The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human ProgressSantayana, George
Philosophy
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress
Santayana, George
Philosophy
The fundamental reason, then, why we attribute consciousness to natural
bodies is that those bodies, before they are conceived to be merely
material, are conceived to possess all the qualities which our own
consciousness possesses when we behold them. Such a supposition is far
from being a paradox, since only this principle justifies us to this day
in believing in whatever we may decide to believe in. The qualities
attributed to reality must be qualities found in experience, and if we
deny their presence in ourselves (_e.g._, in the case of omniscience),
that is only because the idea of self, like that of matter, has already
become special and the region of ideals (in which omniscience lies) has
been formed into a third sphere. But before the idea of self is well
constituted and before the category of ideals has been conceived at all,
every ingredient ultimately assigned to those two regions is attracted
into the perceptual vortex for which such qualities as pressure and
motion supply a nucleus. The moving image is therefore impregnated not
only with secondary qualities—colour, heat, etc.—but with qualities
which we may call tertiary, such as pain, fear, joy, malice,
feebleness, expectancy. Sometimes these tertiary qualities are
attributed to the object in their fulness and just as they are felt.
Thus the sun is not only bright and warm in the same way as he is round,
but by the same right he is also happy, arrogant, ever-young, and
all-seeing; for a suggestion of these tertiary qualities runs through us
when we look at him, just as immediately as do his warmth and light. The
fact that these imaginative suggestions are not constant does not impede
the instant perception that they are actual, and for crude experience
whatever a thing possesses in appearance it possesses indeed, no matter
how soon that quality may be lost again. The moment when things have
most numerous and best defined tertiary qualities is accordingly, for
crude experience, the moment when they are most adequately manifested
and when their inner essence is best revealed; for it is then that they
appear in experience most splendidly arrayed and best equipped for their
eventual functions. The sun is a better expression of all his ulterior
effects when he is conceived to be an arrogant and all-seeing spirit
than when he is stupidly felt to be merely hot; so that the attentive
and devout observer, to whom those tertiary qualities are revealed,
stands in the same relation to an ordinary sensualist, who can feel only
the sun’s material attributes, as the sensualist in turn stands in to
one born blind, who cannot add the sun’s brightness to its warmth
except by faith in some happier man’s reported intuition. The
mythologist or poet, before science exists, is accordingly the man of
truest and most adequate vision. His persuasion that he knows the heart
and soul of things is no fancy reached by artificial inference or
analogy but is a direct report of his own experience and honest
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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