Winds Of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary OpinionSantayana, George
Philosophy
Winds Of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion
Santayana, George
Philosophy, Modern
They allow you, in one happy moment, at
once to play and to worship, to take yourselves simply, humbly, for
what you are, and to salute the wild, indifferent, non-censorious
infinity of nature. You are admonished that what you can do avails
little materially, and in the end nothing. At the same time, through
wonder and pleasure, you are taught speculation. You learn what you
are really fitted to do, and where lie your natural dignity and joy,
namely, in representing many things, without being them, and in
letting your imagination, through sympathy, celebrate and echo their
life. Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for
reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of
these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the
interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes
that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper
happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate
men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so
many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be
frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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