Winds of Doctrine

George Santayana

Description

Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana made a number of significant contributions to his academic discipline, but his popularity stretched beyond the ivory tower when he began to publish his essays and observations for a wider audience. The collection Winds of Doctrine offers readers a glimpse of Santayana's personal perspective with his insightful assessments of several influential philosophers and literary figures.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776584079
• Langue: English

Extrait

WINDS OF DOCTRINE
STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY OPINION
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GEORGE SANTAYANA
 
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Winds of Doctrine Studies in Contemporary Opinion First published in 1913 Epub ISBN 978-1-77658-407-9 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77658-408-6 © 2013 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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I - The Intellectual Temper of the Age II - Modernism and Christianity III - The Philosophy of M. Henri Bergson IV - The Philosophy of Mr. Bertrand Russell V - Shelley: Or the Poetic Value of Revolutionary Principles VI - The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy Endnotes
I - The Intellectual Temper of the Age
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The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. Thecivilisation characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yetanother civilisation has begun to take its place. We still understandthe value of religious faith; we still appreciate the pompous arts ofour forefathers; we are brought up on academic architecture,sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. We still love monarchy andaristocracy, together with that picturesque and dutiful order whichrested on local institutions, class privileges, and the authority ofthe family. We may even feel an organic need for all these things,cling to them tenaciously, and dream of rejuvenating them. On theother hand the shell of Christendom is broken. The unconquerable mindof the East, the pagan past, the industrial socialistic futureconfront it with their equal authority. Our whole life and mind issaturated with the slow upward filtration of a new spirit—that of anemancipated, atheistic, international democracy.
These epithets may make us shudder; but what they describe issomething positive and self-justified, something deeply rooted in ouranimal nature and inspiring to our hearts, something which, like everyvital impulse, is pregnant with a morality of its own. In vain do wedeprecate it; it has possession of us already through ourpropensities, fashions, and language. Our very plutocrats and monarchsare at ease only when they are vulgar. Even prelates and missionariesare hardly sincere or conscious of an honest function, save as theydevote themselves to social work; for willy-nilly the new spirit hashold of our consciences as well. This spirit is amiable as well asdisquieting, liberating as well as barbaric; and a philosopher in ourday, conscious both of the old life and of the new, might repeat whatGoethe said of his successive love affairs—that it is sweet to seethe moon rise while the sun is still mildly shining.
Meantime our bodies in this generation are generally safe, and oftencomfortable; and for those who can suspend their irrational labourslong enough to look about them, the spectacle of the world, if notparticularly beautiful or touching, presents a rapid and crowded dramaand (what here concerns me most) one unusually intelligible. Thenations, parties, and movements that divide the scene have a knownhistory. We are not condemned, as most generations have been, to fightand believe without an inkling of the cause. The past lies before us;the history of everything is published. Every one records his opinion,and loudly proclaims what he wants. In this Babel of ideals fewdemands are ever literally satisfied; but many evaporate, mergetogether, and reach an unintended issue, with which they are content.The whole drift of things presents a huge, good-natured comedy to theobserver. It stirs not unpleasantly a certain sturdy animality andhearty self-trust which lie at the base of human nature.
A chief characteristic of the situation is that moral confusion is notlimited to the world at large, always the scene of profound conflicts,but that it has penetrated to the mind and heart of the averageindividual. Never perhaps were men so like one another and so dividedwithin themselves. In other ages, even more than at present, differentclasses of men have stood at different levels of culture, with amagnificent readiness to persecute and to be martyred for theirrespective principles. These militant believers have been keenlyconscious that they had enemies; but their enemies were strangers tothem, whom they could think of merely as such, regarding them as blanknegative forces, hateful black devils, whose existence might make lifedifficult but could not confuse the ideal of life. No one sought tounderstand these enemies of his, nor even to conciliate them, unlessunder compulsion or out of insidious policy, to convert them againsttheir will; he merely pelted them with blind refutations and clumsyblows. Every one sincerely felt that the right was entirely on hisside, a proof that such intelligence as he had moved freely andexclusively within the lines of his faith. The result of this was thathis faith was intelligent, I mean, that he understood it, and had aclear, almost instinctive perception of what was compatible orincompatible with it. He defended his walls and he cultivated hisgarden. His position and his possessions were unmistakable.
When men and minds were so distinct it was possible to describe and tocount them. During the Reformation, when external confusion was atits height, you might have ascertained almost statistically whatpersons and what regions each side snatched from the other; it was notdoubtful which was which. The history of their respective victoriesand defeats could consequently be written. So in the eighteenthcentury it was easy to perceive how many people Voltaire and Rousseaumight be alienating from Bossuet and Fénelon. But how shall we satisfyourselves now whether, for instance, Christianity is holding its own?Who can tell what vagary or what compromise may not be calling itselfChristianity? A bishop may be a modernist, a chemist may be a mysticaltheologian, a psychologist may be a believer in ghosts. For science,too, which had promised to supply a new and solid foundation forphilosophy, has allowed philosophy rather to undermine its foundation,and is seen eating its own words, through the mouths of some of itsaccredited spokesmen, and reducing itself to something utterlyconventional and insecure. It is characteristic of human nature to beas impatient of ignorance regarding what is not known as lazy inacquiring such knowledge as is at hand; and even those who have notbeen lazy sometimes take it into their heads to disparage theirscience and to outdo the professional philosophers in psychologicalscepticism, in order to plunge with them into the most vapidspeculation. Nor is this insecurity about first principles limited toabstract subjects. It reigns in politics as well. Liberalism had beensupposed to advocate liberty; but what the advanced parties that stillcall themselves liberal now advocate is control, control overproperty, trade, wages, hours of work, meat and drink, amusements,and in a truly advanced country like France control over education andreligion; and it is only on the subject of marriage (if we ignoreeugenics) that liberalism is growing more and more liberal. Those whospeak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality; howmany people read and write, or how many people there are, or what isthe annual value of their trade; whereas true progress would ratherlie in reading or writing fewer and better things, and being fewer andbetter men, and enjoying life more. But the philanthropists are nowpreparing an absolute subjection of the individual, in soul and body,to the instincts of the majority—the most cruel and unprogressive ofmasters; and I am not sure that the liberal maxim, "the greatesthappiness of the greatest number," has not lost whatever was just orgenerous in its intent and come to mean the greatest idleness of thelargest possible population.
Nationality offers another occasion for strange moral confusion. Ithad seemed that an age that was levelling and connecting all nations,an age whose real achievements were of international application, wasdestined to establish the solidarity of mankind as a sort of axiom.The idea of solidarity is indeed often invoked in speeches, and thereis an extreme socialistic party that—when a wave of national passiondoes not carry it the other way—believes in internationalbrotherhood. But even here, black men and yellow men are generallyexcluded; and in higher circles, where history, literature, andpolitical ambition dominate men's minds, nationalism has become oflate an omnivorous all-permeating passion. Local parliaments must beeverywhere established, extinct or provincial dialects must begalvanised into national languages, philosophy must be made racial,religion must be fostered where it emphasises nationality anddenounced where it transcends it. Man is certainly an animal that,when he lives at all, lives for ideals. Something must be found tooccupy his imagination, to raise pleasure and pain into love andhatred, and change the prosaic alternative between comfort anddiscomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow. Now thatthe hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most partis so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonalbusiness, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of honour.It has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid illusion. Illusion, Imean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a mystical essence, forof course nationality is a fact. People speak some particular languageand are very uncomfortable where another is spoken or where their ownis spoken differently. They have h