle and poetic revery. In this way crude
experience grows reasonable and appearance becomes knowledge of reality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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