Winds Of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary OpinionSantayana, George
Philosophy
Winds Of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion
Santayana, George
Philosophy, Modern
love the one and hate the other with an infinite love or hatred.
Meanwhile the reprobate need not fear hell in the next world, but the
elect are sure to find it here.
What shall we say of this strangely unreal and strangely personal
religion? Is it a ghost of Calvinism, returned with none of its old
force but with its old aspect of rigidity? Perhaps: but then, in
losing its force, in abandoning its myths, and threats, and rhetoric,
this religion has lost its deceptive sanctimony and hypocrisy; and in
retaining its rigidity it has kept what made it noble and pathetic;
for it is a clear dramatic expression of that human spirit--in this
case a most pure and heroic spirit--which it strives so hard to
dethrone. After all, the hypostasis of the good is only an
unfortunate incident in a great accomplishment, which is the
discernment of the good. I have dwelt chiefly on this incident,
because in academic circles it is the abuses incidental to true
philosophy that create controversy and form schools. Artificial
systems, even when they prevail, after a while fatigue their
adherents, without ever having convinced or refuted their opponents,
and they fade out of existence not by being refuted in their turn, but
simply by a tacit agreement to ignore their claims: so that the true
insight they were based on is too often buried under them. The
hypostasis of philosophical terms is an abuse incidental to the
forthright, unchecked use of the intellect; it substitutes for things
the limits and distinctions that divide them. So physics is corrupted
by logic; but the logic that corrupts physics is perhaps correct, and
when it is moral dialectic, it is more important than physics itself.
Mr. Russell's ethics _is_ ethics. When we mortals have once assumed
the moral attitude, it is certain that an indefinable value accrues to
some things as opposed to others, that these things are many, that
combinations of them have values not belonging to their parts, and
that these valuable things are far more specific than abstract
pleasure, and far more diffused than one's personal life. What a pity
if this pure morality, in detaching itself impetuously from the earth,
whose bright satellite it might be, should fly into the abyss at a
tangent, and leave us as much in the dark as before!
V
SHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES
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