The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human ProgressSantayana, George
Philosophy
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress
Santayana, George
Philosophy
It is obvious that the feelings attributed to other men are nothing but
the tertiary qualities of their bodies. In beings of the same species,
however, these qualities are naturally exceedingly numerous, variable,
and precise. Nature has made man man’s constant study. His thought, from
infancy to the drawing up of his last will and testament, is busy about
his neighbour. A smile makes a child happy; a caress, a moment’s
sympathetic attention, wins a heart and gives the friend’s presence a
voluminous and poignant value. In youth all seems lost in losing a
friend. For the tertiary values, the emotions attached to a given image,
the moral effluence emanating from it, pervade the whole present world.
The sense of union, though momentary, is the same that later returns to
the lover or the mystic, when he feels he has plucked the heart of
life’s mystery and penetrated to the peaceful centre of things. What the
mystic beholds in his ecstasy and loses in his moments of dryness, what
the lover pursues and adores, what the child cries for when left alone,
is much more a spirit, a person, a haunting mind, than a set of visual
sensations; yet the visual sensations are connected inextricably with
that spirit, else the spirit would not withdraw when the sensations
failed. We are not dealing with an articulate mind whose possessions are
discriminated and distributed into a mastered world where everything has
its department, its special relations, its limited importance; we are
dealing with a mind all pulp, all confusion, keenly sensitive to passing
influences and reacting on them massively and without reserve.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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