Santayana's Selected Ideas.

The Selection below are from this work.

§1
the quality of a thing. §4 Thus beauty is constituted by the objectification of pleasure. It is pleasure objectified. §5 Grammar, philosophically studied, is akin to the deepest metaphysics, because in revealing the constitution of speech, it reveals the constitution of thought, and the hierarchy of those categories by which we conceive the world. §6 Now, it is the essential privilege of beauty to so synthesise and bring to a focus the various impulses of the self, so to suspend them to a single image, that a great peace falls upon that perturbed kingdom. §7 Our religion is the poetry in which we believe. §8 Intense contemplation disentangles the ideal from the idol of sense, and a purified will rests in it as in the true object of worship ... those profounder spirits ... who can rise continually, by abstraction from personal sensibility, into identity with the eternal [T]he exclusively subjective and human

department of imagination and emotion. §2 In removing consciousness, we have removed the possibility of worth. §3 Beauty is pleasure regarded as objects of rational life.

§9 [I]n studying the beauty of things ... that detachment of the phenomenon, that love of the form for its own sake, which is the secret of contemplative satisfaction. §10 All things, then, are in their right places and the universe is perfect above our querulous tears. Perfect? we may ask. But perfect from what point of view, in reference to what ideal? To its own? In that case the evil is not explained, it is forgotten; it is not cured, but condoned. We have surrendered the category of the better and the worse, the deepest foundation of life and reason; we have become mystics on the one subject on which, above all others, we ought to be men. §11 [T]he value of things is moral ... value lies in meaning, not in substance; in the ideal which things approach, not in the energy which they embody. §12 [G]ood and bad may be not existences but qualities which existences have only in relation to demands in themselves or in one another. §13 The universe can wish particular things only in so far as particular beings wish them; only in this relative capacity can it find things good, and only in its relative capacity can it be good for anything. §14 Instinct alone compels us to neglect and seldom to recall the irrelevant infinity of ideas. §15 We attribute independence to things in order to normalise their recurrence. We attribute essences to them in order to normalise their manifestations or constitution ... The one marks the systematic distribution of objects, the other their settled character.

§16 The several repetitions of one essence given in consciousness will tend at once to be neglected, and only the essence itself—the character shared by those sundry perceptions—will stand and become a term inmental discourse. §17 When consciousness first becomes cognitive it frames ideas; but when it becomes cognitive of causes, when it becomes practical, it perceives things. §18 Hume, in this respect more radical and satisfactory than Kant himself, saw with perfect clearness that reason was an ideal expression of instinct. §19 Now the body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation ... so that while the body feeds the mind the mind perfects the body, lifting it and all its natural relations and impulses into the moral world, into the sphere of interests and ideas. §20 Consciousness, then, is the expression of bodily life and the seat of all its values. §21 [W]e should say that matter determines the existence and distribution of mind, and mind determines the discovery and value of matter. §22 Consciousness is not itself dynamic ... It is ... the actuality of its random objects. §23 Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

§24 Life from its inception is simply some partial natural harmony raising its voice and bearing witness to its own existence; to perfect that harmony is to round out and intensify that life. §25 Eudaemonism is another name for wisdom ... Happiness is the only sanction of life §26 That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, where it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions. §27 Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it … In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. §28 We learn that in morals the infinite is a chimera, and that in accomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else. §29 The love of home is a human instinct. §30 If fighting were not a possible means of livelihood the bellicose instinct could never have established itself in any long-lived race. §31 It is not society’s fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation §32 [N]ature, in her haste to be fertile, wants to produce everything at once, and her distracted industry has brought about terrible confusion and waste and terrible injustice … She has imposed suffering on her creatures together with life; she has defeated her own objects and vitiated her bounty by letting every good do harm and bring evil in its train to some unsuspecting creature.

§33 Those will substantially remember and honour us who keep our ideals, and we shall live on in those ages whose experience we have anticipated. §34 Renunciation is the corner-stone of wisdom, the condition of all genuine achievement. §35 Philosophy may describe unreason, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them. §36 Nature neither is nor can be man’s ideal. §37 The existence of any evil—and if evil is felt it exists, for experience is its locus §38 Those whom a genuine spirituality has freed from the foolish enchantment of words and conventions and brought back to a natural ideal, have still another illusion to vanquish, one into which the very concentration and deepening of their life might lead them. This illusion is that they and their chosen interests alone are important or have a legitimate place in the moral world. Having discovered what is really good for themselves, they assume that the life is good for everybody … Spiritual men, in a word, may fall into the aristocrat’s fallacy ... After adopting an ideal it is necessary, therefore, without abandoning it, to recognise its relativity. §39 Most people think they have stuff in them for greater things than time suffers them to perform. To imagine a second career is a pleasing antidote for ill fortune; the poor soul wants another chance. §40 Unconsciousness of temporal conditions and of the very flight of time makes the thinker sink for a moment into identity with timeless objects.

§41 Matter has a double function in respect to existence; essentially it enables the spirit to be, yet chokes it incidentally. §42 Important truth is truth about something, not truth about truth. §43 A cosmos does not mean a disorder with which somebody happens to be well pleased; it means a necessity from which every one must draw his happiness. §44 [W]e exist through form, and the love of form is our whole real inspiration. §45 Contempt for mortal sorrows is reserved for those who drive with hosannas the Juggernaut car of absolute optimism. But against evils born of pure vanity and self-deception, against the verbiage by which man persuades himself that he is the goal and acme of the universe, laughter is the proper defence §46 What renders the image cognitive is the intent that projects it §47 A conscience is a living function, expressing a particular nature §48 A thing is seen under the form of eternity when all its parts or stages are conceived in their true relations, and thereby conceived together ... You are saved in that you lived well; saved not after you have stopped living well, but during the whole process.

§49 The realm of essence is merely the system or chaos of these fundamental possibilities, the catalogue of all exemplifiable natures; so that any experience whatsoever must tap the realm of essence, and throw the light of attention on one of its constituent forms. §50 [Shelley] might be called a panpsychist; especially as he did not subordinate morally the individual to the cosmos. He did not surrender the authority of moral ideals in the face of physical necessity, which is properly the essence of pantheism. §51 [A]n eternal possibility has no material power. §52 Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. §53 The immaturity of the German moralists appears in their conception that the good is life, which is what an irrational animal might say: whereas for a rational being the good is only the good part of life, that healthy, stable, wise, kind, and beautiful sort of life which he calls happiness. §54 This was at bottom Schopenhauer’s conviction. His great intuition, the corner-stone of his philosophy, was precisely the priority of automatism and instinct over the intellect. §55 Epicurean philosophers, who do not care at all about conquering the world. §56 America ... lacks the maturity, self-confidence, and refinement proper in older societies to the great body of Epicurean and disenchanted opinion ... [which is] the open way to nature and truth and a secure happiness.

§57 Nature is material, but not materialistic; it issues in life, and breeds all sorts of warm passions and idle beauties. §58 You may disregard your environment, you can not escape it; and your disregard of it will bring you moral impoverishment and some day unpleasant surprises. §59 Life is compelled to flow, and things must either flow with it or, like Lot’s wife, in the petrified gesture of refusal, remain to mock their own hope. §60 To come to an end is a virtue when one has had one’s day, seeing that in the womb of the infinite there are always other essences no less deserving of existence. §61 [T]o live in the moment is the only possible life if we consider the spiritual activity itself. §62 You cannot be everything. Why not be what you are? §63 We do not consent to be absurd, though absurd we are. §64 There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. §65 God—I mean the sum of all possible good §66 The eternal is always present §67 Imagination changes the scale of everything ... it is nature itself that imagines

§68 [E]verything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence. §69 This world is contingency and absurdity incarnate §70 Spirit is not an instrument but a realization, a fruition ... it is a contemplation of eternal things ... eternal things are the essences of all things here. §71 Spirituality, then, lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely as a vehicle for joy. §72 A spirit lodged in time, place, and an animal body needs to be mindful of existence ... It should study appearance for the sake of substance. §73 [E]ssences appear precisely when all inventions are rescinded and the irreducible manifest datum is disclosed ... This realm is no discovery of mine; it has been described, for instance, by Leibniz in two different ways; once as the collection of all possible worlds, and again as the abyss of non-existence ... The difficulty in discerning essences is simply the very real difficulty which the practical intellect has in abstaining from belief, and from everywhere thinking it finds much more than is actually given. §74 Ideas becomes beliefs only when by precipitating tendencies to action they persuade me that they are signs of things. §75 A datum is by definition a theme of attention, a term in passing thought, a visioned universal.

§76 In order to reach existences intent must transcend intuition, and take data for what they mean, not for what they are §77 It is not resemblance but relevance and closeness of adaptation that render a language expressive or an expression true. §78 Nothing given is either physical or mental ... it is just a quality of being. §79 These data of intuition are universals; they form the elements of such a description of the object as is at that time possible; they are never that object itself, nor any part of it. §80 If people reflected that the non-existent, as Leibniz says, is infinite, that it is everything, that it is the realm of essence ... They would not conceive it as the power or worth in things actual, but rather as the form of everything and anything. §81 Philosophy is nothing if not honest §82 [G]iven fact (meaning given essence plus thing posited), and perception (meaning intuition plus belief) §83 Substance is the speaker and substance is the theme; intuition is only the act of speaking or hearing, and the given essence is the audible word. §84 Substance is not more real than appearence, nor appearence more real than essence, but only differently real.

§85 For by spirit I understand simply the pure light or actuality of thought, common to all intuitions, in which essences are bathed if they are given. §86 [Intent] ... also implies spirit, and in spirit as man possesses it intent or intelligence is almost always the dominant element. For this reason I shall find it impossible, when I come to consider the realm of spirit, to identify spirit with simple awareness. §87 Spirit is accordingly qualified by the types of life it actualises, and is individuated by the occasions on which it actualises them. Each occasion generates an intuition numerically distinct, and brings to light an essence qualitatively different. §88 These natural opinions … are superposed in a biological order, the stratification of the life of reason. In rising out of passive intuition, I pass, by a vital constitutional necessity, to belief in discourse, in experience, in substance, in truth, and in spirit. §89 Pure spiritual life ... in which satisfaction becomes free from care, selfless, wholly actual and, in that inward sense, eternal. §90 Existence is contingent essentially. As things might just as well have been different §91 Either the private anarchy will ruin public order, or public order will cure private anarchy. §92 In a word, the principle of morality is naturalistic.

§93 Our mind by its animal roots ... and by its spiritual actuality ... is a language ... almost, we might say, a biological poetry. §94 [M]aterial elements form the organ, the stimulus, and probably also the object for those mental sensations or ideas. §95 The protest of human nature against the world and its oppressions is the strong side of utilitarianism, of the rebellion against irrational morality. §96 We might almost say that sure knowledge, being immediate and intransitive, is not real knowledge, while real knowledge, being transitive and adventurous, is never sure. §97 Calling substance unknowable, then, is like calling a drum inaudible, for the shrewd reason that what you hear is the sound and not the drum ... In the sense in which what is heard is the sound, hearing is intuition: in the sense in which what is heard is the drum, hearing is an instance of animal faith §98 Knowledge, then, is not knowledge of appearance, but appearances are knowledge of substance when they are taken for signs of it. §99 This spiritual hypostasis of life into intuition is ... actuality ... Is, applied to spirit or to any of its modes, accordingly means is actual; in other words, exists not by virtue of inclusion in the dynamic, incessant, and infinitely divisible flux of nature, but by its intrinsic incandescence, which brings essences to light and creates the world of appearances.

§100 A naturalist may distinguish his own person or self, provided he identifies himself with his body and does not assign to his soul any fortunes, powers, or actions save those of which his body is the seat and organ. He may recognize other spirits, human, animal, or divine, provided they are all proper to natural organisms figuring in the world of action §101 [I]f we wish to make a religion of love, after the manner of Socrates, we must take universal good, not universal power, for the object of our religion. This religion would need to be more imaginative, more poetical, than that of Spinoza, and the word God, if we still use it, would have to mean for us not the universe, but the good of the universe. §102 [W]hen power takes on the form of life, and begins to circle about and pursue some type of perfection, spirit in us necessarily loves these perfections, since spirit is aspiration become conscious, and they are the goals of life §103 Mind does not come to repeat the world but to celebrate it. §104 Mine was indeed a modest Epicurean humanism §105 Events have then given birth, in a living organism, to experience of events. My whole description of the spiritual life is thus an extension of my materialism and a consequence of it. §106 Existence is groundless; for if I thought I saw a ground for it, I should have to look for a ground for that ground, ad infinitum. I must halt content at … the brute fact.

§107 [T]hat matter is the only substance, power, or agency in the universe: and this, not that matter is the only reality, is the first principle of materialism. §108 I need not, like Kant, remove knowledge to make room for faith ... Instead … I would retain faith to give breath to knowledge: a faith imposed on every living creature by the exigences of action and justified in the natural interplay of each animal with his environment. §109 Nature, which was dynamic in matter then becomes actual in spirit; it becomes the sense and the knowledge of its own existence. And how should this moral actualisation of existence be less existent than the physical potentiality of it? §110 The epithet universal ... is confused with the epithet general. “John” is a general name for all Johns, but not for any essence ... [essences] are forms of being, not names for groups of particulars. §111 A worse confusion [than the previous one] ... when the word idea began to change its meaning and to designate not a datum but a perception, not an essence but a moment of spirit, not a universal but an event ... Nominalism then passed into psychologism. §112 Thus the whole Eleatic and mystically monistic tradition is open to the nominalist refutation, because it confuses Being with substance. Some persons, both nominalists and realists, seem congenitally unable to distinguish a particular from a universal, an occurrence from a character.

§113 The psyche, in my system, belongs to the realm of matter. Only the spirit is immaterial, being the moral fruition of existence. §114 Sensation, passion, and thought are therefore efficacious materially in so far as they are material, but not in so far as they are spiritual. §115 Pure spirit does not exist, spirit according to my theory being a function of the psyche ... [Spirit is] the witness and not the actor in the soul. The actor is the psyche in which the spirit lives; and it is this animal psyche that acts even in the spirit. The spirit merely perceives and endures that action, become for it emotion and light. §116 My materialism regards the mind as purely expressive; there is no mental machinery; the underground work is all done by the organism, in the psyche, or in what people call the unconscious mind. §117 [W]e believe because we act §118 Existence flows, and preserves continuity in place, time, and quantity, with specific potentialities. Specific potentialities existing at specific places and times are precisely what substance means. This is what Mill ought to have said, putting potentiality, a physical term, in the place of “possibility,” an irrelevant logical one §119 This is the view that nothing existent is necessary, but that nature and all events in nature are thoroughly contingent.

§120 [T[he absolute truth is undiscoverable just because it is not a perspective. §121 If omniscience were alone respectable, creation would have been a mistake. §122 [O]ur distinction and glory, as well as our sorrow, will have lain in being something in particular, and in knowing what it is. §123 If views can be more or less correct, and perhaps complementary to one another, it is because they refer to the same system of nature, the complete description of which, covering the whole past and the whole future, would be the absolute truth. §124 [T]he selective principle—is matter; yet whatever way it may turn, it must embrace one essence or another. §125 The flux flows by flowing through essences §126 If the fear of power—that is, of matter—was the beginning of wisdom for the natural man, the possesion of power cannot be the end of wisdom for the spirit §127 Essence is an eternal invitation to take form. §128 Universals are individual, not general: terms can be general only in use, never intrinsically; but the individual is an essence, not an existing particular. The latter is not a possible object of intuition and has no place in logic: it is some fragment of the flux of nature, posited in action, and by virtue of that status for ever external to thought.

§129 Contemplation becomes disinterested, but remain pleasant; for it is not the contemplation of any essences at random, but of those precisely to which a vital affinity drew the current of my blood. §130 Yet this trick of arresting the immediate is in one sense an interruption to life; it is proper only to poets, mystics, or epicureans §131 Nevertheless the forms which things assume, when they assume or suggest them, are clearer, more interesting, and more beautiful than their substance or their causes. It would be a pity if the abuse of logic hardened men’s hearts against poetry, and made them enemies to their own intellectual life ... their contemplative vocation. §132 Reverence is something due to antiquity, to power, to the roots and the moral supports of existence; it is therefore due really to the realm of matter only ... to ideal objects[:] [t]owards these the appropriate feeling is not reverence so much as love, enthusiasm, contemplative rapture. §133 What logic enables us to assert, therefore, is not that there is only one universe, but that each universe must be one. §134 In a contingent world necessity is a conspiracy of accidents. §135 This form of religion is more materialistic than materialism, since it assigns to matter a dignity which no profane materialist would assign to it, that of having moral authority over the hearts of men.

§136 What I call spirit is only that inner light of actuality or attention ... It is roughly the same thing as feeling or thought; it might be called consciousness. §137 It is the psyche that creates spirit in becoming materially sensitive to remote things; and it is this living natural individual that in generating spirit renders his vital unity moral §138 The first thing that spirit must renounce, if it would begin to be free, is any claim to domination ... Its essence is to be light, not to be power. §139 I regard all immaterial things, in so far as they exist or are true, as qualities, products, or ideal implications of the physical world. §140 [M]atter, as the region and method of power; essence, as the proper nature of appearances and relations; and spirit as the witness or moral sensibility that is subject to the double assault of material events and of dramatic illusions. There remains the realm of truth, which is the total history and destiny of matter and spirit, or the enormously complex essence which they exemplify by existing. §141 If I heartily love my transgressions, and am ready to stick to them for ever, I am spiritually one with them, no matter what causes or antecedents might explain my love according to the usual course of nature ... The will is free, not because it is uncaused historically, but because it is a moral choice and allegiance by its very nature.

§142 Thus Spinoza entitles his pantheistic cosmology Ethics. The good that God loves is meantime being realised in all things ... The logic of this is sound: yet there is something false in the pretence that it brings happiness and salvation. It brings resignation or self-contempt or despair; it brings a savage courage and pride; but it hardens the heart to human misery and drowns charity in lust. Better, much better, for human morality to be humane than to be sublime. §143 It is always the psyche that supports the spirit, and becomes spirit in her free moments. §144 Nature was indeed never directed towards making individuals happy. §145 [M]atter cannot be cheated §146 [S]pirit, which is essentially a witness and not an agent §147 [F]or what is greater than beauty, and what more beautiful than courage to live and to die freely, in one’s chosen way? §148 [B]eing a student was my vocation §149 To possess things and persons in idea is the only pure good to be got out of them; to possess them physically or legally is a burden and a snare. §150 Catholicism is paganism spiritualised: it is fundamentally naturalistic §151 Matter has been kind to me, and I am a lover of matter.

§152 That this spiritual life—meaning the entire conscious fruition of existence in perception, feeling, and thought—is the seat and judge of all values I take to be an axiom 153 Yet matter itself could not exist if it possessed no essence ... so that at the base of everything lies the eternal distinctness and variety of those forms which existence may wear §154 Are we not confusing logical character with natural existence, essences with facts? §155 Psychology is a crucial subject for the naturalist. §156 Psychology is crucial for systematic materialism … and to master psychology would be a prerequisite to an adequate materialism. §157 God is a name the world gives to the devil when he is victorious. §158 That consciousness is a lyric cry ... is something which must be felt, perhaps, to be understood; and they that have feeling, let them feel it. §159 Spirit is vision; unspirituality is attachment. §160 The contemplative force of spirit does not lie in not acting but in living when you act. §161 Every image, however, if animal faith is suspended in its presence, is an essence seen under the form of eternity.

§162 What is life but a form of motion … locomotion —the privilege of animals—is perhaps the key to intelligence. 163 [M]an, and all other animals, owe their intelligence to their feet. No wonder, then, that a peripatetic philosophy should be the best ... Thinking while you walk ... keeps you alert … you are careful to choose the right road, and if you take the wrong one, you are anxious and able to correct your error. §164 [T]he groundless is everywhere the ground of everything; the radical facts and habits in nature are perfectly arbitrary, and everything might originally have been different §165 Existence was seated in the particular, and intuition has found only the universal. §166 A logician may well hesitate to say of his ultimates that they exist. His ultimates are essences, which in fact do not exist, being only ideal terms, specific characters intrinsically possible, forms of being §167 [E]ssences are the first data we have, and things the first objects we mean §168 For the spirit rests in the good actualised §169 [C]onsciousness cannot be observed: it is observation of other things §170 Consciousness has the privilege of actuality

§171 Let me say something rash, and which in a materialist may sound strange, although in truth it is a corollary to materialism: all nature lives, cares, and is conscious, in as much as it is all concerned in the process which culminates at times in life, consciousness, and preference … The moral life of the world is late, local, ephemeral; but it is a natural expression of the world, and at a greater or less remove, an expression of the whole world; for the whole world has made just this sort of moral life possible and inevitable. Natural, surely, consciousness is; but it is immaterial. §172 Perceptions, feelings, emotions are not states of consciousness; they are states of the psyche involving consciousness of certain essences or things. §173 Everything in the spirit, if not spirit itself, is the work of matter §174 Fundamentally all the problems of human society are zoölogical problems.