The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress. George Santayana

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СКАЧАТЬ which their present disappearance may have for subsequent experience are in no wise foreseen or estimated, much less are any inexperienced feelings invented and attached to that retreating figure, otherwise a mere puppet. What happens is that by the loss of an absorbing stimulus the whole chaotic mind is thrown out of gear; the child cries, the lover faints, the mystic feels hell opening before him. All this is a present sensuous commotion, a derangement in an actual dream. Yet just at this lowest plunge of experience, in this drunkenness of the soul, does the overwhelming reality and externality of the other mind dawn upon us. Then we feel that we are surrounded not by a blue sky or an earth known to geographers but by unutterable and most personal hatreds and loves. For then we allow the half-deciphered images of sense to drag behind them every emotion they have awakened. We endow each overmastering stimulus with all its diffuse effects; and any dramatic potentiality that our dream acts out under that high pressure—and crude experience is rich in dreams—becomes our notion of the life going on before us. We cannot regard it as our own life, because it is not felt to be a passion in our own body, but attaches itself rather to images we see moving about in the world; it is consequently, without hesitation, called the life of those images, or those creatures' souls.

      "Pathetic fallacy" normal yet ordinarily fallacious.

      The pathetic fallacy is accordingly what originally peoples the imagined world. All the feelings aroused by perceived things are merged in those things and made to figure as the spiritual and invisible part of their essence, a part, moreover, quite as well known and as directly perceived as their motions. To ask why such feelings are objectified would be to betray a wholly sophisticated view of experience and its articulation. They do not need to be objectified, seeing they were objective from the beginning, inasmuch as they pertain to objects and have never, any more than those objects, been "subjectified" or localised in the thinker's body, nor included in that train of images which as a whole is known to have in that body its seat and thermometer. The thermometer for these passions is, on the contrary, the body of another; and the little dream in us, the quick dramatic suggestion which goes with our perception of his motions, is our perception of his thoughts.

      A sense for alien thought is accordingly at its inception a complete illusion. The thought is one's own, it is associated with an image moving in space, and is uncritically supposed to be a hidden part of that image, a metaphysical signification attached to its motion and actually existing behind the scenes in the form of an unheard soliloquy. A complete illusion this sense remains in mythology, in animism, in the poetic forms of love and religion. A better mastery of experience will in such cases dispel those hasty conceits by showing the fundamental divergence which at once manifests itself between the course of phenomena and the feelings associated with them. It will appear beyond question that those feelings were private fancies merged with observation in an undigested experience. They indicated nothing in the object but its power of arousing emotional and playful reverberations in the mind. Criticism will tend to clear the world of such poetic distortion; and what vestiges of it may linger will be avowed fables, metaphors employed merely in conventional expression. In the end even poetic power will forsake a discredited falsehood: the poet himself will soon prefer to describe nature in natural terms and to represent human emotions in their pathetic humility, not extended beyond their actual sphere nor fantastically uprooted from their necessary soil and occasions. He will sing the power of nature over the soul, the joys of the soul in the bosom of nature, the beauty visible in things, and the steady march of natural processes, so rich in momentous incidents and collocations. The precision of such a picture will accentuate its majesty, as precision does in the poems of Lucretius and Dante, while its pathos and dramatic interest will be redoubled by its truth.

      Case where it is not a fallacy.

      A primary habit producing widespread illusions may in certain cases become the source of rational knowledge. This possibility will surprise no one who has studied nature and life to any purpose. Nature and life are tentative in all their processes, so that there is nothing exceptional in the fact that, since in crude experience image and emotion are inevitably regarded as constituting a single event, this habit should usually lead to childish absurdities, but also, under special circumstances, to rational insight and morality. There is evidently one case in which the pathetic fallacy is not fallacious, the case in which the object observed happens to be an animal similar to the observer and similarly affected, as for instance when a flock or herd are swayed by panic fear. The emotion which each, as he runs, attributes to the others is, as usual, the emotion he feels himself; but this emotion, fear, is the same which in fact the others are then feeling. Their aspect thus becomes the recognised expression for the feeling which really accompanies it. So in hand-to-hand fighting: the intention and passion which each imputes to the other is what he himself feels; but the imputation is probably just, since pugnacity is a remarkably contagious and monotonous passion. It is awakened by the slightest hostile suggestion and is greatly intensified by example and emulation; those we fight against and those we fight with arouse it concurrently and the universal battle-cry that fills the air, and that each man instinctively emits, is an adequate and exact symbol for what is passing in all their souls.

      Whenever, then, feeling is attributed to an animal similar to the percipient and similarly employed the attribution is mutual and correct. Contagion and imitation are great causes of feeling, but in so far as they are its causes and set the pathetic fallacy to work they forestall and correct what is fallacious in that fallacy and turn it into a vehicle of true and, as it were, miraculous insight.

      Knowledge succeeds only by accident.

      Let the reader meditate for a moment upon the following point: to know reality is, in a way, an impossible pretension, because knowledge means significant representation, discourse about an existence not contained in the knowing thought, and different in duration or locus from the ideas which represent it. But if knowledge does not possess its object how can it intend it? And if knowledge possesses its object, how can it be knowledge or have any practical, prophetic, or retrospective value? Consciousness is not knowledge unless it indicates or signifies what actually it is not. This transcendence is what gives knowledge its cognitive and useful essence, its transitive function and validity. In knowledge, therefore, there must be some such thing as a justified illusion, an irrational pretension by chance fulfilled, a chance shot hitting the mark. For dead logic would stick at solipsism; yet irrational life, as it stumbles along from moment to moment, and multiplies itself in a thousand centres, is somehow amenable to logic and finds uses for the reason it breeds.

      Now, in the relation of a natural being to similar beings in the same habitat there is just the occasion we require for introducing a miraculous transcendence in knowledge, a leap out of solipsism which, though not prompted by reason, will find in reason a continual justification. For tertiary qualities are imputed to objects by psychological or pathological necessity. Something not visible in the object, something not possibly revealed by any future examination of that object, is thus united with it, felt to be its core, its metaphysical truth. Tertiary qualities are emotions or thoughts present in the observer and in his rudimentary consciousness not yet connected with their proper concomitants and antecedents, not yet relegated to his private mind, nor explained by his personal endowment and situation. To take these private feelings for the substance of other beings is evidently a gross blunder; yet this blunder, without ceasing to be one in point of method, ceases to be one in point of fact when the other being happens to be similar in nature and situation to the mythologist himself and therefore actually possesses the very emotions and thoughts which lie in the mythologist's bosom and are attributed by him to his fellow. Thus an imaginary self-transcendence, a rash pretension to grasp an independent reality and to know the unknowable, may find itself accidentally rewarded. Imagination will have drawn a prize in its lottery and the pathological accidents of thought will have begotten knowledge and right reason. The inner and unattainable core of other beings will have been revealed to private intuition.

      Limits of insight

      This miracle of insight, as it must seem to those who have not understood its natural and accidental origin, extends only so far as does the analogy СКАЧАТЬ