The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/A New System of Philosophy
BOOK REVIEWS
A NEW SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY
Scepticism and Animal Faith. Introduction to a System of Philosophy. By George Santayana. 8vo. 314 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.50.
THIS volume is only a prelude to a work on Realms of Being, which will deal with the different spheres of Existence, Essence, Truth, and Spirit. It is a brave thing in these days, to launch a system of philosophy; there is everywhere so much detail, so much bored familiarity, that few men have the comprehensiveness for a large synthesis. Mr Santayana has the power of dismissing the irrelevant: "exact science and the books of the learned," he says, "are not necessary to establish my essential doctrine. . . . It needs, to prove it, only the stars, the seasons, the swarm of animals, the spectacle of birth and death, of cities and wars." He claims, accordingly, that his philosophy is not merely an expression of the intellectual fashion of the moment.
"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."
This is more nearly true in his case than in that of any other living European, but it is not quite true—probably it is not meant to be quite true. It is true that the speculations of the last two centuries leave him cold. Philosophy in modern times, he says:
"ceased to be the art of thinking and tried to become that impossible thing, the science of thought. . . . The whole of British and German philosophy is only literature. . . . Not one term, not one conclusion in it has the least scientific value, and it is only when this philosophy is good literature that it is good for anything."
He might therefore have had the same philosophy if he had lived before Kant and Hume. But we cannot say as much of the three men whom he really admires: Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza. Plato, especially, is woven into the very texture of his thought. I do not know what his outlook would have been if he had been a contemporary of Heraclitus, but it would not have been the outlook which in fact he has.
So much for the past. As for the future, will it be "the same sky"? In Mr Wells' When the Sleeper Awakes, London has a roof, it eschews daylight, and has only electric lamps; the Londoner never sees the stars, or even the sun and moon; he knows nothing of "the sweet approach of even or morn." Such a man would not have Mr Santayana's philosophy, or any other that is proved by "the stars, the seasons, the swarm of animals." Yet future man will presumably be such, unless industrialism destroys itself.
Mr Santayana's system, therefore, though not bound to the present moment or to any one Western country, belongs to the Hellenic tradition created by Plato and in process of destruction by modern science; it belongs to about two thousand years of Western Europe, and could not have been produced (short of a miracle) in another age or continent. Of course, I include America in Western Europe for this purpose.
Mr Santayana holds—and in this I agree with him—that all our beliefs are matters of faith rather than reason. Applying the method of Cartesian doubt, he finds no reason to stop short at the ego, or any other existing thing; he arrives at last at "essence," which he holds to be indubitable but non-existent. The essence of a thing, in his system, is its character, apart from the fact that it exists; there are innumerable essences which do not belong to any existing thing, such as "golden mountain," "phoenix," "unicorn." There is no room for scepticism here; so he contends, because essence is free, not wedged tight among rivals, like the things that exist. But a philosophy which wholly ignores the existing world is somewhat unsatisfactory; moreover, like Hume's doubts, it must be abandoned when the philosopher leaves his study.
"Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through a long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness."
It is "animal faith" that prompts this exchange. By "animal faith" is meant something that we share with other animals: the belief of the cat in the mouse, and of the mouse in the cat; the habit of taking our fleeting perceptions as signs of "things," and generally those fundamental beliefs without which daily life is impossible. Animal faith can be purified and systematized by philosophy, but cannot be abolished except on pain of death. Accordingly, it is to be frankly accepted where it is indispensable.
"I propose now to consider what objects animal faith requires me to posit, and in what order; without for a moment forgetting that my assurance of their existence is only instinctive, and my description of their nature only symbolic."
The remainder of the book reports the deliverance of such animal faith as has survived in Mr Santayana.
There are three points in the system which fail to make themselves luminous to the present reviewer. The first is the treatment of essence as something divorced from existence and independent of it. The second is the belief in "substance." The third is the discernment of "spirit" as a separate realm of being. This last raises such thorny problems that it will have to be left on one side. The other two, however, can be briefly considered.
The distinction between essence and existence is one which, apart from terminology, is familiar to common sense. Hamlet is merely an essence; Julius Caesar has an essence, but was also an existing being. For this reason Hamlet was whatever Shakespeare chose that he should be; whereas Julius Caesar was what he was, and not whatever the historians chose to invent. We can abstract his essence by describing him, and leave it doubtful whether he existed, just as it is doubtful whether King Arthur existed. When we do this we are freed from the trammels of historical fact. It is doubtful, however, whether this is a logically correct account of what occurs. Let us take some simpler essence—say, a certain shade of colour. Wherever this shade of colour exists, it seems to be the essence itself that exists. All that we do when we call it an "essence" is to ignore its relations in space and time; it is the fact of having such relations that seems to be meant when anything is said to "exist." (This, at least, is one meaning of this very ambiguous word.) It may be suggested that all simple essences do actually exist, in the sense in which a shade of colour exists wherever there is a patch having that colour. As for complex essences, they will not be substantives, but a collection of propositions—true in the case of Caesar, false in the case of Hamlet. They become false through the prelude "once upon a time," which has to be supposed in every tale if no more definite time is indicated. It would take us too far into technical logic to elaborate this suggestion. But the question is vital to Mr Santayana; perhaps it is a case where his dismissal of "exact science" has its dangers.
The same may be said of "substance," which apparently means, in this book, much the same as what is ordinarily meant by "matter." Some acknowledgement is made that this notion is now often regarded as questionable, but arguments are advanced to show that nevertheless substance is unavoidable.
"If Heraclitus and modern physics are right in telling us that the most stable of the Pyramids is but a mass of events, this truth about substance does not dissolve substance into events that happen nowhere and to nothing. . . . If an event is to have individual identity and a place amongst other events, it must be a change which substance undergoes in one of its parts."
Again, we are told that events must be "things in flux" or "modes of substance." One is reminded of a famous argument of Kant in favour of substance. But when Mr Santayana speaks of those he is criticising as assuming events that happen "nowhere and to nothing," the word "nowhere" is unwarranted, and the words "to nothing" assume doctrines in logic and physics which demand a more elaborate justification than is to be found in this volume.
The book has all Mr Santayana's well-known merits: beauty of style, a truly philosophic temper, a wide survey of history and thought. It is full of sayings that are profound, delightful, or amusing. And it has the great merit of not pretending, by bad arguments, to establish doctrines which we accept on instinct, but cannot hope to prove.