Part 7 (1/2)
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Mr Logan Pearsall Smith, for whom most of us have a deep admiration, reads George Santayana because he finds in this philosopher ”much writing like that of the older Essayists on large human subjects, which seemed ... more interesting and in many ways more important than anything ... in the works of other contemporary writers ... it has been his aim to reconstruct our modern, miscellaneous, shattered picture of the world, and to build, not of clouds, but of the materials of this common earth, an edifice of thought, a fortress or temple for the modern mind, in which every natural impulse could find, if possible, its opportunity for satisfaction, and every ideal aspiration its shrine and altar.”
In a word, then, we should read Mr Santayana because he has a definite philosophy, a rational conception of the world and man's allotted place in it. But what, you will ask, does a modern novelist want with a general philosophy when he has made it his business merely to describe what he observes in the particular lives of individual men and women? To which I would reply that though the philosopher has his eyes steadily turned to the infinite and contemplates eternal values in the round, by the light of reason, the novelist at times likes to turn from transcribing the trivial incidents of everyday life and from probing the characters of men and women to join the philosopher in his serene detachment. What is good for the novelist is good for every man.
Even the business man or the sportsman occasionally thinks of a future life either vividly and with acute misery when he has suffered an irreparable loss or loosely and vaguely when he attends the religious rites of his church. To such men--that is, to all of us who are not philosophers--such a pa.s.sage as the following acts like a tonic or tests our courage.
”To imagine a second career is a pleasing antidote for ill-fortune: the poor soul wants another chance. But how should a future life be const.i.tuted if it is to satisfy this demand, and how long need it last?
It would evidently have to go on in an environment closely a.n.a.logous to earth; I could not, for instance, write in another world the epics which the necessity of earning my living may have stifled here, did that other world contain no time, no heroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor is it clear that my epics, to be perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiled in me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency toward perpetual motion, it would not help me if in heaven, in lieu of my dreamt-of epics, I were allowed to beget several robust children. In a word, if hereafter I am to be the same man improved I must find myself in the same world corrected.”
In a moment we feel as if the windows were opened for the first time in our minds and the pure air of Reason allowed to circulate in our weak lungs. Such clarity of thought may kill us by its freshness; on the other hand, it may restore us to real health. May not our pathetic clinging to a belief in immortality be only a gross form of selfish terror? The philosopher would raise us to a higher plane of thought.
”What a despicable creature must a man be, and how sunk below the level of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to live and die for his children, for his art, or for his country....” ”Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome....” ”Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on any how and in any shape: a spirit with any honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.”
”While the primitive and animal side of man may continue to cling to existence at all hazards and to find the thought of extinction intolerable, his reason and finer imagination will build a new ideal on reality better understood, and be content that the future he looks to should be enjoyed by others....”
”The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”
So we are bidden to follow the advice of Horace:
”He lives happy and master over himself who can say daily, I have lived.”
It is this fierce determination to face the truth of things and not to take refuge in comfortable superst.i.tions that endears the philosopher to us and makes us sympathise with his scorn for the irrationality of Browning.
”It [Browning's ”philosophy”] is in spirit the direct opposite of the philosophic maxim of regarding the end, of taking care to leave a finished life and a perfect character behind us. It is the opposite, also, of the religious _memento mori_, of the warning that time is short before we go to our account. According to Browning, there is no account: we have an infinite credit ... his notion is simply that the game of life, the exhilaration of action, is inexhaustible ... but it is unmeaning to call such an exercise heaven ... it is a mere euphemism to call this perpetual vagrancy a development of the soul.”
Closely related to his thoughts on Immortality are Mr Santayana's caustic comments on fame.
”The highest form of vanity is love of fame. It is a pa.s.sion easy to deride but hard to understand, and in men who live at all by imagination almost impossible to eradicate. The good opinion of posterity can have no possible effect on our fortunes, and the practical value which reputation may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous fame....
What comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read him at school, or to Pindar that he is sometimes mentioned in a world from which everything he loved has departed?” ... But yet the ancients ”often identified fame with immortality, a subject on which they had far more rational sentiments than have since prevailed.... Fame consists in the immortality of a man's work, his spirit, his efficacy, in the perpetual rejuvenation of his soul in the world.”
The whole essence of Mr Santayana's teaching on this point is that we become a portion of that loveliness which once we made more lovely. It is a wholesome, sanative doctrine this ... it leads us to the belief that if we are b.u.t.terflies, we have a real immortality in that we have added something to the eternal beauty of the world: if we are beetles ... and are squashed, I take it that one more piece of beastliness is suppressed at our extinction and we ought to be glad at that.
Consequently, if we accept his theory of the finitude of life, we are braced up to do our part while we can. We strive to round off each day with the phrase, ”I have lived,” and we see our immortality in our oneness with the Universe, not in the endless projection of our own feeble personality.
And after the philosophy of life we turn naturally to thoughts on Love.
”Not to believe in love is a great sign of dulness,” we read. ”It is a true natural religion ... it sanctifies a natural mystery ... it recognises that what it wors.h.i.+pped under a figure was truly the principle of all good. The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations. Love would never take so high a flight unless it sprung from something profound and elementary.... When the generative energy is awakened all that can ever be is virtually called up and made consciously potential; and love yearns for the universe of values.... As a harp, made to vibrate to the fingers, gives some music to the wind, so the nature of man, necessarily susceptible to woman, becomes simultaneously sensitive to other influences, and capable of tenderness toward every object.”
And after love, religion.
He adds an all-important corollary to Bacon's well-known axiom that ”a little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.”
”When Bacon penned the sage epigram,” he continues, ”he forgot to add that the G.o.d to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better conceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time, where tradition and pa.s.sion have jumbled everything together.”
I suppose that though most of us have had to listen to an amazing amount of nonsense about immortality and love, on the subject of religion we have rarely been taught anything that was not nonsense. Mr Santayana clears the ground as with a hatchet. We feel after reading him as if we were able to see clearly for the first time.
In _Prosaic Misunderstandings_ he makes us realise precisely what we mean by religion.
”Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretensions to be dealing with matters of fact.... The excellence of religion is due to an idealisation of experience which, while making religion n.o.ble if treated as poetry, makes it necessarily false if treated as science.... The ma.s.s of mankind is divided into two cla.s.ses--the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad. The expedient of recognising facts as facts and accepting ideals as ideals, although apparently simple enough, seems to elude the normal human power of discrimination.”
”A G.o.d is a conceived victory of mind over nature. A visible G.o.d is the consciousness of such a victory momentarily attained. The vision soon vanishes, the sense of omnipotence is soon dispelled by recurring conflicts with hostile forces: but the momentary illusion of that realised good has left us with the perennial knowledge of good as an ideal. Therein lies the essence and the function of religion.”