THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

370
THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
phases of human progress/* all the pageant of man's interests and history,
to the scrutiny of reason.
He is modest enough nevertheless; he proposes no new philosophy, but
only an application of old philosophies to our present life; he thinks the
first philosophers were the hest; and of them all he ranks highest Democritus
11 and Aristotle; he likes the plain blunt materialism of the first, and
the unruffled sanity of the second. "In Aristotle the conception of human
nature is perfectly sound: everything ideal has a natural basis, and every-
thing natural an ideal development His ethics, when thoroughly digested
and weighed, will seem perfectly final. The Life of Reason finds there its
classic explication." And so, armed with the atoms of Democritus and
the golden mean of Aristotle, Santayana faces the problems of contempo-
rary life.
In natural philosophy I am a decided materialist apparently the only one
living.
. . , But I do not profess to know what matter is in itself. . . .
I wait for the men of science to tell me. . . . But whatever matter may be,
I call it matter boldly, as I call my acquaintances Smith and Jones without
knowing their secrets.12
He will not permit himself the luxury of pantheism, which is merely a
subterfuge for atheism; we add nothing to nature by calling it God; "the
word nature is poetical enough; it suggests sufficiently the generative and
controlling function, the endless vitality and changeful order of the world
in which I live.'* To be forever clinging to the old beliefs in these refined
and denatured forms is to be like Don Quixote, tinkering with obsolete
armor. Yet Santayana is poet enough to know that a world quite divested
of deity is a cold and uncomfortable home. "Why has man's conscience
in the end invariably rebelled against naturalism and reverted in some
form or other to a cultus of the unseen?" Perhaps "because the soul is
akin to the eternal and ideal"; it is not content with that which is, and
yearns for a better life; it is saddened by the thought of death, and clings
to the hope of some power that may make it permanent amid the sur-
rounding flux. But Santayana concludes, bluntly: "I believe there is
nothing immortal. ... No doubt the spirit and energy of the world is
what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it
passes through us; and, cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege
is to have perceived it as it moved." 18
Mechanism is probably universal; and though "physics cannot account
for that minute motion and pullulation in the earth's crust of which
human affairs are a portion," the best method in psychology is to suppose
that mechanism prevails even in the inmost recesses of the soul. Psycho!
^He makes Democritus the hero of his latest volume, Dialogues in Limbo,
M . and A. F.3 pp. viii and vii.
**Ibid.9 pp. 237 and 271 ; R. in C. ., p. 189; Winds of Doctrine, p. 199.