The Life of Reason

The Life of Reason

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Title: The Life of Reason
Author: George Santayana
Release Date: February 14, 2005 [eBook #15000]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE LIFE OF REASON
The Phases of Human Progress
In Five Volumes
by
GEORGE SANTAYANA
h�� gar noy enhergeia z?h��
Dover Publication, Inc. New York

CONTENTS
Volume I. REASON IN COMMON SENSE
Volume II. REASON IN SOCIETY
Volume III. REASON IN RELIGION
Volume IV. REASON IN ART
Volume V. REASON IN SCIENCE

REASON IN COMMON SENSE
Volume One of "The Life of Reason"
GEORGE SANTAYANA
h�� gar noy enhergeia z?h��

This Dover edition, first published in 1980, is an unabridged republication of volume one of _The Life of Reason; or the Phases of Human Progress_, originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1905. This volume contains the general introduction to the entire five-volume series.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTECEDENTS Pages 1-32 Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.--Efficacious reflection is reason.--The Life of Reason a name for all practical thought and all action justified by its fruits in consciousness.--- It is the sum of Art.--It has a natural basis which makes it definable.--Modern philosophy not helpful.--Positivism no positive ideal.--Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and conditions.--Liberal theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural world.--The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals.--Heraclitus and the immediate.--Democritus and the naturally intelligible.--Socrates and the autonomy of mind.--Plato gave the ideal its full expression.--Aristotle supplied its natural basis.--Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of restatement.--Plato's myths in lieu of physics.--Aristotle's final causes.--Modern science can avoid such expedients.--Transcendentalism true but inconsequential.--Verbal ethics.--Spinoza and the Life of Reason.--Modern and classic sources of inspiration
REASON IN COMMON SENSE


CHAPTER I
--THE BIRTH OF REASON Pages 35-47 Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible with a chosen good.--Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent, indifferent.--In experience order is relative to interests which determine the moral status of all powers.--The discovered conditions of reason not its beginning.--The flux first.--Life the fixation of interests.--Primary dualities.--First gropings.--Instinct the nucleus of reason.--Better and worse the fundamental categories


CHAPTER II
--FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS Pages 48-63 Dreams before thoughts.--The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by physical forces.--Internal order supervenes.--Intrinsic pleasure in existence.--Pleasure a good, but not pursued or remembered unless it suffuses an object.--Subhuman delights.--Animal living.--Causes at last discerned.--Attention guided by bodily impulse


CHAPTER III
--THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS Pages 64-83 Nature man's home.--Difficulties in conceiving nature.--Transcendental qualms.--Thought an aspect of life and transitive.--Perception cumulative and synthetic.--No identical agent needed.--Example of the sun.--His primitive divinity.--Causes and essences contrasted.--Voracity of intellect.--Can the transcendent be known?--Can the immediate be meant?--Is thought a bridge from sensation to sensation?--Mens naturaliter platonica.--Identity and independence predicated of things


CHAPTER IV
--ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY Pages 84-117 Psychology as a solvent.--Misconceived r?le of intelligence.--All criticism dogmatic.--A choice of hypotheses.--Critics disguised enthusiasts.--Hume's gratuitous scepticism.--Kant's substitute for knowledge.--False subjectivity attributed to reason.--Chimerical reconstruction.--The Critique a work on mental architecture.--Incoherences.--Nature the true system of conditions.--Artificial pathos in subjectivism.--Berkeley's algebra of perception.--Horror of physics.--Puerility in morals.--Truism and sophism.--Reality is the practical made intelligible.--Vain "realities" and trustworthy "fictions"


CHAPTER V
--NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED Pages 118-136 Man's feeble grasp of nature.--Its unity ideal and discoverable only by steady thought.--Mind the erratic residue of existence.--Ghostly character of mind.--Hypostasis and criticism both need control.--Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas.--Spirit and sense defined by their relation to nature.--Vague notions of nature involve vague notions of spirit.--Sense and spirit the life of nature, which science redistributes but does not deny


CHAPTER VI
--DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS Pages 137-160 Another background for current experience may be found in alien minds.--Two usual accounts of this conception criticised: analogy between bodies, and dramatic dialogue in the soul.--Subject and object empirical, not transcendental, terms.--Objects originally soaked in secondary and tertiary qualities.--Tertiary qualities transposed.--Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities of perceived body--"Pathetic fallacy" normal, yet ordinarily fallacious.--Case where it is not a fallacy.--Knowledge succeeds only by accident.--Limits of insight.--Perception of character.--Conduct divined, consciousness ignored.--Consciousness untrustworthy.--Metaphorical mind.--Summary


CHAPTER VII
--CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE Pages 161-183 So-called abstract qualities primary.--General qualities prior to particular things.--Universals are concretions in discourse.--Similar reactions, merged in one habit of reproduction, yield an idea.--Ideas are ideal.--So-called abstractions complete facts.--Things concretions of concretions.--Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the order of nature.--Aristotle's compromise.--Empirical bias in favour of contiguity.--Artificial divorce of logic from practice.--Their mutual involution.--Rationalistic suicide.--Complementary character of essence and existence


CHAPTER VIII
--ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS Pages 184-204 Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical principle.--Concretions in discourse