Winds Of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary OpinionSantayana, George
Philosophy
Winds Of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion
Santayana, George
Philosophy, Modern
looks, and to look it must first choose a point of view and an optical
method. This point of view and this method posit the individual; they
fix him in time and space, and determine the quality and range of his
passive experience: they are his body. If the Absolute, then, wishes
to retain the individual not merely as one of its memories but as one
of its organs of practical life, it must begin by retaining the image
of his body. His body must continue to figure in that landscape of
nature which the absolute life, as it pulses, keeps always composing
and recomposing. Otherwise a personal mind, a sketch of things made
from the point of view and in the interests of that body, cannot be
preserved.
M. Bergson, accordingly, should either tell us that our bodies are
going to rise again, or he should not tell us, or give us to
understand, that our minds are going to endure. I suppose he cannot
venture to preach the resurrection of the body to this weak-kneed
generation; he is too modern and plausible for that. Yet he is too
amiable to deny to our dilated nostrils some voluptuous whiffs of
immortality. He asks if we are not "led to suppose" that consciousness
passes through matter to be tempered like steel, to constitute
distinct personalities, and prepare them for a higher existence. Other
animal minds are but human minds arrested; men at last (what men, I
wonder?) are "capable of remembering all and willing all and
controlling their past and their future," so that "we shall have no
repugnance in admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone,
consciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life." Elsewhere he
says, in a phrase already much quoted and perhaps destined to be
famous, that in man the spirit can "spurn every kind of resistance and
break through many an obstacle, perhaps even death." Here the tenor
has ended on the inevitable high note, and the gallery is delighted.
But was that the note set down for him in the music? And has he not
sung it in falsetto?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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