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

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СКАЧАТЬ those objects cannot be represented directly, but is approached by indirect methods, through an imitation or assimilation of will to will and emotion to emotion. Only by the instrumentality of signs, like gesture or language, can we bring ourselves to reproduce in some measure an absent experience and to feel some premonition of its absolute value. Apart from very elaborate and cumulative suggestions to the contrary, we should always attribute to an event in every other experience the value which its image now had in our own. But in that case the pathetic fallacy would be present; for a volitional reaction upon an idea in one vital context is no index to what the volitional reaction would be in another vital context upon the situation which that idea represents.

      Æsthetic and speculative cruelty.

      This divergence falsifies all representation of life and renders it initially cruel, sentimental, and mythical. We dislike to trample on a flower, because its form makes a kind of blossoming in our own fancy which we call beauty; but we laugh at pangs we endured in childhood and feel no tremor at the incalculable sufferings of all mankind beyond our horizon, because no imitable image is involved to start a contrite thrill in our own bosom. The same cruelty appears in æsthetic pleasures, in lust, war, and ambition; in the illusions of desire and memory; in the unsympathetic quality of theory everywhere, which regards the uniformities of cause and effect and the beauties of law as a justification for the inherent evils in the experience described; in the unjust judgments, finally, of mystical optimism, that sinks so completely into its subjective commotion as to mistake the suspension of all discriminating and representative faculties for a true union in things, and the blur of its own ecstasy for a universal glory. These pleasures are all on the sensuous plane, the plane of levity and unintentional wickedness; but in their own sphere they have their own value. Æsthetic and speculative emotions make an important contribution to the total worth of existence, but they do not abolish the evils of that experience on which they reflect with such ruthless satisfaction. The satisfaction is due to a private flood of emotion submerging the images present in fancy, or to the exercise of a new intellectual function, like that of abstraction, synthesis, or comparison. Such a faculty, when fully developed, is capable of yielding pleasures as intense and voluminous as those proper to rudimentary animal functions, wrongly supposed to be more vital. The acme of vitality lies in truth in the most comprehensive and penetrating thought. The rhythms, the sweep, the impetuosity of impassioned contemplation not only contain in themselves a great vitality and potency, but they often succeed in engaging the lower functions in a sympathetic vibration, and we see the whole body and soul rapt, as we say, and borne along by the harmonies of imagination and thought. In these fugitive moments of intoxication the detail of truth is submerged and forgotten. The emotions which would be suggested by the parts are replaced by the rapid emotion of transition between them; and this exhilaration in survey, this mountain-top experience, is supposed to be also the truest vision of reality. Absorption in a supervening function is mistaken for comprehension of all fact, and this inevitably, since all consciousness of particular facts and of their values is then submerged in the torrent of cerebral excitement.

      Imputed values: their inconstancy.

      That luminous blindness which in these cases takes an extreme form is present in principle throughout all reflection. We tend to regard our own past as good only when we still find some value in the memory of it. Last year, last week, even the feelings of the last five minutes, are not otherwise prized than by the pleasure we may still have in recalling them; the pulsations of pleasure or pain which they contained we do not even seek to remember or to discriminate. The period is called happy or unhappy merely as its ideal representation exercises fascination or repulsion over the present will. Hence the revulsion after physical indulgence, often most violent when the pleasure—judged by its concomitant expression and by the desire that heralded it—was most intense. For the strongest passions are intermittent, so that the unspeakable charm which their objects possess for a moment is lost immediately and becomes unintelligible to a chilled and cheated reflection. The situation, when yet unrealised, irresistibly solicited the will and seemed to promise incomparable ecstasy; and perhaps it yields an indescribable moment of excitement and triumph—a moment only half-appropriated into waking experience, so fleeting is it, and so unfit the mind to possess or retain its tenser attitudes. The same situation, if revived in memory when the system is in an opposite and relaxed state, forfeits all power to attract and fills the mind rather with aversion and disgust. For all violent pleasures, as Shakespeare says, are cruel and not to be trusted.

      A bliss in proof and, proved, a very woe:

       Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream …

       Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;

       Past reason hunted and, no sooner had,

       Past reason hated.

      Methods of control.

      Past reason, indeed. For although an impulsive injustice is inherent in the very nature of representation and cannot be overcome altogether, yet reason, by attending to all the evidences that can be gathered and by confronting the first pronouncement by others fetched from every quarter of experience, has power to minimise the error and reach a practically just estimate of absent values. This achieved rightness can be tested by comparing two experiences, each when it is present, with the same conventional permanent object chosen to be their expression. A love-song, for instance, can be pronounced adequate or false by various lovers; and it can thus remain a sort of index to the fleeting sentiments once confronted with it. Reason has, to be sure, no independent method of discovering values. They must be rated as the sensitive balance of present inclination, when completely laden, shows them to stand. In estimating values reason is reduced to data furnished by the mechanical processes of ideation and instinct, as in framing all knowledge; an absent joy can only be represented by a tinge of emotion dyeing an image that pictures the situation in which the joy was felt; but the suggested value being once projected into the potential world, that land of inferred being, this projection may be controlled and corroborated by other suggestions and associations relevant to it, which it is the function of reason to collect and compare. A right estimate of absent values must be conventional and mediated by signs. Direct sympathies, which suffice for instinctive present co-operation, fail to transmit alien or opposite pleasures. They over-emphasise momentary relations, while they necessarily ignore permanent bonds. Therefore the same intellect that puts a mechanical reality behind perception must put a moral reality behind sympathy.

      Example of fame.

      Fame, for example, is a good; its value arises from a certain movement of will and emotion which is elicited by the thought that one's name might be associated with great deeds and with the memory of them. The glow of this thought bathes the object it describes, so that fame is felt to have a value quite distinct from that which the expectation of fame may have in the present moment. Should this expectation be foolish and destined to prove false, it would have no value, and be indeed the more ludicrous and repulsive the more pleasure its dupe took in it, and the longer his illusion lasted. The heart is resolutely set on its object and despises its own phenomena, not reflecting that its emotions have first revealed that object's worth and alone can maintain it. For if a man cares nothing for fame, what value has it?

      This projection of interest into excellence takes place mechanically and is in the first instance irrational. Did all glow die out from memory and expectation, the events represented remaining unchanged, we should be incapable of assigning any value to those events, just as, if eyes were lacking, we should be incapable of assigning colour to the world, which would, notwithstanding, remain as it is at present. So fame could never be regarded as a good if the idea of fame gave no pleasure; yet now, because the idea pleases, the reality is regarded as a good, absolute and intrinsic. This moral hypostasis involved in the love of fame could never be rationalised, but would subsist unmitigated or die out unobserved, were it not associated with other conceptions and other habits of estimating values. For the passions are humanised only by being juxtaposed and forced to live together. As fame is not man's only goal and the realisation of it comes into manifold СКАЧАТЬ