SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH
_BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND AND LATER
SOLILOQUIES.
CHARACTER AND OPINION IN THE
UNITED STATES. With Reminiscences
of William James and Josiah Royce and
Academic Life in America.
LITTLE ESSAYS DRAWN FROM THE
WRITINGS OF GEORGE SANTAYANA.
Edited by LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH.
INTERPRETATIONS OF POETRY AND
RELIGION.
THE LIFE OF REASON. Five Volumes.
THE SENSE OF BEAUTY.
POEMS.
SCEPTICISM AND ANIMAL FAITH
INTRODUCTION TO A SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY
BY
GEORGE SANTAYANA
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
_First published 1923_
_Second Impression 1924_
_Third Impression 1929_
_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.
PREFACE
Here is one more system of philosophy. If the reader is tempted to
smile, I can assure him that I smile with him, and that my system—to
which this volume is a critical introduction—differs widely in spirit
and pretensions from what usually goes by that name. In the first place,
_my system is not mine, nor new_. I am merely attempting to express for
the reader the principles to which he appeals when he smiles. There are
convictions in the depths of his soul, beneath all his overt parrot
beliefs, on which I would build our friendship. I have a great respect
for orthodoxy; not for those orthodoxies which prevail in particular
schools or nations, and which vary from age to age, but for a certain
shrewd orthodoxy which the sentiment and practice of laymen maintain
everywhere. I think that common sense, in a rough dogged way, is
technically sounder than the special schools of philosophy, each of
which squints and overlooks half the facts and half the difficulties in
its eagerness to find in some detail the key to the whole. I am animated
by distrust of all high guesses, and by sympathy with the old prejudices
and workaday opinions of mankind: they are ill expressed, but they are
well grounded. What novelty my version of things may possess is meant
simply to obviate occasions for sophistry by giving to everyday beliefs
a more accurate and circumspect form. I do not pretend to place myself
at the heart of the universe nor at its origin, nor to draw its
periphery. I would lay siege to the truth only as animal exploration and
fancy may do so, first from one quarter and then from another, expecting
the reality to be not simpler than my experience of it, but far more
extensive and complex. I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in
daily life; I should not be honest otherwise. I accept the same
miscellaneous witnesses, bow to the same obvious facts, make conjectures
no less instinctively, and admit the same encircling ignorance.
My system, accordingly, is _no system of the universe_. The Realms of
Being of which I speak are not parts of a cosmos, nor one great cosmos
together: they are only kinds or categories of things which I find
conspicuously different and worth distinguishing, at least in my own
thoughts. I do not know how many things in the universe at large may
fall under each of these classes, nor what other Realms of Being may not
exist, to which I have no approach or which I have not happened to
distinguish in my personal observation of the world. Logic, like
language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of
symbolising and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of
things; and whilst some languages, given a man’s constitution and
habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is
a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is
intelligible or right. No language or logic is right in the sense of
being identical with the facts it is used to express, but each may be
right by being faithful to these facts, as a translation may be
faithful. My endeavour is to think straight in such terms as are offered
to me, to clear my mind of cant and free it from the cramp of artificial
traditions; but I do not ask any one to think in my terms if he prefers
others. Let him clean better, if he can, the windows of his soul, that
the variety and beauty of the prospect may spread more brightly before
him.
Moreover, my system, save in the mocking literary sense of the word, is
_not metaphysical_. It contains much criticism of metaphysics, and some
refinements in speculation, like the doctrine of essence, which are not
familiar to the public; and I do not disclaim being metaphysical because
I at all dislike dialectic or disdain immaterial things: indeed, it is
of immaterial things, essence, truth, and spirit that I speak chiefly.
But logic and mathematics and literary psychology (when frankly
literary) are not metaphysical, although their subject-matter is
immaterial, and their application to existing things is often
questionable. Metaphysics, in the proper sense of the word, is
dialectical physics, or an attempt to determine matters of fact by means
of logical or moral or rhetorical constructions. It arises by a
confusion of those Realms of Being which it is my special care to
distinguish. It is neither physical speculation nor pure logic nor
honest literature, but (as in the treatise of Aristotle first called by
that name) a hybrid of the three, materialising ideal entities, turning
harmonies into forces, and dissolving natural things into terms of
discourse. Speculations about the natural world, such as those of the
Ionian philosophers, are not metaphysics, but simply cosmology or
natural philosophy. Now in natural philosophy I am a decided
materialist—apparently the only one living; and I am well aware that
idealists are fond of calling materialism, too, metaphysics, in rather
an angry tone, so as to cast discredit upon it by assimilating it to
their own systems. But my materialism, for all that, is not
metaphysical. I do not profess to know what matter is in itself, and
feel no confidence in the divination of those _esprits forts_ who,
leading a life of vice, thought the universe must be composed of nothing
but dice and billiard-balls. I wait for the men of science to tell me
what matter is, in so far as they can discover it, and am not at all
surprised or troubled at the abstractness and vagueness of their
ultimate conceptions: how should our notions of things so remote from
the scale and scope of our senses be anything but schematic? But
whatever matter may be, I call it matter boldly, as I call my
acquaintances Smith and Jones without knowing their secrets: whatever it
may be, it must present the aspects and undergo the motions of the gross
objects that fill the world: and if belief in the existence of hidden
parts and movements in nature be metaphysics, then the kitchen-maid is a
metaphysician whenever she peels a potato.
My system, finally, though, of course, formed under the fire of
contemporary discussions, is _no phase of any current movement_. I
cannot take at all seriously the present flutter of the image-lovers
against intelligence. I love images as much as they do, but images must
be discounted in our waking life, when we come to business. I also
appreciate the other reforms and rebellions that have made up the
history of philosophy. I prize their sharp criticism of one another and
their several discoveries; the trouble is that each in turn has denied
or forgotten a much more important truth than it has asserted. The first
philosophers, the original observers of life and nature, were the best;
and I think only the Indians and the Greek naturalists, together with
Spinoza, have been right on the chief issue, the relation of man and of
his spirit to the universe. It is not unwillingness to be a disciple
that prompts me to look beyond the modern scramble of philosophies: I
should gladly learn of them all, if they had learned more of one
another. Even as it is, I endeavour to retain the positive insight of
each, reducing it to the scale of nature and keeping it in its place;
thus I am a Platonist in logic and morals, and a transcendentalist in
romantic soliloquy, when I choose to indulge in it. Nor is it necessary,
in being teachable by any master, to become eclectic. All these vistas
give glimpses of the same wood, and a fair and true map of it must be
drawn to a single scale, by one method of projection, and in one style
of calligraphy. All known truth can be rendered in any language,
although the accent and poetry of each may be incommunicable; and as I
am content to write in English, although it was not my mother-tongue,
and although in speculative matters I have not much sympathy with the
English mind, so I am content to follow the European tradition in
philosophy, little as I respect its rhetorical metaphysics, its
humanism, and its worldliness.
There is one point, indeed, in which I am truly sorry not to be able to
profit by the guidance of my contemporaries. There is now a great
ferment in natural and mathematical philosophy and the times seem ripe
for a new system of nature, at once ingenuous and comprehensive, such as
has not appeared since the earlier days of Greece. We may soon be all
believing in an honest cosmology, comparable with that of Heraclitus,
Pythagoras, or Democritus. I wish such scientific systems joy, and if I
were competent to follow or to forecast their procedure, I should gladly
avail myself of their results, which are bound to be no less picturesque
than instructive. But what exists to-day is so tentative, obscure, and
confused by bad philosophy, that there is no knowing what parts may be
sound and what parts merely personal and scatter-brained. If I were a
mathematician I should no doubt regale myself, if not the reader, with
an electric or logistic system of the universe expressed in algebraic
symbols. For good or ill, I am an ignorant man, almost a poet, and I can
only spread a feast of what everybody knows. Fortunately exact science
and the books of the learned are not necessary to establish my essential
doctrine, nor can any of them claim a higher warrant than it has in
itself: for it rests on public experience. It needs, to prove it, only
the stars, the seasons, the swarm of animals, the spectacle of birth and
death, of cities and wars. My philosophy is justified, and has been
justified in all ages and countries, by the facts before every man’s
eyes; and no great wit is requisite to discover it, only (what is rarer
than wit) candour and courage. Learning does not liberate men from
superstition when their souls are cowed or perplexed; and, without
learning, clear eyes and honest reflection can discern the hang of the
world, and distinguish the edge of truth from the might of imagination.
In the past or in the future, my language and my borrowed knowledge
would have been different, but under whatever sky I had been born, since
it is the same sky, I should have had the same philosophy.
CONTENTS
PREFACE ... v
I. THERE IS NO FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM ... 1
II. DOGMA AND DOUBT ... 6
III. WAYWARD SCEPTICISM ... 11
IV. DOUBTS ABOUT SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS ... 21
V. DOUBTS ABOUT CHANGE ... 27
VI. ULTIMATE SCEPTICISM ... 33
VII. NOTHING GIVEN EXISTS ... 42
VIII. SOME AUTHORITIES FOR THIS CONCLUSION ... 49
IX. THE DISCOVERY OF ESSENCE ... 67
X. SOME USES OF THIS DISCOVERY ... 77
XI. THE WATERSHED OF CRITICISM ... 99
XII. IDENTITY AND DURATION ATTRIBUTED TO ESSENCES ... 109
XIII. BELIEF IN DEMONSTRATION ... 116
XIV. ESSENCE AND INTUITION ... 125
XV. BELIEF IN EXPERIENCE ... 134
XVI. BELIEF IN THE SELF ... 145
XVII. THE COGNITIVE CLAIMS OF MEMORY ... 150
XVIII. KNOWLEDGE IS FAITH MEDIATED BY SYMBOLS ... 164
XIX. BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE ... 182
XX. ON SOME OBJECTIONS TO BELIEF IN SUBSTANCE ... 192
XXI. SUBLIMATIONS OF ANIMAL FAITH ... 214
XXII. BELIEF IN NATURE ... 233
XXIII. EVIDENCES OF ANIMATION IN NATURE ... 240
XXIV. LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY ... 252
XXV. THE IMPLIED BEING OF TRUTH ... 262
XXVI. DISCERNMENT OF SPIRIT ... 272
XXVII. COMPARISON WITH OTHER CRITICISMS OF KNOWLEDGE ... 289
INDEX
CHAPTER I
THERE IS NO FIRST PRINCIPLE OF CRITICISM
A philosopher is compelled to follow the maxim of epic poets and to
plunge _in medias res_. The origin of things, if things have an origin,
cannot be revealed to me, if revealed at all, until I have travelled
very far from it, and many revolutions of the sun must precede my first
dawn. The light as it appears hides the candle. Perhaps there is no
source of things at all, no simpler form from which they are evolved,
but only an endless succession of different complexities. In that case
nothing would be lost by joining the procession wherever one happens to
come upon it, and following it as long as one’s legs hold out. Every one
might still observe a typical bit of it; he would not have understood
anything better if he had seen more things; he would only have had more
to explain. The very notion of understanding or explaining anything
would then be absurd; yet this notion is drawn from a current
presumption or experience to the effect that in some directions at least
things do grow out of simpler things: bread can be baked, and dough and
fire and an oven are conjoined in baking it. Such an episode is enough
to establish the notion of origins and explanations, without at all
implying that the dough and the hot oven are themselves primary facts. A
philosopher may accordingly perfectly well undertake to find _episodes
of evolution_ in the world: parents with children, storms with
shipwrecks, passions with tragedies. If he begins in the middle he will
still begin at the beginning of something, and perhaps as much at the
beginning of things as he could possibly begin.
On the other hand, this whole supposition may be wrong. Things may have
had some simpler origin, or may contain simpler elements. In that case
it will be incumbent on the philosopher to prove this fact; that is, to
find in the complex present objects evidence of their composition out of
simples. But in this proof also he would be beginning in the middle; and
he would reach origins or elements only at the end of his analysis.
The case is similar with respect to first principles of discourse. They
can never be discovered, if discovered at all, until they have been long
taken for granted, and employed in the very investigation which reveals
them. The more cogent a logic is, the fewer and simpler its first
principles will turn out to have been; but in discovering them, and
deducing the rest from them, they must first be employed unawares, if
they are the principles lending cogency to actual discourse; so that the
mind must trust current presumptions no less in discovering that they
are logical—that is, justified by more general unquestioned
presumptions—than in discovering that they are arbitrary and merely
instinctive.
It is true that, quite apart from living discourse, a set of axioms and
postulates, as simple as we like, may be posited in the air, and
deductions drawn from them _ad libitum_; but such pure logic is otiose,
unless we find or assume that discourse or nature actually follows it;
and it is not by deduction from first principles, arbitrarily chosen,
that human reasoning actually proceeds, but by loose habits of mental
evocation which such principles at best may exhibit afterwards in an
idealised form. Moreover, if we could strip our thought for the arena of
a perfect logic, we should be performing, perhaps, a remarkable
dialectical feat; but this feat would be a mere addition to the
complexities of nature, and no simplification. This motley world,
besides its other antics, would then contain logicians and their sports.
If by chance, on turning to the flowing facts, we found by analysis that
they obeyed that ideal logic, we should again be beginning with things
as we find them in the gross, and not with first principles.
It may be observed in passing that no logic to which empire over nature
or over human discourse has ever been ascribed has been a cogent logic;
it has been, in proportion to its exemplification in existence, a mere
description, psychological or historical, of an actual procedure;
whereas pure logic, when at last quite recently, it was clearly
conceived, turned out instantly to have no necessary application to
anything, and to be merely a parabolic excursion into the realm of
essence.
In the tangle of human beliefs, as conventionally expressed in talk and
in literature, it is easy to distinguish a compulsory factor called
facts or things from a more optional and argumentative factor called
suggestion or interpretation; not that what we call facts are at all
indubitable, or composed of immediate data, but that in the direction of
fact we come much sooner to a stand, and feel that we are safe from
criticism. To reduce conventional beliefs to the facts they rest
on—however questionable those facts themselves may be in other ways—is
to clear our intellectual conscience of voluntary or avoidable delusion.
If what we call a fact still deceives us, we feel we are not to blame;
we should not call it a fact, did we see any way of eluding the
recognition of it. To reduce conventional belief to the recognition of
matters of fact is empirical criticism of knowledge.
The more drastic this criticism is, and the more revolutionary the view
to which it reduces me, the clearer will be the contrast between what I
find I know and what I thought I knew. But if these plain facts were all
I had to go on, how did I reach those strange conclusions? What
principles of interpretation, what tendencies to feign, what habits of
inference were at work in me? For if nothing in the facts justified my
beliefs, something in me must have suggested them. To disentangle and
formulate these subjective principles of interpretation is
transcendental criticism of knowledge.
Transcendental criticism in the hands of Kant and his followers was a
sceptical instrument used by persons who were not sceptics. They
accordingly imported into their argument many uncritical assumptions,
such as that these tendencies to feign must be the same in everybody,
that the notions of nature, history, or mind which they led people to
adopt were the right or standard notions on these subjects, and that it
was glorious, rather than ignominious or sophistical, to build on these
principles an encyclopædia of false sciences and to call it knowledge. A
true sceptic will begin by throwing over all those academic conventions
as so much confessed fiction; and he will ask rather if, when all that
these arbitrary tendencies to feign import into experience has been
removed, any factual element remains at all. The only critical function
of transcendentalism is to drive empiricism home, and challenge it to
produce any knowledge of fact whatsoever. And empirical criticism will
not be able to do so. Just as inattention leads ordinary people to
assume as part of the given facts all that their unconscious
transcendental logic has added to them, so inattention, at a deeper
level, leads the empiricist to assume an existence in his radical facts
which does not belong to them. In standing helpless and resigned before
them he is, for all his assurance, obeying his illusion rather than
their evidence. Thus transcendental criticism, used by a thorough
sceptic, may compel empirical criticism to show its hand. It had
mistaken its cards, and was bluffing without knowing it.