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

and immediate experience. That it accompanies changes in his body and in the world is not an inference for him but a datum. But when crude experience is somewhat refined and the soul, at first mingled with every image, finds that it inhabits only her private body, to whose fortunes hers are altogether wedded, we begin to imagine that we know the cosmos at large better than the spirit; for beyond the narrow limits of our own person only the material phase of things is open to our observation. To add a mental phase to every part and motion of the cosmos is then seen to be an audacious fancy. It violates all empirical analogy, for the phenomenon which feeling accompanies in crude experience is not mere material existence, but reactive organisation and docility.

      Artifices involved in separating them.

      The limits set to observation, however, render the mental and material spheres far from coincident, and even in a rough way mutually supplementary, so that human reflection has fallen into a habit of interlarding them. The world, instead of being a living body, a natural system with moral functions, has seemed to be a bisectible hybrid, half material and half mental, the clumsy conjunction of an automaton with a ghost. These phases, taken in their abstraction, as they first forced themselves on human attention, have been taken for independent and separable facts. Experience, remaining in both provinces quite sensuous and superficial, has accordingly been allowed to link this purely mental event with that purely mechanical one. The linkage is practically not deceptive, because mental transformations are indeed signs of changes in bodies; and so long as a cause is defined merely as a sign, mental and physical changes may truly be said to cause one another. But so soon as this form of augury tries to overcome its crude empiricism and to establish phenomenal laws, the mental factor has to fall out of the efficient process and be represented there by what, upon accurate examination, it is seen to be really the sign of—I mean by some physiological event.

      If philosophers of the Cartesian school had taken to heart, as the German transcendentalists did, the cogito ergo sum of their master, and had considered that a physical world is, for knowledge, nothing but an instrument to explain sensations and their order, they might have expected this collapse of half their metaphysics at the approach of their positive science: for if mental existence was to be kept standing only by its supposed causal efficacy nothing could prevent the whole world from becoming presently a bête-machine. Psychic events have no links save through their organs and their objects; the function of the material world is, indeed, precisely to supply their linkage. The internal relations of ideas, on the other hand, are dialectical; their realm is eternal and absolutely irrelevant to the march of events. If we must speak, therefore, of causal relations between mind and body, we should say that matter is the pervasive cause of mind's distribution, and mind the pervasive cause of matter's discovery and value. To ask for an efficient cause, to trace back a force or investigate origins, is to have already turned one's face in the direction of matter and mechanical laws: no success in that undertaking can fail to be a triumph for materialism. To ask for a justification, on the other hand, is to turn no less resolutely in the direction of ideal results and actualities from which instrumentality and further use have been eliminated. Spirit is useless, being the end of things: but it is not vain, since it alone rescues all else from vanity. It is called practical when it is prophetic of its own better fulfilments, which is the case whenever forces are being turned to good uses, whenever an organism is exploring its relations and putting forth new tentacles with which to grasp the world.

      Consciousness expresses vital equilibrium and docility.

      We saw in the beginning that the exigences of bodily life gave consciousness its first articulation. A bodily feat, like nutrition or reproduction, is celebrated by a festival in the mind, and consciousness is a sort of ritual solemnising by prayer, jubilation, or mourning, the chief episodes in the body's fortunes. The organs, by their structure, select the impressions possible to them from the divers influences abroad in the world, all of which, if animal organisms had learned to feed upon them, might plausibly have offered a basis for sensation. Every instinct or habitual impulse further selects from the passing bodily affections those that are pertinent to its own operation and which consequently adhere to it and modify its reactive machinery. Prevalent and notable sensations are therefore signs, presumably marking the presence of objects important for the body's welfare or for the execution of its predestined offices. So that not only are the soul's aims transcripts of the body's tendencies, but all ideas are grafted upon the interplay of these tendencies with environing forces. Early images hover about primary wants as highest conceptions do about ultimate achievements.

      Its worthlessness as a cause and value as an expression

      Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress; but thought is in no way instrumental or servile; it is an experience realised, not a force to be used. That same spontaneity in nature which has suggested a good must be trusted to fulfil it. If we look fairly at the actual resources of our minds we perceive that we are as little informed concerning the means and processes of action as concerning the reason why our motives move us. To execute the simplest intention we must rely on fate: our own acts are mysteries to us. Do I know how I open my eyes or how I walk down stairs? Is it the supervising wisdom of consciousness that guides me in these acts? Is it the mind that controls the bewildered body and points out the way to physical habits uncertain of their affinities? Or is it not much rather automatic inward machinery that executes the marvellous work, while the mind catches here and there some glimpse of the operation, now with delight and adhesion, now with impotent rebellion? When impulses work themselves out unimpeded we say we act; when they are thwarted we say we are acted upon; but in neither case do we in the least understand the natural history of what is occurring. The mind at best vaguely forecasts the result of action: a schematic verbal sense of the end to be accomplished possibly hovers in consciousness while the act is being performed; but this premonition is itself the sense of a process already present and betrays the tendency at work; it can obviously give no aid or direction to the unknown mechanical process that produced it and that must realise its own prophecy, if that prophecy is to be realised at all.

      That such an unknown mechanism exists, and is adequate to explain every so-called decision, is indeed a hypothesis far outrunning detailed verification, although conceived by legitimate analogy with whatever is known about natural processes; but that the mind is not the source of itself or its own transformations is a matter of present experience; for the world is an unaccountable datum, in its existence, in its laws, and in its incidents. The highest hopes of science and morality look only to discovering those laws and bringing one set of incidents—facts of perception—into harmony with another set—facts of preference. This hoped-for issue, if it comes, must come about in the mind; but the mind cannot be its cause since, by hypothesis, it does not possess the ideas it seeks nor has power to realise the harmonies it desiderates. These have to be waited for and begged of destiny; human will, not controlling its basis, cannot possibly control its effects. Its existence and its efforts have at best the value of a good omen. They show in what direction natural forces are moving in so far as they are embodied in given men.

      Thought's march automatic and thereby implicated in events.

      Men, like all things else in the world, are products and vehicles of natural energy, and their operation counts. But their conscious will, in its moral assertiveness, is merely a sign of that energy and of that will's eventual fortunes. Dramatic terror and dramatic humour both depend on contrasting the natural pregnancy of a passion with its conscious intent. Everything in human life is ominous, even the voluntary acts. We cannot, by taking thought, add a cubit to our stature, but we may build up a world without meaning it. Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence. A will that represents many active forces, and is skilful in divination and augury, may long boast to be almighty without being contradicted by the event.

      Contemplative essence of action.

      That thought is not self-directive appears best in the most immaterial processes. In strife against external forces men, being ignorant of their deeper selves, attribute the obvious effects of their action to their chance ideas; but when the process is wholly internal the real factors are more evenly represented in consciousness and the magical, involuntary nature of life is better perceived. My hand, guided by I know not what machinery, is at this moment adding syllable to syllable