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The Works of George Santayana Volume VI, Book One Marianne S. Wokeck, Editor William G. Holzberger, Textual Editor Kristine W. Frost, Associate Editor Johanna E. Resler, Assistant Editor David E. Spiech, Assistant Textual Editor Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., Founding and Consulting Editor
This volume is dedicated, with thanks, to Mairi
Santayana’s drawing from Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft Image used by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University AC9 Sa591 Zz878k
George Santayana’s Marginalia A Critical Selection Book One: Abell — Lucretius
Edited and with an Introduction by John McCormick Kristine Walters Frost, Associate Editor
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
© 2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Introduction,” John McCormick. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopy, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Santayana, George, 1863–1952. George Santayana’s marginalia : a critical selection / edited and with an introduction by John McCormick. 2 v. — (The works of George Santayana ; v. 6) Includes bibliographical references. Contents: Bk. 1. Abell–Lucretius — bk. 2. McCord–Zeller. ISBN 978-0-262-01629-2 (v. 1 : hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-262-01630-8 (v. 2 : hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy. I. McCormick, John, 1918– II. Title. B945.S2 2011 191—dc22 2010052839 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48 1984. ∞ ™
The Santayana Edition Marianne S. Wokeck Kristine W. Frost Martin A. Coleman Johanna E. Resler David E. Spiech Elizabeth Garmen John Joachim
Director and Editor Assistant Director and Associate Editor Associate Editor Assistant Editor Assistant Textual Editor Graduate Intern Graduate Intern
Editorial Board Hugh J. Dawson Matthew C. Flamm Morris Grossman Angus Kerr-Lawson John Lachs Richard C. Lyon
Douglas M. MacDonald John M. Michelsen Andrew J. Reck Beth J. Singer Glen Tiller Henny Wenkart
Consultants Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. William G. Holzberger
The Works of George Santayana I II III IV V
Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography, 1986 The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Æsthetic Theory, 1988 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 1989 The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, 1994 The Letters of George Santayana Book One: 1868–1909, 2001 Book Two: 1910–1920, 2002 Book Three: 1921–1927, 2002 Book Four: 1928–1932, 2003 Book Five: 1933–1936, 2003 Book Six: 1937–1940, 2004 Book Seven: 1941–1947, 2006 Book Eight: 1948–1952, 2008 VI George Santayana’s Marginalia: A Critical Selection Book One: Abell — Lucretius, 2011 Book Two: McCord — Zeller, 2011
Contents Book One: Abell — Lucretius Introduction Editorial Practice List of Authors
xi xv xix
MARGINALIA
3
Introduction John McCormick In his essay “Imagination,” George Santayana wrote, “There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text.”1 That remark might serve to define the quality of a great many of the thousands of marginalia that Santayana never scrawled, but neatly and legibly entered, in the hundreds of books he acquired over the course of a long lifetime. It is not that he was given to buying dull books, but that his comments serve to illuminate, to defy, to negate, or interestingly to expand his authors’ thought in routine or surprising or frequently delightful ways. At the same time, the marginalia offer a unique way into the processes of Santayana’s mind, a measure of his undoubted originality as philosopher, imaginative writer, critic, essayist, and as human being. We look to marginalia for indications of a writer’s development or changes of mind, for a relaxed statement in place of public formality, for unsuspected moods, passions, or enthusiasms, and for otherwise imperceptible traces of influence, prejudice, or omission. Santayana’s comments offer all that and more, even though he often insisted in letters that his thought did not develop; his claim is borne out for the most part when one pursues the marginalia over a period of years. The process at work is accretion resulting in changes of emphasis or definition of terms (see “essence,” early and late) rather than fundamental change. During his years at Harvard as student and lecturer, another kind of marginalia from the ruminative or critical occurs in passages clearly representing study or lecture notes. Such notes might be compared to a concert pianist’s interpretation of a familiar score, so that we hear it anew and vividly: thus the notes on Kant’s work. In another sense, the marginalia can be seen as Santayana’s stylebook; they show us his daily linguistic discipline, his practice in diction that salts his cogent prose. Santayana’s marginal notes are frequently surprising as his reactions change in the course of a long text. By turns he approves (although rarely), he is quirky, always critical, sometimes slangy, literary, frivolous,
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and sometimes bitchy: only that word will do. He shows full control of the American language despite his preference for British spellings. Often a generalized comment, thought, or meditation occurs on the page, set in motion by the subject at large: e.g., Bultmann, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition (The History of the Synoptic Tradition) 11 p 110 (1:121). The effort here, then, has been to list alphabetically by author all the books extant that belonged to Santayana; to indicate where each book is located and how extensively annotated; and to reproduce a sufficient number of annotations to be of use to the reader or student of Santayana’s thought, his art, and his life. The professional writer on Santayana will of course want to go directly to the sources listed: no simple task. The bibliographical listings, as complete as can be ascertained, can answer with reasonable certitude when Santayana read a given text, from date of publication, from changes in his penmanship as he aged, and from secondary sources. In maturity, his habit was to order books from Blackwell’s, Oxford, or from the United States through his nephew and business agent, George Sturgis, or through his publisher in the United States, Charles Scribner’s Sons. He read books so ordered at once. The many books sent by aspiring writers he acknowledged courteously upon reception, so that he would not necessarily have to read them. Santayana led a wandering life from 1911, when he determined to retire from Harvard, to 1940, when he settled in Rome and where he died in 1952. As he acquired books in those peripatetic years, he would deposit them with his lifelong friend Charles Augustus Strong, first in Strong’s quarters in Paris, then in his villa, Le Balze, in Fiesole, Italy. After Santayana’s death, his literary executor, Daniel Cory, who had inherited the library, sold off many of the books in lots to various libraries in the United States, and one lot of some 300 to Blackwell’s, Oxford, which firm in turn sold them to the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario. Because of the war and its aftermath, however, Cory had no access to Santayana’s books in Strong’s villa. Strong died in 1939; the Germans were believed to have occupied the villa and to have destroyed the contents. In 1979 Augustus Strong’s daughter, Margaret de Cuevas de Larrain, presented the villa, its contents quite undestroyed, to Georgetown University, and Santayana’s part of the library, insofar as it can be identified, has now been deposited in the Special Collections 2 section of the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University. Santayana’s wit is apparent in all his many kinds of writing, but his humor, his occasional outcry at a writer’s folly, his concern as great for
Introduction
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the niceties of English prose as for the placing of Greek accent marks, these the marginalia indicate in abundance. Reputed to be isolated, antisocial, even a recluse, although he had no such attributes, Santayana nevertheless, living by choice in celibate solitude, spent a great deal of time talking to, and talking back to, a wonderful miscellany of writers, from Spinoza to Kant to J. S. Mill to Bertrand Russell and Ezra Pound. After retiring from his Harvard professorship in 1912 and moving back to Europe, Santayana persisted in his habit of marking up the books he was reviewing or texts on subjects he was writing about. Accordingly, the present compilation might well be entitled Santayana’s Critical Marginalia. If only the flavor of those remarks registers as they deserve it should, the edition in hand will have succeeded in fulfilling the editor’s ambitions for it, and the volume will not appear as a mere compromise with the many volumes which would be necessary to publish Santayana’s marginalia in their entirety. Marginalia are customarily published in one of two ways: either in multivolume sets, faithful to every utterance and punctuation mark of the given writer; or in single volumes embracing all the marginalia of a given 3 writer on a single work. The volume in hand, obviously, does neither. It is rather an attempt to accommodate the financial realities of the day, which rule out multivolume sets, without sacrificing a reasonably extensive and usable compilation. In the same vein, marginalia already published includes Paul Grimley Kuntz’s edition of Santayana’s Harvard dissertation, Lotze’s System of Philosophy, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1971, Appendix, 95105, and Kuntz, “Santayana and Lotze,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Summer 1972, 115–21. In a long work occupying five years’ attention, the editor has committed many an undetected error, for which he alone is responsible. He is more indebted than brief mention can adequately express to Santayana’s former literary executrix, Mrs. Margaret Cory, for permission to print the marginalia; to Mrs. Donna Hanna-Calvert, former Associate Editor of the Santayana Edition; Brenda Bridges, former Editorial Assistant; and Johanna E. Resler, Assistant Editor. Very particular thanks go to Nicholas Scheetz and his associates in the Special Collections Division, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, and to Mrs. Susan Saunders Bellingham, Special Collections Librarian, University of Waterloo; to Susan Halpert, Reference Librarian, Houghton Library, Harvard University; to Mr. Bernard Crystal and his colleagues in the Rare Book
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Introduction
and Manuscript Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University; to the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; to the librarians of the University of York, Yorkshire; to the founding General Editor of the Santayana Edition, Professor Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., and not least to the tireless and precise work of Kristine W. Frost, Associate Editor of this volume. York, U.K. September 2007.
1
Soliloquies in England (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 124. Early lists of books in the villa presumably belonging to Santayana were in fact Strong’s; such is the opinion of the librarians at the Lauinger Library, and the editor’s. 3 E.g., George Remington Havens, Voltaire’s Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau (Columbus: The Ohio State University, 1933). 2
Editorial Practice The following enumeration of pages does not reflect the relative importance of a given work sub specie aeternitatis; the numeration of marginalia in each volume indicates only the degree of attention that Santayana paid to that specific work. The selected texts from Santayana’s personal library are listed in alphabetical order by author (or by title if the work is “edited by” rather than authored) and then, most often, by date of publication. Editions of standard writers are listed by that writer, not by the editor; e.g., Lucretius, but not Munro, editor of the edition in question. Pseudonymous works are listed by pseudonym, followed by the author’s authentic name. A work in two or more volumes is most often treated as one book; there are a few exceptions. A headnote for each text includes the author’s name in bold face type, the title of the work in italics, brief publication information (place and date), library location of the text, and the number of marginalia contained within the text (or by an indication of lack of importance in the editor’s view). Publisher or printer is not included in the headnote. Anonymous works are listed alphabetically by title. Not all marginalia within a given text have been selected for inclusion in this edition. Text is chosen for content and style. Paraphrase occurs to save space. Crucial phrases or entire passages are given in the original language other than English, followed by translation in a footnote. Translations, which are literal, not literary, are the editor’s, unless otherwise indicated. Each marginalia from a particular text is numbered consecutively, followed by the page number(s) and any other information regarding Santayana’s markings (‘marked’, ‘marked Z’, ‘underlined’, etc.) or placement (top, bottom). Santayana’s spelling and usage is maintained throughout; e.g., “every thing” (two words) for “everything.” He favored British spelling after his visit to Frank Russell’s establishment in 1887. Slips of the pencil are reproduced. His punctuation, which he knew to be uncertain in English, caused him to use colons where correctness would indicate semicolons. Single or double quotation marks are reproduced as Santayana wrote them; he was inconsistent.
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Editorial Practice
Flyleaf matter is indicated as such, but presentation messages are not considered to be marginalia. Marginalia within Santayana’s own works are not included here, since they are incorporated in the complete critical edition. Key to location of texts: Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City Georgetown Special Collections, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Harvard Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts Le Balze Georgetown University, Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Italy Texas Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin Waterloo Rare Book and Manuscript Room, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario Key to symbols and typefaces within the edition: The reproduced text taken from a particular book is in regular tenpoint typeface from margin to margin. It is not within quotation marks, but material quoted within the selected text is so marked. Literal translations (in place of reproduced text) from another language into English are in italic typeface from margin to margin. When the text is reproduced in its original language, a translation is given in a footnote, in italic. Text which has been paraphrased by the editor is placed within double vertical bars || … || and aligned from margin to margin. Editorial comments are a smaller, nine-point size text within square brackets [ … ] and block indented. Comments or clarifying words within the text or marginalia also are placed in square brackets and in the smaller font size. Santayana’s marginalia, which normally follow a block of text, are in bold ten-point typeface and block indented. In the marginalia the bracketed question mark [?] indicates a questionable reading of Santayana’s hand.
Editorial Practice
xvii
Footnotes immediately follow the text to which they refer within each numbered entry. Any underlined text reflects underlining done by Santayana. A single slash through a character, as well as strikethroughs and insertions (marked by inferior carets) within the reproduced text or within the marginalia itself, reflect Santayana’s markings. The term ‘marked’ indicates that Santayana drew a vertical line in the margin next to the lines of text reproduced (‘doubly marked’ indicates two vertical lines). ‘Marked X’ indicates that Santayana wrote an ‘X’ in the margin next to the text. ‘Marked Z’ indicates that he drew a wavy vertical line (probably for emphasis) next to the lines of text. ‘Underlined Z’ indicates a wavy horizontal line drawn under a word or words. The “List of Authors” on the following pages informs the reader of authors of books in Santayana’s personal library which the editor has included in this volume, whether or not they contained marginalia. Authors of books in Santayana’s library which are not included in this volume are noted at the end of the list. Book Two of George Santayana’s Marginalia contains an appendix with a complete listing of all of the works known to have been in “George Santayana’s Library.”
List of Authors Abell, Walter Acton, Harold Adam, Antoine Adam, James Aiken, Conrad Ainger, Arthur Campbell Alain [Emile Auguste Chartier] Albert, Thomas Alonso, Dámaso Amery, L[eopold] S[tennett] Ames, Van Meter Archer-Hind, R. D. [Editor] Aristotle Asín Palacios, Miguel Atkinson, Brooks Babbitt, Irving Bacon, Francis Bailey, Cyril Bailly, Auguste Bainville, Jacques Balfour, Arthur James Barbusse, Henri Baring, Maurice Barnes, William Bartlett, Alice Hunt Bates, Ernest Sutherland Bede, Cuthbert Belgion, Montgomery Benda, Julien Benn, Gottfried Berenson, Bernard Bergson, Henri Berkeley, George Beruete, Aureliano de Bevan, Edwyn Robert Bewick, Thomas Birnbaum, Martin Bishop, Elizabeth
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List of Authors
Blanshard, Brand [Editor] Bolaffio, Carlo Bolton, Isabel Bradley, F[rancis] H[erbert] Breasted, James Henry Buchheim, Karl A. [Editor] Buchler, Justus Bullett, Gerald William Bülow, Prince Bernhard von Bultmann, Rudolf Karl Burgard, Raymond Burnett, Whit and Charles E. Slatkin [Editors] Butcher, Samuel Henry Butler, Bishop Joseph Butler, Richard Caird, Edward Callimachus Calverton, V[ictor] F[rancis] Campbell, Lewis Campion, George C. Camus, Albert Carco, Francis Cardozo, Benjamin N. Carus, Paul Castelli, Enrico Castelnau, Jacques Thomas de Cavalcanti, Guido Céline, Louis-Ferdinand Chapman, John Jay Chaucer, Geoffrey Chénier, André Marie Churchill, Winston Clemens, Cyril Clifford, William Kingdon Coates, Adrian Cole, G[eorge] D[ouglas] H[oward] Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Collingwood, R[obin] G[eorge] Collis, John Stewart Colony, Horatio Confucius Corneille, Pierre Corwin, Norman Lewis Cramb, J[ohn] A[dam] Crisógono de Jesús Sacramentado
List of Authors Croce, Benedetto Crosfield, Thomas Cuneo, Niccolò Dante Alighieri Dasgupta, Surendranath Datta, Dhirendra Mohan Davenport, Russell W. Delphic Club Denifle, Henri Dewey, John Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes Dillaway, Newton Douglas, Norman Ducasse, C[urt] J[ohn] Dudley, Owen Francis du Maurier, Daphne Dunn, Robert Dunning, Ralph Cheever Durant, Will[iam] [ James] Duron, Jacques Dyer, Louis Eastman, Max [Forrester] Eaton, Charles Edward Eddington, Arthur Stanley Edman, Irwin Edwards, Jonathan Einstein, Albert [Editor] Eliot, T[homas] S[tearns] English Institute Ewing, A[lfred] C[yril] Falconi, Carlo Fargue, Léon-Paul Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Ficke, Arthur Davison Fielding, Henry Fisch, Max H. [Editor] Fletcher, Phineas Foote, Henry Wilder Frank, Philipp Frazer, James George Freud, Sigmund Frost, Robert Fuller, Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fülöp-Miller, René Furon, Raymond
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List of Authors
Garbe, Richard von García Marruz, Fina Gavin, Frank Gibson, James Gide, André Gioberti, Vincenzo Giraudoux, Jean Gobineau, Joseph Arthur (Comte de) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Gollancz, Victor Goodman, J[ack] R[awlin] Gordon, Hirsch Loeb Gorer, Geoffrey Gray, Thomas Green, Thomas Hill Gregory, Alyse Groethuysen, Bernhard Guénon, René Gumpert, Martin Guzzo, Augusto Hadfield, James Arthur Hamilton, William Harcourt, Robert d’ Harnack, Adolf von Heard, Gerald Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Heidegger, Martin Hemingway, Ernest Henrich, Edith Herodotus Hersch, Jeanne Hertzberg, Gustav Friedrich Hilliard, A. L. Hirn, Yrjö Hispanic Society of America Hogg, James Holmes, Pauline Holt, Edwin Bissell Homer Hone, William [Editor] Hook, Sidney Housman, A. E. Hovelaque, Emile Husserl, Edmund Inge, William Ralph
List of Authors Irazusta, Julio Jackson, Henry James, Alice James, William Jeans, James Hopwood Jeffers, Robinson Jerrold, Douglas Jiménez, Juan Ramón Johnson, Lionel Juan de la Cruz Kallen, Horace Meyer Kant, Immanuel Keith, Arthur Berriedale Kettner, Frederick Keynes, John Maynard Keyserling, Graf Hermann A. Kinney, Mary Cyril Edwin Knowles, David Knox, H. V. Korean American Cultural Association La Batut, Guy de [Editor] La Fontaine, Jean de Lamont, Corliss Langstaff, John Brett Lecky, William E. H. Le Dantec, Félix Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Le Roy, Edouard Levy, Hermann Lietzmann, Hans Lindsay, A[lexander] D[unlop] Lippmann, Walter Locke, John Loisy, Alfred Firmin Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Lotze, Hermann Lowell, Robert Lucian [Lucianus Samosatensis] Lucretius [Titus Lucretius Carus] McCord, David McCulloch, Hugh Machiavelli, Niccolo Macran, Frederick Walter Mallon, James J. and E. C. T. Lascelles Manacorda, Guido
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List of Authors
Mann, Thomas Manning, Hugo Maraini, Fosco Marchant, James [Editor] Maritain, Jacques Marsh, Gerald Masson, John Maxwell, William Mayberry, George [Editor] Maycock, A. L. Medici, Lorenzo de’ Meissner, Erich Meyer, Kuno Michelangelo Buonarroti Mill, John Stuart Millevoye, Charles Hubert Mins, Henry F. Moncrieff, Malcolm M. Montague, William P. Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat More, Paul Elmer Morison, Samuel Eliot Morley, Christopher Motwani, Kewal Müller, Gustav Emil Mumford, Lewis Munitz, Milton Karl Munro, Thomas Murchie, Guy Murry, John Middleton Neilson, W. A. and A. H. Thorndike Nevill, Ralph Nicolas, Marius Paul Nock, Albert Jay Ortega y Gasset, José Otto, Emil Peers, E. Allison Péguy, Charles Pierre Perry, Ralph Barton Pestalozzi Foundation of America Petrie, William Matthew Flinders Phelps, William Lyon Pilar, Princess of Bavaria and Desmond Chapman-Hutton Pizá, Pedro Antonio Plato
List of Authors Pound, Ezra Loomis Powys, Llewelyn Prezzolini, Giuseppe Privitera, Joseph Frederic Prokosch, Frederic Proust, Marcel Quinn, David B. Read, Carveth Reid, Thomas Reves, Emery Richards, I[vor] A[rmstrong] Rickert, Heinrich Rideau, Emile Rimbaud, Arthur Roback, Abraham A. Rolland, Romain Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Royal Asiatic Society Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom Royce, Josiah Runes, Dagobert D. Rush, Benjamin Russell, Bertrand Russell, David Russell, John Francis Stanley Salter, William MacKintire Sankaracarya Santayana, George Sarolea, Charles Scheler, Max Schilpp, Paul Arthur [Editor] Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. Schneider, Herbert W. Schneider, Robert E. Schofield, William H. Schopenhauer, Arthur Sebastian, Fannie B. Seidenberg, Roderick Sellars, Wilfrid and John Hospers [Editors] Semon, Richard Shaw, George Bernard Sitwell, Osbert Slochower, Harry Smart, Charles Allen
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List of Authors
Smith, Logan Pearsall Smith, Robinson Smith, Thomas V. Sophocles Soutar, William Spaulding, Edward G. Spencer, Herbert Spender, Stephen Spengler, Oswald Spinoza, Benedict Spinoza Society Spring, Henry Powell Stalin, Joseph Stanley, Carleton W. Stearns, Harold Sterne, Laurence Stevenson, Robert Louis Stickney, Trumbull Stone, Christopher Strachey, Giles Lytton Strong, Charles Augustus Sturt, Henry Cecil Sturzo, Luigi Surmelian, Leon Z. Swift, Jonathan Thalheimer, August Thomas, Lowell Jackson Thomas Aquinas Thompson, Anna Boynton Thompson, Francis Thompson, Samuel Martin Thoreau, Henry David Toy, Crawford Howell Toynbee, Arnold Joseph Twain, Mark Umfazi [Clara Urquhart] Urquhart, Clara [Editor] Vaihinger, Hans Valéry, Paul Valois, Georges Vercel, Roger Vergil [Publius Vergilius Maro] Vidal, Gore Viereck, Peter Vivante, Leone
List of Authors von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang Walden, Selma Warren, Edward Perry [pseud. ALR] Waterman, Charles Watson, John Broadus Weber, Alfred Weyl, Hermann Wheelock, John Hall Whitehead, Alfred North Whitman, Walt Williams, Oscar [Editor] Williams, William Carlos Winchester College Archaeological Society Woodbridge, Frederick J. E. Woods, James Haughton Worth, Claud Alley Wycherley, William Young, George Malcolm Zeller, Eduard Authors not included in the volume: Alexander, Samuel Bonitz, Hermann Brooks, Van Wyck Drake, Durant Fadiman, Clifton Fairbanks, Arthur Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de Huysman, J.-K. Lutoslawski, Wincenty Manrique, Jorge Noli, Fan Stylian Owen, John
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Marginalia: Abell — Lucretius
Santayana’s marginalia from Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft Image used by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University AC9 Sa591 Zz878k
Walter Abell
Representation and Form: A Study of Aesthetic Values in Representational Art New York: 1936. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[In his preface, Abell acknowledges “a debt of gratitude to Professor Santayana,” who has influenced his point of view.]
Harold Acton
Memoirs of an Aesthete London: 1948. Waterloo. One marginale.
[Acton quotes Santayana on pp. 384–85.]
“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.”1 1
Soliloquies in England (Scribner’s, 1922), 16.
Antoine Adam
Le Vrai Verlaine: essai psychanalytique Paris: 1936. Waterloo. Nine marginalia.
1 p 16, marked
||A mother’s love is necessary, but a father’s less so. The absence of a father is a catastrophe, for a son needs a father’s example. Thus lacking a father for a model, and|| brought up by a very tender mother, Baudelaire was a woman. [A significant marking in light of Santayana’s cold relationship to his mother and his warmer regard for his father.] 2 p 16, marked
[Virtually the same comment as 1 p 16 above on Verlaine.] 3 p 36, marked
||Adam has shown how Verlaine could be obsessed by a woman’s body and at the same time homosexual or heterosexual.|| 4 pp 63–64, marked
||Regarding Verlaine’s two mistresses, Philomène Boudin and Eugenie Krantz: in the Odes in honor of Philomène, she betrays him, tells him of her lapses, and they weep together.|| Verlaine has religious admiration for this dirty woman, a wounded Amazon in her flagrant indiscretions. 5 p 103, underlined and translated
||An image of the sea describes the mother,|| comme aux premiers jours du monde. Herrlich wie am ersten Tag.1 Also Childe Harold 1
As lovely as on the first day.
1:4
George Santayana’s Marginalia
6 p 105, marked
[Verlaine’s irony:]
It is ambiguous, it cannot be simple, spontaneous, natural. At base it is dual. One part of his being tries to live, to love, and to believe. But a quite different part refuses to follow, and objectively observes efforts it knows to be in vain. You see the end before the beginning. 7 p 108
||A despairing letter from Verlaine to his wife tries nevertheless to reassure her. Such phrases attest to Verlaine’s obscure awareness [conscience] of being determined by exterior forces, superior to his will.|| Is there anyone who is not? 8 p 113
||It is universally accepted that the great artist is he who creates. The entirely healthy man does not have to create, because|| reality is given to him all complete. He sees it, and he lives it. He does not dream of re-ordering it. N.B. 9 p 119
||The theory of art as healing to wounds or illness: Dostoievsky’s epilepsy and his use of it in The Idiot.|| No art would ensue if there were no positive gifts. The conflict only renders the result more tragic. James Adam
The Religious Teachers of Greece Edinburgh: 1908. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Conrad Aiken
The Kid [Edinburgh]: J. Lehmann, 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Conrad Aiken
The Divine Pilgrim Athens, Georgia: 1949. Waterloo. Five marginalia.
[Aiken writes two explanatory prefaces to his verse.] 1 p 41
Spirit understands all but connives at nothing Witness but not accomplice— Confusion of transcendental spirit—equally ready for every possible world of fancy, and the human psyche which
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1:5
has a specific nature, sensuous and rational, which it must respect or else go mad with pain or contradiction—which is the “divine” pilgrim. 2 p 101
[In the preface to “The House of Dust”:]
||Implicit is the theory|| that in the evolution of man’s consciousness, ever widening and deepening and subtilizing his awareness, and in his dedication of himself to this supreme task, man possesses all that he could possibly require in the way of a religious credo: when the half-gods go, the gods arrive: he can, if he only will, become divine. [After “divine”:] dreaming. [In margin:] N.B. not clarifying or making truer. Arthur Campbell Ainger
Memories of Eton Sixty Years Ago London: 1917. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[Useful to Santayana for the Etonian passages in The Last Puritan.]
Alain [Emile Auguste Chartier]
Propos sur le Christianisme Paris: 1924. Waterloo. Eight marginalia.
1 p 53 marked
||A quartet of Beethoven becomes clearer year by year, for the analyses of generations ensure that future glory.|| Rot 2 p 113
||The idea that the dead pray for the living derives from the notion of dead heroes as wiser and better than the living.|| This is true only virtually: it is not historical. 3 p 147
||Alain finds a kind of dualism in Pascal, no meeting of object and idea.|| This is the travers1 of Alain. He doesn’t see the harmony of mind with its ground in objects. 1
Shortcoming.
4 p 162
||One can aid others only through self-government, and only so.|| Quaker?
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George Santayana’s Marginalia
Alain [E. A. Chartier]
Le Citoyen contre les pouvoirs Paris: 1926. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Alain [E. A. Chartier]
Les Idées et les âges Paris: 1927. Volume II. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
[Two surviving marginalia; others were erased.] 1 p 216 marked
||Liberty is hidden|| in the center of obedience, governing the inferior order instead of troubling it. [Santayana agreed with that in Dominations and Powers (written over a period of forty years).]
Alain [E. A. Chartier]
Propos de politique
Paris: 1934 (7th edition). Waterloo. Forty-three marginalia. [Virtually all Santayana’s comments on Alain’s politics underline his extreme conservatism of the 1930s and duplicate views found in his letters of the period.] 1 pp 12–13
||Strong government displeases; weak but sufficient government pleases the citizen.|| Bad government the only salvation. 2 p 14
||Alain’s citizen who wants few controls, but limited, weak government.|| This citizen is a ready-made unit, with ready-made interests. Are they “necessary”? 3 p 115
||Alain writes about the nature of tyranny, then turns to the Dreyfus affair:|| Those who tyrannized over Dreyfus showed an impudent scorn for the judgment of the majority. N.B. Paradise of anarchy 4 p 128
||Alain debates Right versus Left with respect to Pilate, and to Dreyfus,1 using the phrase,|| héros de l’intelligence. Alain thinks only the Left can breathe the air of truth because he has never conceived any but common pleasures. He has a vulgar heart.
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[Opposite “héros de l’intelligence”:]
You confuse disillusion with disloyalty. The truth will never give you a desire: how then should it take away your loyalty? It would be too cynical to say that the truth discouraged all pursuit of the good. 1 The marginalia on pages 115 and 128 are two of only three references to the Dreyfus affair known to me in all Santayana’s writings. (See also marginalia in Bergson, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 36 p 75.)
5 p 131
[On Comte’s idea of order in society:]
Sound positivism: but look out for the sensualism that will slip in. 6 p 134
[Concerning Rodin’s bronze, “The Thinker”:]
||Erase the inscription Thinker, write in Slave, and no one would be surprised.|| It is the slave who thinks, and the master who plays. This is plain falsehood: but you mean that the true thinker respects matter and art, and speaks by their leave. 7 p 134
Thought awakens brighter from a hard bed. This is eloquent: but consider the artisan philosophers Socrates, Spinoza, and then the aristocrats Plato, Buddha, Descartes. More soundness in the humble, but no more thought. 8 p 207, underlined
[Alain quotes Stendhal:]
“La nation s’enivre de gloire; adieu la liberté!”1 What couldn’t a Parisian do under Napoleon (I or III)? 1
The nation is drunk on glory; farewell liberty!
9 p 252
The people is king; the general will is the law; and the general law is infallible, because it implies that what is imposed on one is imposed on all […] but the general will expresses itself in all justice in the moment of the vote. The ideal would be a daily vote in the agora by acclamation. 10 p 254
[On the absence of radicals in Europe:]
[…] they are scorned, but they supply to politics a necessary ballast. A radical is one who is highly sceptical, he believes in nothing, and he is certain that no matter how agreeable a belief may be, it involves complete injustice and all possible evil. Quote. Paradise of anarchy. [Again.]
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11 p 290
||Alain would have rustics in wooden shoes to supervise the work of government agents.|| This idea is fantastic: a chorus of censors instead of a pack of agents and arrivistes. 12 p 339
In brief, the State is not a mystical being; its core is earth and rock. Yes: this is half the truth. There is moral unity to be considered also. Alain [E. A. Chartier]
Propos de littérature Paris: 1934. Waterloo. Twenty marginalia.
1 p 31
||How great writers use metaphor. The purpose of comparison is to rule our thoughts, to cause them to march, in some fashion, in step with the world.|| There is relief—not comic relief, but relief in the indifference and hugeness of the background tragedy here: the march of things beyond. 2 p 167
[Of La Fontaine’s vanity:]
The master is too fond of himself. Thought must know its vanity, in order to be just and free. 3 p 200
[About Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme: ] ||Alain says that Stendhal is|| a republican of the most dangerous species. But observe the misery; he doesn’t please the republicans at all? Whom then? Il n’aime pas la beaute, ni physique ni morale.1 He’s a cad. 1
He doesn’t love beauty, neither physical nor moral.
4 p 254
Proust’s death deprived us of two or three unique volumes. Why print this obituary error? 5 p 256
||All men are capable of monstrosity, depending on the occasion and leadership.|| This is a question of degree. All monstrosities are not equally present or potential in everybody: but circumstances develop them. There are physically effeminate men;
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there are masculine men fond of boys. Question of early fixture, taste, opportunity, contagion, etc. [This is one of Santayana’s rare comments about homosexuality.] 6 p 298
||In Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, Alain sees love depicted as romantic passion, a terrifying natural force, as in The Odyssey.|| Penetrating analysis [Ironic underlining?]
Alain [E. A. Chartier]
Histoire de mes pensées
Paris: 1936 (8th edition). Waterloo. Thirty-seven marginalia. 1 p 14
||Alain describes how his mind works.|| Self-indulgence in accepting intuitions as decisions. 2 pp 79–80, marked
[Alain on his own literary style:]
I believed thus that I was entering into the great family of writers who really owe their success to a mixture of genres, to a certain refusal to place on one side boring and difficult ideas, and on the other, easy gossip. [The mark is significant for Santayana’s own conception of literary style.] 3 p 98
||Alain cannot prevent himself from hunting out the most varied occasions on which to say something.|| Alas! 4 p 109, marked
[About attempts to describe the world:]
[…] cette transparence du monde qui aussitôt nous fait libres et heureux. C’est pourtant un monde sans espérance, c’est un monde qu’on ne peut pas prier.1 [Although Santayana only marked this lovely passage, it precisely reflects his own despairing serenity.] 1 That transparency of the world which at once makes us free and happy. Moreover it is a world without hope, a world that one cannot pray for.
5 pp 132–33
||There is a contradiction in Kant’s account of what the mind is and how it functions.|| Yes: but do you understand what you are saying?
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6 p 135, underlined
In its development, Marxism has produced neither a doctrine of liberty, nor a doctrine of Humanity, nor a doctrine of war. “Marx is a naturalist: are you? That capital H is suspicious.” 7 p 219, marked
||Prose-poetry, and the relationship between words and art. Idea matters in a poem,|| but the art of speaking and writing is always dominated by the law of improvisation, which does not let us judge that which is already in place; thus it is we speak. The signs the body makes do not exist for us, but for those to whom we speak. One must express before one knows what one expresses […]. 8 p 224
[Alain quotes Comte:]
“In reproaching love for being blind, often we forget that hatred is better and in an often disastrous degree.” Cf. King Edward and Mrs. Simpson1 1 Edward VIII, who renounced the British throne to marry the divorced American commoner, Mrs. Simpson, in 1936.
9 p 252
||Alain translates Hegel’s term, “Geist” as “l’esprit de la terre.”|| Erdgeist1 is good for Hegel’s Geist. 1
“Erdgeist” or earth-spirit, occurs in Goethe’s Faust.
10 p 255
||The conclusion of his chapter on Descartes, in which Alain writes of the relationship between skepticism and belief.|| By doubting all you can entertain all. 11 p 256
[Santayana’s note at the very end of the chapter on Descartes.]
End of R. of T.1 Above belief, is thought Beyond truth is essence. Nearer than present passing events and stronger purer ^ ^ ^ ^ than passions is the spirit that endures them. observes and survives perhaps survives them. 1
Realm of Truth.
12 p 275, top
[In Alain’s chapter “Sentiments”:]
The love of truth is involved in all the passions and is so much of each as settles the mind.
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Alain [E. A. Chartier]
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Les Dieux Paris: 1934. Waterloo. Thirty-three marginalia.
1 p l0, underlined
La vérité […] nous trompe sur nous-mêmes;1 […]. i.e. in normal thinking we do not realize the medium. 1
The truth deceives us in ourselves.
2 p 45
||Memory of infancy disappears.|| re memory: i.e. the past has no interest in itself. It is used up in producing present assurance. 3 p 47, underlined
[Only one example of Santayana’s constant insistence on precision in diction.]
||Concerning “recovering” the past. One must invent a dialectic of childhood, otherwise called the steps of forgetfulness,|| de l’oubli, qui est la substance des rêves,1 […]. [At “substance”:] differentia Why not take pains to say what you mean? 1
… forgetfulness, which is the substance of dreams.
4 p 79
||Alain discusses perception.|| Has he read Scep. and An. F.?1 1
Scepticism and Animal Faith.
5 p 86
[In section on “Work”:]
He who fails to bite on the world ignores the world. Work may mean material process, derivation of one event materially from another. In that case, work = dynamic reality. Die Wirklichkeit = das Wirken.1 1
Reality = activity.
6 p 116
The occult, that friend of religions, never makes an appearance. […] One may fully understand that children at play never have visions. The interior disposition in mystics is the reality and visions of little moment. [Santayana was deeply interested in the “interior disposition” of mystics; see his marginalia to Aphorismes de Saint Jean de la Croix, among several other sources.]
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7 p 124
||Motors run, men make motors; we must return to the mark of the human upon the machine.|| There is nothing of the occult in these matters. It all comes back to a circle of works, according to the law of equivalence, and again to its fuites1 always explicable according to changes in adjacent conditions. This is a curious bit of stupidity. Due to Marx? 1
Exceptions [?].
8 p 130
||[…] the “miracle” of industrial and agricultural processes, which when administered with thought,|| show that the miracle will be harbored in man and be named courage. This is one of the fanatical delusions of the day. Why encourage it? 9 p 296
||The myths, or religion, simply are as they are.|| Correcting religion = knowing nothing of religion. 10 pp 297–98
[Alain’s chapter “Aesop”:]
||Divine power expires when there is no consent to it. Nothing makes the slave believe. The slave can think, however, and cause animals to speak.|| This is a psychologist’s fallacy. No power ignores that which it controls: but all real control is physical. The slave, like the demagogue, cannot be ignored as a physical force. Mais ce qu’il pense n’intéresse personne.1 1
But what he thinks interests no one.
11 p 298
||Alain elaborates on the position of the slave.|| This is forced because the slave, like the domestic animal, may be very sympathetically considered. There is no vacuum, unless the slave has no slave-mind and no rebellious mind. The former would organize him within society; the latter would class him as a public enemy.1 1
See Dominations and Powers (New York, 1951), 73–77.
12 p 367
||The doctrine of grace. Faith in the reality of grace does not guarantee it, but it is liberating.|| Is this more than a contorted way of saying that spirit energizes spiritually, and is content with that?
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13 p 373, underlined
||Concerning belief in the mythology of the Holy Ghost, of the trinity itself: this doctrine is not supinely to be accepted, but to re-make,|| sous la loi de liberté et d’amour 1 […]. i.e. sincerity. The very acceptance of dictation from God, i.e. from within. 1
… according to the law of liberty and love.
Thomas Albert
Manufacture of Christianity Philadelphia: c. 1946. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Dámaso Alonso
Poesía Española: ensayo de metodos y limites estilisticos Madrid: 1950. Waterloo. Five marginalia.
[Pages 424–69, the end, are uncut. Although few in number, Santayana’s notes here serve to contradict his repeated statement that his Spanish was no longer serviceable in his old age.] 1 p 344
[Gongora’s couplet from “Polifemo y Galatea”:]
[…] infame turba de nocturnas aves, gimiendo tristes y volando graves. [Santayana translates:]
Black-feathered flocks of evil birds of night Mournfully croak and flop in solemn flight [He then retranslates:]
Unholy broods of ghostly birds of night Pass sadly croaking in funereal flight. [Thus the sequence on the page, but the second translation is literal, the first freer and surely better?]
American Authors Today
L[eopold] S[tennett] Amery
Edited by Whit Burnett and Charles E. Slatkin Boston: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Thoughts on the Constitution London: 1947. Waterloo. Eight marginalia.
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1 pp 10–11, underlined
||The whole life of British politics is|| action and reaction between Ministry and the Parliament. ||Amery identifies Bagehot as his source for this, and adds that one might almost say to-day|| between the Ministry and the Opposition, ||for it is the latter|| upon which has devolved most of the original critical function of Parliament. which ought to be personal & competent, instead of partisan and ignorant. 2 p 11
||Montesquieu went astray in treating the division between the executive and legislative functions as|| natural checks ||on each other.|| But appropriated in the U.S. 3 pp 20–21, underlined and marked
Our system is one of democracy, but of democracy by consent acquies^ cence and not by delegation, of government of the people, for the people, ^ with, but not by, the people. 4 p 31, marked
||Amery discusses the concept of responsibility.|| Responsibility in the sense of allegiance to one’s own conscience. 5 p 31
Members of Parliament are no mere delegates of their constituents, but, as Burke pointed out, representatives of the nation, responsible, in the last resort, to their own conscience. Honour preserved. 6 p 44
||The dangers of party organization; its power outside Parliament:|| using Parliament merely as an instrument for carrying through policies shaped without reference to it. As now in Italy [Alleged to approve of Mussolini’s Fascism, Santayana here strongly implies criticism.]
Van Meter Ames
Proust and Santayana: The Aesthetic Way of Life Chicago: 1937. Waterloo. Seven marginalia.
1 p 22
[Proust] was naturalistic and profoundly disillusioned, but also romantic.
His heroines have more than feet of clay; some of his heroes might be
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mistaken for villains; the society in which they move is vain. But what seemed a pit of despair became a hill of hope. rot 2 p 23, underlined
[Proust] took the anguish of his mind and body, with the moments of bliss, and through the alchemy of art left nothing but beauty. not again 3 p 30
Anything not art, or not redeemed by a touch of art, was death—though [Proust] called it life. not intellectually 4 p 35
||We are indebted to Proust’s art for our comprehension of Françoise (the family’s servant).|| It is your nonsense only that supposes that “art” is the only interesting emotion. 5 p 42
||Proust, unlike Schopenhauer, devoted his art|| to preventing the transcendence of personality. ? Not to exhibiting it, and so to transcend it? 6 p 69, marked
Mr. Santayana is not ready, like Croce, to accept identification of form and expression implicit in Proust, but does admit that expression (association) “can give images the same hold upon our attention which might be secured by a fortunate form or splendid material.” ||Further, that Santayana had read and liked “nearly all” of A la recherche du temps perdu.|| He added: “I was interested to find toward the last that he also had the idea of essences. It is impossible that he should have got it from me, but he had hit on the same thing.”1 1
See Santayana’s essay “Proust on Essences,” Obiter Scripta (New York and London: Scribner’s, 1936), 273–79. 7 p 69, underlined and marked
If it was the same thing, then Mr. Santayana indirectly, at least, admitted relations in essences, for relations are the quintessence of essence for Proust. Yet Proust thinks of essences as somehow rising above the relativity and change in which they are discovered—as shadowing forth an eternal reality behind all process. identies [sic] are the essence. Do you call ideality a relation? [No further markings. Ames had called on Santayana in Rome in preparation for his book.]
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Aristotle
Aristotle’s Psychology: A Treatise on the Principle of Life (De Anima and Parva Naturalia) Translated and edited by William Alexander Hammond London and New York: 1902. Georgetown. Sixty-six marginalia.
[The marginalia is in Santayana’s hand of c. 1902. Several of the marginalia not included here are paraphrases of text for study, minor corrections in diction, and quibbles about Hammond’s Greek.] 1 p xx–xxi, underlined
[Hammond’s introduction:]
||Aristotle regards vegetable and animal life as virtually the same; while sensation, movement, and conceptual thought show the development of the|| vital principle found in plants. […] It is, however, a distinctly marked stage that nature makes in the development of the vital principle when sensation is exceeded and rational thought is reached. This new phenomenon is confined to man, and is the last stage in the evolution of . Soul is, therefore, in the opinion of Aristotle, the unity in which the principles of life, sense-perception, and thought are embraced. Bad language: Soul is a term for the principle of life and all its functions in any animal. ^ ^ 2 p xxxvi, underlined
[Concerning organs of perception:]
To make a further use of Aristotle’s terminology, the organ assimilates the significance or form of a thing without its matter. But not into its substance: it assimilates the form by producing an idea of it. This is the final cause of the assimilation, its “unmoved mover.” 3 p xlviii, top
[Section on “Sensation”:]
[ There are but two important philosophers in these matters: Aristotle and Spinoza. Aristotle must be corrected by Spinoza on the subject of the relations of mind and body: Spinoza must be supplemented by Aristotle on all moral subjects. The double aspect and the unmoved mover must be combined.] 4 p xlviii
No animal can exist without touch, and only animals can possess it. As it is necessary to animal life, any stimulus sufficiently excessive to destroy it, destroys not only the organ, as in the other senses, but life itself.
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This would suggest an interesting restatement in terms of the unmoved mover. No animal can exist without tactile reactions: no being having such exists without producing the consciousness of its situation. Interplay of forces is the basis of significant life. When your action is widely adjusted, your consciousness is widely intelligent. 5 p lxviii, marked
Aristotle, like Plato, developed his ethical doctrines in the closest connection with his psychological theories. His conception of the moral will and its function is determined largely by his theory of the practical reason. In his analysis of the elements of consciousness, he finds only what we should call ideational and affective elements. There is no reference to any third conative element. In which he is of course profoundly right. Will is an emotion with or at an idea. 6 p lxviii
Desire, as Aristotle employs it, is not a purely pathic or affective element. Feeling as such (theoretically) is completely passive,—mere enjoyment of the pleasant or mere suffering of the painful. The painful = a feeling repelled. The pleasant = a feeling welcomed. 7 p lxxiv, marked
[On “Creative Reason”:]
In the interpretation of Averroës, although the reason is immortal, individuality ceases with death; for differences in individuals are due to differences in their accumulated sensible images and phantasmata—in the content of their experience. Rational activity, as such, is universally the same, and it is only this universal, non-individual principle of reason that persists after death. All individuals are alike in participating in one rational life, and they are different in so far as reason has a different mass of images to illumine. The principle of individuation is in plastic matter, not in generic form, and reason is related to sensible images as form is related to matter. Good [Rare praise.] 8 p lxxxi, marked
||The Reason has no bodily organ.|| Reason, then, confers on a potentially rational world its actually rational existence; and, moreover, in thinking the actually rational, it thinks itself. N.B.
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9 p lxxxvi, marked
The sum of sense-data constitutes the potentiality of reason, i.e. it constitutes the passive reason, while their construction into actual rational significance constitutes the activity of creative reason; the real content is given in the former, the formal content in the latter. The content, therefore, of the sensus communis regarded as rational potentiality is the
;1 the power which converts this potentiality into actual rational forms or meanings is the [From “The content, therefore,” to the end of the passage:]
N.B. 1
Mind of the senses. Mind of action.
2
[Pages 37–120, those which contain Santayana’s markings, treat Aristotle’s De Anima.] 10 p 39, marked
[Book I, chapter V, “Definition of the Soul.”]
[…] it is evident that knowledge does not belong to the soul in virtue of its composition out of the elements, neither is it right or true to say that it is moved. Conclusion of the whole book. 11 p 54
[Santayana’s enlightening summary:]
Dialectical psychology. Sensation, being pleasant or painful, produces desire. 12 p 60, marked
[Book II, chapter IV, “Principle of Nutrition.”]
[…] the growth of fire is indeterminate so long as there is material to burn; on the other hand, in all bodies developed in nature there is a limit and significance to size and growth. These attributes ([of limit and significance])1 belong to soul, not to fire, to reason rather than to matter. Good illustration of bad physics. 1 The parentheses and brackets are actually in the text to denote words inserted by the translator.
13 p 62
[Santayana summarizes and comments:]
Assimilation of food by the soul to the body, through heat. [ Soul is the instinct of self-preservation; of race preservation, etc ] 14 p 66–67
[Book II, chapter V, on sense-perception:]
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||Aristotle defines three stages in the acquisition of knowledge, from potentiality to actuality.|| education, drawing out, like Socrates. 15 p 67
||Sense-perception in the new-born as a species of knowledge.|| Active sensation is used in a way similar to active thinking. There is, however, this difference, that the objects which produce sensation are external, […]. The reason for this is that active sense-perception refers to particular things, while scientific knowledge refers to the universal. These universals, however, are, in a certain sense, in the mind itself. Therefore it is in one’s power to think when one wills, but to experience sense-perception is not thus in one’s power; for a sensible object must first be present. Yet this is more definite, richer, more permanent, more unmistakable than any existence. 16 p 106
||Animals experience sensation, not reflexion.|| Neither is thought, in which right and wrong are determined, i.e. right in the sense of practical judgment, scientific knowledge and true opinion, and wrong in the sense of the opposite of these,—thought in this signification is not identical with sensation. Perception not opinion. Cf Theaetetus. Sensation always true of the sensible. 17 p 107
[Aristotle on the psychology of imagination:]
If imagination means the power whereby what we call a phantasm is awakened in us, and if our use of language here is not merely metaphorical, then imagination is one of those faculties or mental forces in us by virtue of which we judge and are capable of truth and error. Imagination not sense, usually false, not inevitably present when sense exists, sometimes present without it when sense is absent. 18 p 107, marked
Again, sensations are always true, while imaginations are for the most part false. 19 p 113, marked
[Book III, chapter IV, “Theory of Reason.”]
||The nature of thought is|| exclusively potentiality. What we call reason in the soul (by reason I mean the instrument by which the soul thinks and forms conceptions) is, prior to the exercise of thought, no reality at all.
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Pure Kant. The categories are not existences: if they were they would have to be material organs, for the existent condition of anything is material. 20 p 121, marked
A predication, as e.g. an affirmation, asserts something of something else, and is in every instance either true or false. This does not apply to the mind always, but when the mind asserts what a thing is in its essential nature and not what attaches to something as a predicate, then it is true. Pure dialectic. 21 p 159, marked
[“On the Senses,” chapter III.] [Of color, and diaphanous bodies such as water:]
Colour is the limit of transparency. [ These definitions, even when good, are not physical: they are definitions of “concretions in discourse”. Things cannot be defined, they must be decomposed or derived from their causes. [ ] ] 22 p 197
[“On Memory,” chapter I.]
[…] all memory is associated with time. Therefore, only those creatures that have perception of time, have memory, and memory attaches to that organ [the heart] whereby time is perceived. Memory is here pregnantly and transcendentally understood. For an animal might profit by past experience which it did not, in this pregnant sense, remember or know to be past. Cf. the conscience. 23 p 200, marked
[On the psychology of memory and images:]
[…] the question arises whether one remembers the impression or the thing from which the impression was derived. 24 p 200, underlined
[…] the animal in a picture is both animal and a copy, and both of these are one and the same thing; but the mode of existence in the two instances is different, and it is possible to regard this picture both in the sense of animal and in the sense of image, and so it is with the image within us: we must regard it both as something in itself and as the image of something else. Here is the point: the logical energy which makes the image significant is the essence of memory as distinguished from imagination.
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25 pp 220–21fn
[“On Sleep and Waking,” chapter II.]
||Hammond’s didactic footnote (1) on Aristotle’s theory of form and matter. Matter is potentiality, which in a world of movement becomes actuality. Actuality is identical with form. In organic processes, the two can be separated only|| in abstraction. Form represents the completed condition towards which matter strives. Form is therefore the end, […] the final cause. Further, as the completed notion of a thing, or that which a thing really and finally is, it is the essential or notional cause. The definition of a thing is its notional cause. Cause ( ) is here, of course, employed in a sense foreign to English usage. There is no idea of agency in it, as there is in all English meanings of cause. It signifies, rather, ‘principle.’ Further, form represents the inner Trieb or force in matter whereby it is in constant transition towards realisation of its end. ? The final cause is immanent; the efficient is not. It is cause in our sense. 26 p 233, underlined
Even when we are in sound health and know the truth, still the sun appears to us to be only a foot in diameter. [At “a foot”:]
! and, according to Spinoza, three hundred feet away! 27 p 251, marked
[“On Dreams,” chapter II.]
Since other animals than man have dreams, one may say, in a word, that dreams are not sent from God and do not occur for his ends. Nobility and humanity of the divine. 28 p 251, underlined and doubly marked
||Dreams are daemonic, not divine.|| This is proven by the fact that very ordinary men have prophetic visions and true dreams, showing that God does not send them; but such men as have a loquacious and atrabilious nature see all sorts of visions. i.e. Reason & Virtue, the Ideal. They do not come in the service of ultimate good. 29 p 260
[“On Length and Shortness of Life,” chapter III.]
[…] in whatsoever thing there is no principle of opposition, and where there is no such principle, there can be no destruction [of the Empyrean]. Reference to Plato Republic, X.
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30 p 268
||Of identity between plants and animals:|| In man the mouth is beautiful; in plants the roots, hidden in the earth, are base and obscene. The reproductive organs, on the contrary. The fruit and flavor, are beautiful and flaunted in the air. One may say: because reproduction is the highest function of the unconscious. Cf. L. of R.1 on Love. 1
Life of Reason.
31 p 272, marked
[“On Youth and Old Age,” chapter I.]
||Aristotle’s distinction between the “upper” parts of plants and animals; upper signifying the direction of light and flame; lower referring to the voiding of excrement.|| Poetic. [Ironic?]
Aristotle
Aristoteles Metaphysik Translated by Hermann Bonitz and edited by Eduard Wellmann Berlin: 1890. Georgetown. Fifty-three marginalia.
[Many of the marginalia are corrections of Bonitz’s Greek, together with expressions of Santayana’s annoyance when Bonitz adds phrases to conform to his own interpretation of the Greek, as in marginalia 1 and 2 below. From Santayana’s marginalia on p. 142, it is obvious that he was reading Bonitz’s Aristotle in preparation for The Life of Reason, c. 1900 to its publication in 1905.] 1 p 2, underlined
[Book I, chapter I.]
||Aristotle distinguishes between science and art. Bonitz translates,|| when Callias or Socrates or some other individual was suffering from this or that disease, für welchen es ein Accidens ist,1 experience urged that a physician be called in. [Santayana cites the Greek, a mistranslation in the German, which he has underlined, and writes:]
The translation is biassed in the direction of nominalism and shocks the adept in Aristotelianism. 1
… by accident.
2 p 2, underlined
[Bonitz translates as Ursache.]
= cause but rather in the sense of principle: for evidently the accumulation of cases does not give a deeper cause, only a cause
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3 p 3, marked
Lesser craftsmen work mechanically without knowing why they do certain things; the master works from theory and knows the causes for his actions. Two parts of the same phenomenon. Intelligence is wonderful because it is a revelation: it is a revelation because it is relevant to practice, and relative to external fact. Instinct may be no less useful: but human wisdom consists in knowing the good life while we live it. Its essence is contemplative but its locus is practical. 4 p 47, underlined
[Book III, chapter IV.]
If nothing exists but particulars, and they are infinite in number, how can we attain knowledge? We may learn of particulars only if they belong to a universal. Denn wenn weder diese sein soll noch jene, so würde überhaupt nichts sein.1 i.e. is a term of thought . . . . Otherwise thinking would be a continuum of insignificant feeling, not a mental energy connecting two terms—the material data and the ideal forms. The individual locus and matter of the process and ^ ^ its distinguishable halting-places. 1
If nothing exists other than individual units, knowledge is impossible.
5 p 117, marked
[Book V, chapter XXIX.]
||Aristotle’s comment on the Hippias: that the same man is both false and true. When he says that the man who limps willingly is better than the man who limps unwillingly, he means pretending to limp. Bonitz translates the next sentence:|| Denn wenn jemand wirklich freiwillig hinkte, so würde er wohl, wie dies auch im Sittlichen der Fall ist, noch schlechter sein.1 1
If he is lame by will, he is the loser in this instance, even as he is morally.
6 p 138, marked
[Book VII, chapter I.]
||The relationship between being and substance.|| Every thing that arises is conditioned, and when the existence of a nature form is conditioned, that form needs mat^ ^ ter to exist. A material = a condition. 7 p 142, marked
[Book VII, chapter VIII.]
||The process of generation of something by something; the ideal or principle of form versus the thing generated.||
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The idea must not arise, Platonically speaking: but the category which leads the mind to that idea takes gradual possession of individuals and races, so that the existence of the Platonic idea or rather ideal is due to the accidental development of the animal intellect and of animal life in general. In this sense ideas have a material and a history. There is a sort of geology of the mind unknown to Aristotle who studied only its geography. Put this in the preface to the L. of R. or at the end of Part I. 8 p 146–47
[Book VII, chapter X.]
||On the relationship of parts to the whole.|| Und deshalb löst sich die irdene Bildsäule in Erde, die eherne Kogel in Erz, und Kallias in Fleisch und Knochen auf, und auf ähnliche Weise ferner der Kreis in die Kreisabschnitte, weil er etwas mit der Materie vereinigtes ist.1 L. of R. Preface. It is an intolerable demand that because half of the world is stupid, the other half, out of consideration, should be [illegible]. Nor do I fear to sin against good manners by repeating the words of the one among all philosophers who was most a gentleman: “[ Descartes’ Discours, about his education.]” 1 Accordingly the clay statue may be broken down in clay, the sphere into bronze, and Callias into flesh and bone. So it is we use the form of the circle for the individual circle, since it is somehow materially related.
9 pp 179–80, marked; doubly marked at the passage on ‘Line’
[Book IX, chapter II.]
The form of the triangle is not necessarily indicated by lines and enclosed space; the figure 2 and the form of 2 may be the same, but a line and the form of Line are surely not similar to the forms of numbers. Therefore many things have one form, as the Pythagoreans deduced. It is possible then to see one encompassing Form of all things; then clearly all things would be one. Important for Pythagoreanism and not quoted in the text books. Cf. Neo-Platonism. 10 p 181
[Book IX, chapter III.]
||Aristotle refutes the view of Megaric school that a thing is potent only when it functions: a builder only when he builds. So for the inanimate: nothing will possess sensation unless it is using that faculty: cold must be experienced to be cold, sweet to be sweet, blindness to be blindness.||
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This passage is worth all the transcendental intuition of Hume. It shows clearly that the trouble lies in ignoring the natural functions of the intellect. 11 p 226, underlined
[Book XI, chapter IV.]
||Philosophy, unlike mathematics, does not study things in their definite attributes, but concentrates on what is, insofar as each particular is. Physics, like Mathematics, studies the attributes and first principles of things.|| […] denn diese betrachtet die Accidenzen und die Prinzipien des Seienden, insofern es bewegt, nicht insofern es seiend ist.1 Also ist Hegel ein Physiker. Cf. L. of R. 1
… deals with these things insofar as they exist but not otherwise.
12 p 252, underlined
[Book XII, chapter IV.]
||There are three elements and four causes or principles. They differ in different cases, and the moving cause differs in differing cases: e.g. Health, disease, body; and the moving cause the art of medicine. Bonitz:|| die Heilkunst.1 i.e. the thoughts in the physician’s mind or (more classically) the physician’s art.—Rather the process of healing. 1
The art of healing.
13 p 254, marked
[Book XII, chapter V.]
As to whether the principles or elements of substances, and relations or qualities, are the same or different: it is evident that when “principle” and “element” are used with more than one meaning they are the same for everything. When the meanings are distinguished one from another they are different. Important for the variations of the ideal. 14 p 255, underlined
[Book XII, chapter VI.]
||There must be a substance that is eternal and immutable. Substances are primary reality; if they perish, all perishes. The prime mover must function for motion to occur; it cannot be mere potentiality. That prime mover, god or mind, must be immaterial and eternal.|| Doch hier ensteht eine Schwierigkeit. Denn das Wirkliche, meint man, ist alles möglich, das Mögliche nicht alles wirklich, so dass demnach dies Vermögen das frühere sein würde. Aber wäre dies wahr, so würde nichts von dem Seienden sein; denn es ist möglich, dass etwas zwar vermag zu sein, aber doch noch nicht ist.1
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George Santayana’s Marginalia [At “würde”:]
Könnte? 2 Nothing need have existed? Or is the idea that a potentiality could initiate nothing, and all would have remained possible only? 1 Here a difficulty arises. For everything that functions is possible or potential, but not everything potential functions, so that potentiality comes first. But if that is true, there would be no reality, for it is possible that something might exist, but not yet exist. 2 Might be able to.
15 p 257, underlined and marked
[Book XII, chapter VII.]
||How the prime-mover Mover moves: It is the apparent good that is wanted, and the real good that the rational will desires.|| Wir erstreben aber etwas vielmehr, weil wir es für “gut” halten, als dass wir es für gut hielten, weil wir es erstreben.1 ?To make this acceptable we should have to say (referring to the previous phrases) that we desire sub forma voice because our will is directed to the real but unknown good. The latter would be relative to our nature, and particular desires would be secondary to it. 1 But we struggle much more for that which we consider the good, than for that which appears good in the course of our struggle.
16 p 258, underlined and marked
[Book XII, chapter VII.]
||Aristotle summarizes: such is the prime Mover, on which the sensible universe and all nature depend.|| Sein Leben aber ist das trefflichste, und wie es bei uns nur kurze Zeit stattfindet, da beständige Dauer uns unmöglich ist, so ist bei ihn immerwährend. Denn seine wirkliche Thätigkeit ist zugleich Freude. Und deshalb ist Wachen, Wahrnehmen, Denken das angenehmeste, und durch dieses erst Hoffnung und Erinnerung.1 N.B. here implies that imagined pleasures please on account of the present image, not on account of the eventual experience they refer to. This is the truth. 1 Its life is the best that we only temporarily enjoy. It must always be in that state which we cannot know, since its condition is pleasure. Accordingly waking, sensation, and thought are most pleasurable, and because of them, hopes and memories too.
17 p 265
[Book XII, chapter X.]
||The Good manifests itself in the order of the universe. All is ordered, as in a household: the free have the least liberty to act randomly.|| Freedom equals nonentity.
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Aristotle
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The Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle
Translated by J. E. C. Welldon London and New York: 1892. Le Balze. Few and inconsequential markings. [Signed “G. Santayana Avila 1895”.]
Aristotle
Psychologie d’Aristote: Traité de l’âme Translated by J. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire Paris: 1846. Le Balze. Few and unimportant markings.
The Arts in Renewal
Lewis Mumford et al. Philadelphia: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Miguel Asín Palacios
El Islam cristianizado Madrid: 1931. Waterloo. Fifty-one marginalia.
1 p 23
||Concerning divine providence.|| Deus loquitur:1 Bother this history and geography that oblige me to go such a long way round to profit my providence! 1
God speaks.
2 p 96
||Concerning divine love, that made Abenarabi a lover of women as well as of divinity.|| Pero este amor divino, ¿que efectas tiene?1 [Properly, “efectas” should be “efecto.”] 1
But what effect has this divine love?
3 p 132
||That a mystic phenomenon occurs between two ascetics: one who engenders it, and one in whom it is engendered.|| This may be generalised. The ultimate may pervade the vicissitudes of life. 4 p 210
||Asín constructs a parallel between St. Francis of Assisi and Abenarabi, contemporaries, on holy obedience.||
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The inner reason for this is not that you respect the will of others but that you express the indifference you feel to all action. 5 p 215
||Baruzi, following St. Juan de la Cruz, taught his followers to prefer|| desolation to consolation and spiritual sadness to happiness. Also in Ecclesiastes, who is no mystic. 6 p 238
||On hearing God.|| The source of “divine” messages is the psyche; no need of other vehicles. 7 p 243
||On God’s love for His creatures [la criatura].|| Now love is always something that does not exist, nothingness, the reality of which one craves. If, then, given the two single terms we have concerning love, the second of which is nothingness, there remains only to know the first, the lover. ’ Tis Love that makes the world go round, not the object of love. The object of love is passive and perhaps non-existent. Cf. The Secret of Aristotle. 8 p 243, marked
||It is a paradox that love combines two contraries, desiring at once union with and separation from the beloved.|| Cf. Spinoza. 9 p 244
God’s love is eternal as He is. God is at home in the realm of essence. 10 p 245, marked
||Mystical love combines spiritual and physical longing.|| All this is an improper way of saying that essences become, for the spirit, the objects of love, because the psyche pursues them. 11 p 279, marked
||Penitence is the basis of attaining the mystical state.|| This might be said of clearing the heart, without false lamentations for the past. 12 p 280, marked
One may succeed in realizing the reality of love only after the heart is cleansed of the impurities of concupiscence.
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13 p 281, underlined
[Asín quotes El Chonaid.]
“El amor es la introducción de las cualidades del amado en el amante,1 causing the permutation of the qualities of the lover.” The essence: which can be possessed only contemplatively. 1
Love is the introduction of the qualities of the beloved to the lover.
14 p 281, “Dios” underlined
||El Chonaid further remarks that the sign of God’s love rests on cutting the root desires of this life and of the other life.|| Here God is rather Fate than the Good. 15 p 281, marked
||Asín quotes two examples of sexual love in the service of devotion to God. E.g.,|| “Tenía mi corazón diferentes amores, y se juntaron todos, cuando el alma vió que sólo Tú eras mi amor.” 1 Shocking! 1 I held in my heart various lovers and was joined to them, when my soul perceived that You were my beloved.
16 p 283, marked
[“Amor de corazón”1 defined.]
[…] it is the result of concupiscence and prefers worldly love to the love of God. Its objects are seven: women, children, treasures of gold and silver, horses, herds, and fields. Such love accounts for all sin. 1
Corporeal love.
17 p 287
||Concerning prayer:|| N.B. Prayer is not a petition, but an elevation of the heart. 18 p 293, marked
||On the various kinds of revelation: Revelation of the understanding clarifies previously unintelligible ideas and possible contingencies.|| Essence. 19 p 293
||Revelation of the secrets of created beings and their providence.|| Matter 20 p 293
Revelation of the spirit indicates the gardens of paradise and the infernal regions, the elevations of the soul and the vision of the angels. The supernatural (material) world.
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21 p 293
||With purification from all sensual nastiness, further insights occur.|| [Santayana defines those insights as:]
Truth Telepathy & magic Majesty & Beauty 22 p 295
||On mystical union:|| 1. Conscious absorbtion [sic] in God. 2. Self-unconscious absorbtion: the divine is mirrored but the image reproduces only a part of the divine—(This is not a good simile, because there is no “reproduction” but only a partial inspection.) 23 p 298
[Santayana agrees with the text and clarifies it.]
When once the spirit is raised to pure intuition, distraction by passion is oppressive: and recovery of pure intuition then is a release or expansion. 24 p 300
[Asín quotes the Koran.]
Preach to your family, to your closest relatives […]. Horrid advice! 25 p 337
||One cannot rely on one’s effort to communicate with God.|| This oriental deity is a good symbol for the absoluteness of Nature, but not for her constancy. 26 p 455
||On the difference between “sufies” [sic] and “Malamies”:|| I have such a thick head when saints do what is wrong I think they are wicked! [Would-be verse.] 27 p 456
||More on mystical love.|| [From this passage to the end of the text, Asín is concerned with the nature of the Godhead, rather than with the attitude of the mystic to God, as in the preceding passages.]
Falling in love with nobody in particular: Spring fever.
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28 p 457
||The disposition toward mystical love.|| Good psychology: Emotion is always essentially about nothing. We attribute it to an object which (except for our readiness to be moved, or actual motion) would produce no effect. 29 pp 464–65
[Asín quotes Fotuhat.]
El objeto del amor es algo inexistente.1 Lovely man: two truths in two pages 1st Only God is beautiful or can be loved— .2 2nd Only the non-existent can be loved—Essence 1
The object of love is something nonexistent. That which is good and beautiful.
2
30 p 466
[Santayana adds to his remarks on the love of mystics.]
Neither pictorial essences nor tropes ever exist. It is not the futurity of the object of desire that makes it non-existent but the ideality of it—that is an essence and not a substance. 31 p 467
Love reconciles contraries. Disdain is a ground of love, consent a cause of indifference. That is why God, truth, and beauty are loved. 32 p 468
He who agrees to receive God is rewarded with His love; who does not agree is punished. Nasty thing! 33 p 473
||On God’s love of his own creation, which is himself.|| The Beautiful deployed 34 p 473
[More on the same.]
Admirable. the mystic feels the same Beauty in all Beauties: the understanding looks for a true good: and the will pursues its own satisfactions. 35 p 477
||More on God’s love for creation.|| The Merciful, the Compassionate! The One Power is the One Benefactor (also the one enemy).
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36 p 478
Fué por el amor de Dios que puede amar a los hombres1 Love is the infallible sign that the Good is the reality which attracts us. [This may be taken as Santayana’s gloss on his Spanish verse.] 1
It was for the love of God / that he can love mankind.
37 p 481
Love is the life of the lover. 38 p 495
[Fotuhat quoted.]
Love is irrational. Imagination is the lover’s substitute both for ideas and for things. 39 p 501
[Asín quotes Fotuhat on “Amorous melancholy.”]
Es una pena que el amante siente dentro de sí, pero que no es debida a 1a pérdida de algún bien o al abandono del amado; es una tristeza que no se sabe a qué atribuirla, que no tiene otra causa que el amor mismo, y que no tiene más medicina que la unión con el amado. Esta unión, mientras dura, priva al amante de sentir aquella tristeza. Si la unión con el amado no es unión personal, y el amado es un superior que impone obligaciones al amante, entonces el cumplimiento de estas obligaciones hace las veces de la unión personal, produciéndole una alegría que borra en su alma la consciencia de la tristeza.1 Beautiful [“Beautiful” is an extraordinary adjective in Santayana’s vocabulary.] 1 It is a pain that the lover feels within him, but one that is not caused by the loss of some good, or by the loss of the beloved. It is sadness one cannot fathom, that has no cause other than love itself, and that knows no medicine other than union with the beloved. While this union lasts, it prevents the lover from feeling sadness. If the union with the beloved is not personal, and the beloved is a superior who imposes obligations on the lover, then the fulfilment of such obligations creates the occasions for that personal union, resulting in a state of happiness that effaces from his soul his awareness of melancholy.
Brooks Atkinson
Once Around the Sun New York: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia.
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Irving Babbitt
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Democracy and Leadership London: 1924. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Francis Bacon
The Essays or Counsels: Civil and Moral London: 1891. Columbia. One marginale.
[Presented to Santayana on December 16, 1891, his 28th birthday, by Delta Phi Delta, Harvard.] [The essay “Truth” is marked at the beginning.]
Cyril Bailey
The Greek Atomists and Epicurus Oxford: 1928. Georgetown. 103 marginalia.
1 p 16, underlined
||Anaximenes’ theory that the primary substance was air appears retrogressive but was|| really an advance on Thales and even on Anaximander himself. ?Why stretch everything on this arbitrary rack? 2 p 27, underlined
The theory of Parmenides had made it impossible any longer to maintain the single homogeneous substance as the primary basis of the world, […]. Thinkers began to search for a solution on new lines, […]. It is merely perverse to regard Parmenides as a scarecrow. All this is modern interpretation, not history. 3 p 28, underlined
[…] a dualism did not open up much greater possibility of variation than the old monism, […]. N.B. False evolution read into speculation: imagination was active and various people suggested various systems: that’s all. 4 p 34, marked Z
Empedocles had shown that the only hope of progress lay in abandoning a strict Ionian monism, […]. All this is sheer invention. 5 p 34, underlined
||Anaxagoras’|| pluralism was absolutely complete: ‘he said that the firstbeginnings were infinite’. i.e. primary substances. (This is the affected neo-English vocabulary)
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6 p 36
[Santayana’s critical paraphrase of Bailey’s remarks on Anaxagoras.]
Terribly cumbrous way of getting at a clear notion: all qualities are permanent: they are shuffled mechanically, and some come to the surface here, and others there. 7 p 37, marked
[Bailey comments on Anaxagoras’s statement “there is a portion of everything in everything.”]
||The theory is contradicted by the evidence of the senses.|| It is quite true that bread contains in it portions of everything, but because the portions of bread greatly exceed in number and bulk those of any other thing, it has throughout the appearance and character of bread and nothing else. At last. 8 p 37, underlined
The subordinate portions, even those of the bodily substances which bread may become are so minute and so scattered in among the prevailing portions of bread, ||that they are not and could not be perceptible except in thought.|| Not according to Anaxagoras His doctrine is that nothing can become anything else. His substances are simple essences hypostatized. 9 p 38, marked
||The difficulties of the doctrine of “everything in everything.”|| I think the point is that “ultimates” don’t exist in an infinite compound: i.e. they are never separated: but they have pure quality, else they could not impart it. 10 p 46, marked
||The idea of a Prime Mover to explain creation as important to the philosophy of religion, but not present in early pre-Atomism.|| The primary substance is itself regarded at first not as so much inanimate matter which must be worked on by an outside power and set in motion in order to produce change and so creation, but rather as a kind of living thing with half-mysterious powers, which by the force which is in it can move and change. ‘Everything’, said Thales in this spirit, ‘is full of gods’, […]. But of course: and do you imagine anything different? 11 p 47, underlined
||Side by side with mythological and theological explanations for creation there arises|| the more strictly scientific conception of the world, in which it was felt that causes must be sought for in phenomena themselves regarded as a natural and not a supernatural manifestation.
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I hope not. It is not scientific to regard phenomena as substances, but to explain them by reference to our organs and the secret movements of matter elsewhere. Matter (not phenomena) has to be posited before investigation begins. 12 p 50
[…] since it so presented itself to later commentators, it is not unreasonable to see in Heraclitus the germ of the notion of ‘necessity’ emerging from a religious background, just as with the Milesians appeared the first traces of ‘eternal motion’. Bailey seems incapable of understanding natural religion 13 p 51, marked Z
||The Atomists came to the question of an efficient cause with a science still imbued with religion.|| The world itself has a fatal contingency: it is “arbitrary” only in the sense in which any existence necessarily is arbitrary. 14 p 63, underlined and marked Z
||The pre-Atomists moved from skepticism about evidence of the senses to|| the senses are not of themselves safe tests of truth, ||but aid investigation.|| Nor is this change difficult to explain in the light of the general progress of thought. The theories of the Monists do not rest on observation or investigation, but are rather based on a priori reasoning about the universe and its nature. What perversity! Did not Xenophanes look into the broad heaven and sigh: “The All is One!” 15 p 65
||Differences between Indian and Greek atomic explanations of the universe.|| This whole book is a rearrangement of class work with students. Part of the stupidity may be simply adaptation to ruling prejudices or tricks of speech. 16 p 68, underlined
[Leucippus on “The Mind”:]
[…] with its emphatic assertion of the supremacy of ‘necessity’, reads more like Democritus than Leucippus. There is therefore nothing extant of Leucippus’ own work on which it is possible to build, […]. How then do you know what would “read like him”? 17 p 103, underlined and marked
The general idea of the importance of respiration to life comes no doubt from Empedocles, […].
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“From whom does the idea come that men have two legs?” “From Aristotle, of course, who called them bipeds without feathers!” 18 p 107, marked
||Thus Leucippus|| reconciled the ‘One’ of Parmenides and the Eleatics with the ‘Many’ of the Pluralists by the conception of a permanent substratum which though not continuous, is homogeneous, one in substance, though not in extension. […] He saw that the only solution of the impasse of Monism was the admission of the existence of empty space, yet he agreed with the strictest Monists that it was not ‘real’ or ‘full existence’. Invaluable for the crammer. 19 p 107, underlined
And if it be asked by the examiner, what were his greatest positive con^ ^ tributions to the history of thought, the answer would be that they were two: […]. (take this down on your wrist-band). 20 p 107
He had given the most fully satisfactory answer to the original question of Thales. and I hope you will do the same and be a credit to your College. 21 p 115, underlined
[Democritus on Homeric diction:]
There was also an important discussion on the origin of language, in which Democritus held that names were invented deliberately ( ) and not naturally (). ?They were not (as the mad Socrates declares in the Cratylus) natural or native to the things designated: it does not follow that they were “deliberately invented”. They were casually applied. 22 p 123
||Democritus slightly if at all changes the general principles of Atomism; however:|| It is as if a rather crabbed and narrow theory expounded from the inside has passed into the hands of a man of the world (like us ^ Balliol men) who can look at it from many points of view and infuse ^ new life into it. 23 p 127
[On the “size” of atoms:]
What is the criterion of size?
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24 p 127, underlined and marked Z
||Logically,|| infinite differences in shape imply infinite differences in size: for within the limits of the same size there can only be limited differences of shape, and further variety of form cannot be obtained except by increase in bulk. Am I a fool, or is this foolish? 25 p 143, marked
The Atomic conception of ‘chance’ then is, as we may say, the purely subjective conception which is proper to a scientific view of nature. Good boy for once: go to the head of the class! 26 p 143, marked
||Epicurus’ view of the swerve of atoms differed from that of Democritus.|| N.B. Epicurus suffered from anticlericalitis 27 p 149
||Leucippus failed to differentiate between fixed stars and planets.|| What nonsense: as if the planets had not had names in Chaldea. Not mentioned in the fragments: that’s all. 28 p 187, underlined
||Democritus’ idea of natural law leads to strict determinism in ethics.|| Strangely enough, this question seems never to have occurred to Democritus’ mind. No indeed: D. was capable of thinking straight. […] ‘men have fashioned an image of chance as a cloak for their own illcouncil […]’. Naturally: a man’s will and things which are accidental to it, all combine in profound ways to accomplish what is inevitable. Has Bailey forgotten his tragic poets? 29 p 203, underlined and marked Z
||Some of Democritus’ sayings about justice|| are conceived on a high plane and some of them have an almost Christian ring about them. […] Democritus seems sometimes to get outside his self-centred philosophy. If he had been a Christian he couldn’t have had this pride. 30 p 240
[On the falsity or accuracy of sensations:]
[…] the common-sense philosopher prefers to reply that sensation is a primary fact of our nature and our only means of relation with the external world, […]. How urgent is the need here of distinguishing intuition from animal faith!
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31 p 257
[Santayana’s preliminary summary on the discussion of Epicurus’s Canonice of the criterion of truth:]
Perhaps Epicurus, like modern empiricists, was more interested in experience than in external things. 32 p 261
It is impossible for a modern critic of Epicureanism—accustomed to the accurate methods of modern scientific inquiry—not to regard Epicurus’ method as extremely unsatisfactory and slovenly. He was a pragmatist. 33 p 261fn, underlined
[Footnote 3, a quotation from the Canonice, ii, § 87:]
[…] ,1 […]. [Santayana’s translation:] Hypotheses must remain hypothetical and may be various. This, however, ought to have cooled the dogmatism of Epicurus. 1
And defies any scientific reasoning.
34 p 273
||The Epicurean consciously shut himself off from social and political life|| and left him a philosopher stranded to all intents and purposes on a desert island. x ^ ^
x
Thus in the sea of life enisled, Its echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild We mortal myriads live alone—1 says Matthew Arnold, Epicurus didn’t have to invent this natural fact.
1
Santayana misquotes “To Marguerite” (1852), the first stanza of which is: Yes! in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone. The islands feel the enclasping flow, And then their endless bounds they know.
35 p 287
[On Epicurus’s theory of Atoms and Space:]
The world of thought corresponds exactly ( ) to the world of sense: in the world of sense we have the visible body composed of ‘distinguishable’ points, in the world of thought the atom composed of ‘inseparable’ parts. This imaginative analogy has then given us the answer to Leucippus and his critics and to Democritus: the atoms are not
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‘without parts’ ( ) in the sense that they have magnitude and parts ‘distinguishable’ by thought; they are on the other hand without parts in the sense that they are not formed of parts which could be separated. This is new to me and interesting. Epicurus regarded atoms as aggregates of minima sensibilia. It is at bottom a pictorial physics, not that of Democritus, which was dynamic and truly materialistic. Epicurus was not a materialist, then, but a sort of “new realist”! 36 p 292, marked
Not merely are the atoms without qualities, but they are also without sensation: here again analogy might lead us astray and we might suppose that those atoms which compose our ‘soul’ are themselves endowed with sensation. But this is not the case: all atoms are completely without sensation and sensation and consciousness in us are due merely to particular movements on the part of a particular combination of atoms: as arrangement results in qualities, so movement may produce sensation. It is manifest that this position will prove of great importance, when we come to consider the Epicurean psychology. Strong excommunicated in limine.1 1 The reference is to Charles Augustus Strong, Santayana’s friend and host in Paris and Fiesole, whose Essays on the Natural Origin of the Mind Santayana took exception to. See his marginalia on that work. (“In limine”: On the line, or, line by line.)
37 p 313
||Epicurus’ notion that the weight of atoms must produce motion in one direction.|| That all things fly in one direction is picturable: it is not defensible because it would be the same as rest. Space would have to be an ether with individual parts: then all the atoms might rush through it “down ward”, i.e. in one direction therefore called “down”. [Bailey’s intermittent but frequent references to atoms rushing “down” have elicited various scornful comments previous to this not so scornful one.] 38 p 323
||Epicurus’ doctrine of the swerve of atoms must not imply conscious volition;|| it could at most be described as a mechanical freedom corresponding to the psychical freedom of the will. The motive is not love of freedom but hatred of fate and of everything superhuman. It is the anti-religious passion.
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39 p 325, underlined
[Bailey quotes Guyau’s La Morale d’Epicure.]
[…] ‘spontaneity precedes, follows, and completes nature, and prevents it from being a mere mechanism incapable of improvement and subject to an inexorable fatalism: […]’. Why should chance motions produce improvement? The motive is superstitious. If the dice don’t obey probability then I shall win even when it is improbable. 40 p 326
||Lucretius on Epicurus’ benefits to mankind:|| ‘he showed what there is of ill in the affairs of mortals everywhere, coming to being and flying abroad in diverse forms, be it by the chance or by the force of nature, because nature had so brought it to pass’.1 Lucretius is by instinct less superstitious than Epicurus, James, & Co. There is chance, but it is one of those irreparable things which we must put up with. 1
De rerum natura, VI, 29ff: quidve mali … sic natura parasset.
41 p 478
||Both Epicurus and Lucretius conformed to religious practices.|| Horace too was sympathetic to the established religion. It was poetry. 42 p 481
[The conclusion to the chapter on Epicurus, “Theology and Religion”:]
His theology is correlated alike with his physical theories and his moral system: it is indeed in some sort the link between them. If its main ideas seem at first to be fantastic subtleties, and its deductions arbitrary, a closer examination reveals their intimate connexion both among themselves and with the whole body of Epicurean doctrine. Cf Hermes, in “Lucifer”: “For men have need of us to charm the soul And with a perfect thought their pain beguile. We are the better part that saves the whole, And man’s heart lightens as he treads a grove Hallowed by me, or any child of Jove.” [ And in a rejected passage ] “Men beg for many things, and still they pine; But to grow better is the best of prayers When in our presence mortals unawares Wax to our stature, and become divine.”
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43 p 483, marked
[On Epicurean Ethics:] [Epicurus] is not concerned with what ‘ought’ to be or what is ‘fitting’, but
simply with what is: pleasure is the end. Yes: but in so far he is not a moralist: it is his sympathy with this supposed fact that is moral. 44 p 491
||On gluttony and ambition, painful desires both.|| Vice: all modern thirst for change is vicious. 45 p 518, underlined
||In a moment of enthusiasm, Epicurus exclaimed:|| ‘friendship goes dancing round the world proclaiming to us all to awake to the praises of a happy life’. The ‘wise man’ may almost be forgiven his refusal to take his share in the burdens of politics when the beauty of his life with his friends is realized. Why are the philosophers of the left so false in their poetry? 46 p 521, underlined
||Epicurus disliked marriage and family.|| The chief ‘unpleasantness and distraction’ in his eyes appears to have been the presence of the children who might divert the philosopher from his high thoughts. No: their existence and their future. If you didn’t love the children they wouldn’t make you unhappy. 47 p 523
[…] the aphorisms of Democritus leave one with the impression of a series of comments on life made from no very deep conviction of its ultimate purpose, […]. Democritus was an ironical naturalist. Epicurus a timid atheist with a gospel to preach, like a modern socialist full of his class-interests. 48 p 526–27
||Epicurus finally wanted tranquility,|| a positive and not merely a negative value. Epicurus was a Greek, healthy but not barbarous. He was therefore capable of pure pleasure. 49 p 556
[Santayana comments on and paraphrases Bailey’s Appendix “On the Theory of Anaxagoras.”]
Yes: this sounds plausible.
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There may be a great depth in the notion that chaos—with the seeds of everything in it—may be present still in the heart of matter at every point. It is not necessary, perhaps, to regard these seeds as actually realizing, in small bits, the qualities eventually to be developed. There is metamorphosis, doubtless, not merely rearrangement: but the point would be that the or chaos would have a “forward tension” towards everything indiscriminately; and the specific issue anywhere, or up to anytime, would be determined by the “lateral tensions” of circumstances. Auguste Bailly
Byzance Paris: 1948. Waterloo. Three marginalia.
1 p 357
Despite its prosperity at the time of the third and fourth crusades, Byzantium could do very little against an interior and an exterior situation heavy with mortal danger. 1950 [Santayana had in mind the outbreak of the Korean War.]
Jacques Bainville
L’Allemagne Two volumes. Paris: 1939. Waterloo.
[Volume I, no marginalia; uncut beyond p. 50. Volume II, three marginalia.] 1 p 32
[An article written in 1919:]
||Bainville asserts the injustice to the Germans of reparations and the other conditions imposed, which was to ask them to bow their heads for fifteen years. If we put ourselves in place of the Germans of 1934, would we not look about and ask ourselves if the|| hour of independence had not sounded ? Notable prophecy. Jacques Bainville
L’Angleterre et l’empire Brittanique Paris: 1938. Waterloo. Six marginalia.
1 p 127, marked
||In an article of 1927, Bainville foresees colonial uprisings.|| Further, when we have millions upon millions of yellow and black subjects, what a strange idea it is to proclaim the right of subject peoples to their own destiny!
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Jacques Bainville
1:43
La Fortune de la France Paris: 1937. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
Jacques Bainville
La Russie et la barrière de l’est Paris: 1937. Waterloo. Three marked passages.
Arthur James Balfour (first earl of Balfour) The Foundations of Belief: Being Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology London and New York: 1901 (8th edition, revised). Georgetown. Sixty-two marginalia. 1 p xv, marked
||Scepticism cannot form a basis for a creed, but it may disturb intellectual smugness about received ideas.|| The attack is rather against Philistinism than against Naturalism—since the latter may be as conscious as possible of its tentative character. 2 p xvii, marked
Naturalism is not the goal towards which we are being driven by the intellectual endeavour of the ages; nor is anything gained either for philosophy or science by attempting to minimise its deficiencies. No: since we have been driven from it—at least in name. To return to it is merely to get home again. 3 p xviii, marked
The method of proof depends essentially upon the principle that for a creed to be truly consistent, there must exist a correspondence between the account it gives of the origin of its beliefs and the estimate it entertains of their value; […]. Sophism. 4 p xix
[Further to p. xviii:]
Here is where the superficial and psychological taint appears. 5 p xxi
||Knowledge is indeed real and the moral law has authority; the source of both cannot be irrational or unmoral.|| And in both cases you talk nonsense.
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6 p xxvi
[General comment:]
Reason is something independent of facts & purposes. The region in which Balfour moves is entirely mythical. 7 p xxx fn, marked
[General comment:]
No scientific method. As if what is not known were not to be discovered by starting from what is known. 8 p xxxi
[Further criticism of Balfour’s method:]
Syncretism. The political and shady character of this ideal is obvious: keep all prejudices and let the old myths stand in the rooms of any revolutionary knowledge. This is done in the full sardonic consciousness that one is largely duped. 9 p 27, marked Z
||The relationship between naturalism and ethics. The sense of personal responsibility is bound up with the moral will.|| It may be a small matter that determinism should render it thoroughly irrational to feel righteous indignation at the misconduct of other people. ||It should then be equally irrational to be righteously indignant at one’s own.|| This is irrational because it is useless and odious: not because a man is not the seat of what is foolish or odious in him. 10 p 52, marked
[Santayana for once approves. On naturalism and æsthetic:]
[…] the immorality we glibly predicate of departed artists. If they survive at all, it is but a shadowy life they live, moving on through the gradations of slow decay to distant but inevitable death. They can no longer, as heretofore, speak directly to the hearts of their fellow-men, evoking their tears or laughter, and all the pleasures, be they sad or merry, of which imagination holds the secret. Driven from the market-place, they become first the companions of the student, then the victims of the specialist. He who would still hold familiar intercourse with them must train himself to penetrate the veil which, in ever-thickening folds, conceals them from the ordinary gaze; he must catch the tone of a vanished society, he must move in a circle of alien associations, he must think in a language not his own. Need we, then, wonder that under such conditions the outfit of a critic is as much intellectual as emotional, or that if from off the complex sentiments with which they regard the ‘immortal legacies of the past’ we strip all that is due to interests connected with history, with biography, with
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critical analysis, with scholarship, and with technique, but a small modicum will, as a rule, remain which can with justice be attributed to pure æsthetic sensibility. 11 p 70, underlined
||No|| mystical creed ||can be|| squeezed out of observation and experiment; Science cannot give it us; nor can it be forced into any sort of consistency with the Naturalistic Theory of the Universe. Of course not; but are there no profound vital and ideal harmonies in nature? 12 p 77, marked
[On naturalism and reason:]
The best way of looking at mind on the naturalistic hypothesis is, perhaps, to regard it as an instrument for securing a flexibility of adaptation which instinct alone is not able to attain. No Life of Reason. 13 p 81
The sense of humour, not the least precious among the gifts with which the clash of atoms has endowed us, should surely prevent us assuming any airs of superiority over members of the same family of ‘phenomena,’ more permanent and more powerful than ourselves. How British is this cosmic snobbery! 14 p 127, marked Z
[On the philosophic basis of naturalism:]
The principle of causation cannot be extracted out of a succession of individual experiences, […]. The world described by science is not congruous with our natural beliefs, […]. Nor can we legitimately reason back from effect to cause […]. Bad, bad, bad. [The bulk of the remaining marginalia is summarized in Santayana’s “Bad, bad, bad.” Repeatedly he attacks Balfour’s ignorance of scientific method and his use, or abuse, of scientific terminology.]
Henri Barbusse
Jésus Paris: 1927. Waterloo. One marginale.
1 p 20
Et les livres sont les cimetières des voix.1 Mais d’autres voix sortent de ces tombeaux.2 1
Books are the cemeteries of voices. But other voices emerge from these tombs.
2
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Maurice Baring
Have You Anything to Declare? London: [1935 or 1936?] Waterloo. No marginalia.
William Barnes
Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect London: 1883. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Alice Hunt Bartlett
Six Historic and Romantic Leaders Who Visioned World Peace: Poetic Dramas New York: 1946. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Ernest Sutherland Bates
Biography of the Bible New York: 1937. Waterloo. Six marginalia.
1p6
||The Jews made God subordinate to man.|| Anthropocentric. Not philosophical. Jewish egotism. 2 p 6, marked X
Jehovah is fundmentally Man himself gradually idealized. 3p6
The content furthermore is Average Man. American view of the moralism in the Jews. 4 p 7, underlined
Finally, the content is Collective Man. democratic and revolutionary character of the Bible. 5p9
The Jewish imagination, running always to the concrete, emphasized action. Pragmatism 6 p 13, underlined
||The Jews ceased to be a political entity after 586 BC, but they were great despite all, as proved|| by their literature. Religion: the literature is an effect, not a cause.
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Cuthbert Bede
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The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green London: n.d. Le Balze. No marginalia.
Montgomery Belgion
Our Present Philosophy of Life London: 1929. Georgetown. Two marginalia.
Julien Benda
Mon premier testament Paris: 1928. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
Julien Benda
La Fin de l’éternel Paris: 1929. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Julien Benda Essai d’un discours cohérent sur les rapports de dieu et du monde Paris: 1931. Waterloo. Twenty-nine marginalia. 1 p 26
[Benda’s metaphysics–on complexity:]
Complexity is not quality in the sense of essence: it is mere degree of division, which, being without scale in the infinite, cancels itself. 2 p 32, marked
[…] if God is an infinite Being, he does not recognize existence, insofar that to exist is to be distinct; in the sense that everyone gives to the word “to exist,” God, according to my understanding, n’existe pas. 3 p 33
[Santayana refers again to p. 32.]
The idea of moral perfection implies an existent nature to be perfected, but not this demand realised. Of course if God were perfected being, he would exist. 4 pp 34–35
||The idea of the self as other with relation to God.||
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Oliver’s mistake about love: it can’t be unselfish unless it selects.1 1 Reference to Oliver Alden, the central figure of Santayana’s novel, The Last Puritan.
5 p 52
In popular theology, the divinity in its essence should be inhuman. Thus Jupiter’s tears at chastising Sarpedon, and Wotan’s in putting Brünnhilde to sleep. [At the top of p. 55, Santayana refers to those tears.]
All is a history of discovery: the animal mind begins (that is—spirit in the animal mind begins—[)] with a vague apprehension of existence: within which it distinguishes, alas! one thing and one moment from another: hence these tears. 6 p 55
[Santayana invents a discourse.]
“Do you mean that existence emphasizes a part of essence? If so, all right.” “No! I mean that existence bewitches and strangles a part of substance!” 7 p 56, underlined
The idea of will, which I have shown to be incompatible with the idea of God, is, on the contrary, necessarily included in the idea of the phenomenal world. The world, insofar as it is an entity that has succeeded in producing determination, essentially une chose qui veut.1 This is myth: but not bad of its kind. 1
An entity that wills.
8 p 64
God is neither natura naturata nor natura naturans [i.e., the phenomenal world], but nature. Spinoza wished God to exist & to be a power = Nature. 9 p 65
The world falls through its own will, not through God’s will. This is poetically said, for the supposed will would already be an existent, i.e. a world. 10 p 67, underlined
Dieu m’apparait alors comme une force—comme une force vaincue. […] Mais remarquons bien que c’est uniquement l’idée du monde phenomenal qui m’oblige a concevoir Dieu comme une force.1
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He would be a passive force undiminished by the action against it—like the sea churned by a propeller. 1 At that time God seemed like a force—but a vanquished force. … But note well that it is uniquely the idea of the phenomenal world that obliged me to conceive of God as a force. 11 p 70
This is bad Bergsonism: pasts are not forces: matter must retain a mark of the past, if the past is to count at all. 12 p 71
[Benda quotes William James on his (Benda’s) idea of force.]
[…] that force by which spirit [l’esprit] retains thought [l’idée] and prevents it from escaping.1 Literary psychology with a vengeance: Spirit is a muscular hand, or a set of clenched teeth and an idea is a captive bone or arrested burglar. 1
William James, Principles of Psychology, chapter XXVI.
13 p 136, marked
||The “egoism of species” that makes for the will to solidarity of members of the same species.|| 14 p 150
For the phenomenal being, the return to God consists of a certain manner of thinking about the self, not of living. N.B. There are no spiritual actions, only spiritual feelings and thoughts. 15 p 151, top
[Santayana’s general comment:]
Life is the second-class half of the wagon: spirit is the first-class half. 16 p 151
[Benda elucidates egoism.]
||It is the pride of lives called virtuous to be free of ambition.|| A spiritual man can’t be a puritan or a Pharisee. 17 p 152
It is not important what you do, it is the manner in which you think. Yes: cf. the “good” thief.
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Gottfried Benn
Der Ptolemäer Wiesbaden: 1949. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Bernard Berenson
Sketch for a Self-Portrait London: 1949. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Henri Bergson
L’Intuition philosophique Paris: 1927. Georgetown. One marginale.
Henri Bergson
Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion Paris: 1932. Columbia. 302 marginalia.
1 p 1, marked Z
||Moral Obligation: why does one obey masters and parents, while they seem to act by delegation?|| Notice the false scent followed. Instead of composing the object partly by its function of domination, you explain this function by hypostatising it into a source of dominance beyond the object. 2 p 3, underlined and marked Z
The force that an obligation exerts […] is comparable to the souffle de vie1 that each cell aspires to, indivisible et complet, at the base of the organism of which it is an element. e.g. when you begin to be tipsy. The intoxication is a moral total, but it has a diffused alcoholic cause. 1
Breath of life.
3p5
[General comment:]
“Little boys don’t do that.” There is a sort of compulsion in invariability. Cf. the argument. “It is more & more coming to be thought” etc. 4 p 8, marked Z
The personal self cannot isolate itself fully from the social self; it wants to but cannot, for memory and imagination live in society; because the soul of society is immanent in the language one speaks. Even thought occurs in social language. loose loose loose
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5 p 11, underlined
The criminal feels the urge to denounce himself, if only to a friend or honnête homme.1 N.B. The new note. He almost says: confess to a priest! 1
Some other worthy person.
6 p 20, marked
Is it surprising that in the brief moment that separates obligation purely experienced from obligation fully represented and justified by all sorts of reasons, that obligation takes the form of the categorical imperative: «il faut parce qu’il faut?»1 Good reply to Kant. But why reply at all? 1
It must be because it must be.
7 p 22
Translated this would run: in the use of organs there is a sort of will, in the use of tools a sort of intelligence Cf. Schopenhauer. 8 p 23, marked
||Bergson compares the language of human society to the communication system of ants, maintaining that human morality is comparable to its language; that of ants is based on instinct. Nothing in the vocabulary or syntax of human language derives from nature, other than the faculty of speech.|| [At the ants exchanging signs:]
Like the glances or smiles of lovers. N.B. Crucial passage. 9 p 25, top
[Concerning “closed” and “open” societies:]
Is a “closed” society merely an exclusive or also an invariable one? If all men acknowledge the infallibility of the Pope, would the Church be “closed” or “open”? 10 p 25
Tribes, sides, parties, as among wild boys. 11 p 26
Whether open or closed, societies at war find murder, pillage, perfidy, lies and fraud not only licit but also meritorious. “Morality” is a tiresome and fusty thing which we are all glad of a chance to shake off. War enables us to do so towards the enemy, whilst tightening the home bond in a way which, being temporary & professional, is more executive than
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moral. So the chase. Art is substituted for duty—an enormous gain. The “open” & “closed” business is irrelevant. 12 p 27, underlined
||The social instinct at the base of social obligation is that of a closed society.|| But between the nation, however great it may be, and l’humanité, there is all the distance between the definite and l’indéfini, […]. Mankind is not more indefinite than Frenchman + Senegalese. If you really mean indefinite romantic life you have not an open morality but a loose vitalism—You love every passion & every vice as yourself. 13 p 28, marked X
||Love of country, deriving from love of family and friends, is essential to social survival,|| while love of humanity is indirect and acquired. et non-existent. We love any baby or kitten but not the 40 immortals or the 600 députés. [ Develop this ]. Is it by instinct that you love these and in order to make you love the chinese baby or the kitten must you make a supreme effort in dynamic mysticism? is it by a supreme effort ^ in of dynamic mysticism that you love the chinese baby or ^ ^ the kitten? ^
14 p 28
||Only religion, the idea of God, causes us to love humanity, just as only philosophy, Reason, causes us to esteem the human person.|| bosh Asceticism is requisite to love our enemies, also imagination. 15 p 30, marked
[Santayana summarizes:]
Very just. Compulsion or duty is from men & from fear of evil. Summons or invitation or counsel is from above, for the sake of a good proposed. 16 p 33, marked Z
||On the question of individual good vis à vis social good: “an intelligent being” pursuing his own good might often work against the general good.|| Hardly if he knew his own good: because the good of society is unknown, almost indefinable. 17 p 33
If society were organized to foster the perfect man (as in Greece) perfection & happiness might lie in serving society.
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18 p 38, marked and doubly marked
[Bergson’s section on “Emotion and Creation” describes attitudes toward nature of the Romans and of the Romantics.] 19 p 39
||To romantic love vs. that in Lucretius: Lucretius describes only the qualities of the beloved, not the anticipated emotion of the lover.|| So in Lucretius, perhaps: but in Plato, who has a parallel passage, the mystic object is discerned. 20 p 39, underlined and marked Z
It is beyond doubt that a new emotion may be the origin of great art, of science, and of civilization in general. Not only because l’émotion est un stimulant, because it incites the intelligence to undertake the matter and the will to persevere. Il faut aller beaucoup plus loin.1 Yes: and not so far: because emotion is not a cause but only a background or matrix. 1
One must go much further.
21 p 40, marked
[Bergson elaborates upon his psychology of emotion.]
All this is verbal fiction. No such mechanism of states of mind. 22 p 41
Women are as intelligent as men, but less capable of emotion. Women of today, scientific heartless things: they never cry or faint any more! 23 p 44, marked
||Emotion in relation to morality.|| The atmosphere of emotion is present, if I have breathed it in, if the emotion penetrates my being. Yes: but you express it unfavourably to your own cause. It is the force of nature in you, that in dictating that action or producing those ideas evokes that emotion. The emotion is not a cause. 24 p 47, marked Z
[On “Emotion and Representation”:]
Founders and reformers of religions, mystics and saints, obscure heroes of the moral life whom we have encountered who number among the greatest, all are there: led on by their example, we join them as we would join a conquering army. Is this tone sincere? Probably; but it signifies a sort of back-parlour sectarianism. If B. were a Bolschevik [sic] it would be intelligible.
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25 p 48
[Bergson on “Liberation”:]
The sense of obligation is allied to pleasure rather than to joy. Health? In health is there more pleasure than joy? There is happiness, which you are careful not to mention. As to aspiration it aims at salvation, not progress: rather escape & restoration: [ See next page] 26 p 49, marked Z
||The place of enthusiasm in moral “progress” or “going forward”:|| enthusiasm is rather to be seen as bound up in (moral) well being. ?Whoop-her-up! There isn’t much pleasure in this, but there’s lots of enthusiasm. 27 p 49, underlined
[…] sont les représentations simples qui jaillissent ici de l’émotion […]. [Santayana paraphrases:]
Ideas gush out of emotions. 28 p 49
[…] représentations l’émotion particulière d’une âme qui s’ouvre, rompant avec la nature qui l’enfermait à la fois en elle-même et dans la cité. [Again:]
Inspiration is the source of dogma—very true. 29 p 49, marked
||Aspiring mystics report that they undergo a sense of liberation.|| Well-being, pleasures, riches, all the things that ordinary people hold to leave them indifferent. At their delivery from such things, they feel relief, then happiness. Cf. last note opposite. 30 p 49, underlined
||The unnecessary baggage of the voyage.|| St. Paul travelled: but the reason for dismissing earthly goods & chattels was that Christ had arisen and was coming again. The end was at hand. 31 p 51
[Section: “The Forward March.”]
Neither the mystics’ faith nor reason can move mountains, but if you deny that, you reject the entire approach. Mrs. Eddy.1 1
Founder of Christian Science, which rejects the word “death.”
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32 p 52, underlined
[“Élan”1 in moral advance.]
Obligation is the force of an aspiration or of an élan, the same [même] élan that succeeded in the human species, in society, in customs more or less related to instinct. How is it the same movement if it has a different direction & terminus? B. means it is just movement = Locke’s uneasiness. 1
Momentum, surge, vigor, spirit.
33 pp 54–55, marked Z
||In one sense, man cheats nature when|| he prolongs social solidarity in human brotherhood; but he cheats it again, ||because societies formed according to the structure of the human soul will be unified in themselves, but will constitute hostile groups, one ready to attack and one to defend itself. Nature does not want warfare for the sake of warfare.|| The great leaders of humanity who have forced the defenses of the city seem really to be replaced by the tendency to the élan vital. ||Along the way, it encounters obstacles, and the species successively appearing are the resultants of that force and of antagonistic forces: this one pushes to the front, that one marks time.|| Cf. Freud vice versa. 34 p 63, marked
||Philosophy has not been able to explain the existence of morality in the soul.|| N.B. You don’t see how morality is natural. 35 p 67
[Section: “Justice.”]
The higher life is optional, not obligatory. 36 p 71, marked
||Former ideas of Justice should be integrated with modern ones to create an “integral justice.”|| This is a curious position for an evolutionist: to denounce virtual preexistence or potentiality. [ Right until a trope is established. ] 37 p 75
||After the revolution,|| the health of the people was not alone the supreme law, as it has elsewhere come to be; at the outset it was proclaimed as such, hence today we could not dare to erect into principle that it justifies injustice, even though we accepted from this principle such or such a consequence. Dreyfus.
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38 p 75, underlined
||Could we accept that an innocent man be subjected to eternal torture?|| ah non! plutôt accepter que plus rien n’existe!1 “Rien,” monsieur n’a pas de sens!2 [ Is it justice or pity here? Pity, I think. and [sic] with a feeling that we are all really in the same case as that innocent sufferer.] 1
Rather, accept that nothing further exists. “Nothing” sir makes no sense.
2
39 pp 78–79
[On “Justice”:]
||Changes over time in what constitutes “justice” will receive that pre-existing name: justice, thus creating the notion of an unchanging ideal.|| Quote1 1 More than likely, Santayana does not precisely quote, but appears to draw on this passage and on Benda’s entire section on “Justice” in Dominations and Powers (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 338–39.
40 p 80, doubly marked
L’évolution sociale n’est pas celle d’une société qui se serait développée d’abord par une méthode destinée à la transformer plus tard. Entre le développement et la transformation il n’y a ici ni analogie, ni commune mesure.1 Capital text. 1 Social evolution is not that of a society that will be developed from the outset according to a method destined to transform it later. Between the development and the transformation neither analogy nor a common measure exists.
41 p 83
[Section: “Pressure and Aspiration,” obligation.]
Obligation The essence of morality i.e. of moral feeling: of course not of moral character or action or custom. 42 p 84
||On intellectuality in moral obligation.|| Even if we are not interested in individuals, the general formula of morality remains which today accepts the idea of civilized humanity at large: this formula encapsulates two things: a system of orders dictated by impersonal social exigencies, and an ensemble of appeals or terms directed at the conscience of each of us by individuals who represent the best in humanity. Has B. read my account of piety and spirituality?
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43 p 87
[Santayana’s criticism:]
prosy commonplaces, sermons. B. has evidently used old lectures to make up this book, which has the élan vital only in spots. 44 p 89
||Intellectuality and moral obligation. Bergson cites the idea of the highest good of the “philosophes grecs.”|| The highest good was not the idea of the highest good but happiness in act. 45 p 89
Reason was the method of virtue: the good was happiness or perfection of life. 46 p 89, marked
||The double purpose,|| to maintain social cohesion and to cause humanity to progress is not imposed in an obligatory manner insofar as it is simply proposed by reason. If certain forces are really at work and effectively weighing on our will, reason will be able to and must intervene in order to coordinate the results, but it will not know how to re-vitalize these forces, ||because reason may dither, seeing all sides of the argument.|| [In right margin:] N.B. [Asterisk and arrow to top of page:]
* Keep moving, is what this policeman commands. He is not so meddlesome as to tell us which way to move: his orders are keep moving, and he sticks to that. 47 p 90 marked
Of course: and reason has no other function. There is, however, a certain discomfort in unreason, as in waste. After all, reason too is a trope in the psyche and demands to be executed. 48 p 97
||L’élan vital in moral obligation. How the “determined man” affects the mass of humanity; today, instinctual strength is not the same as moral force.|| Were the ancients never moved by heroic example? Were Achilles and Odysseus moved by the élan vital or by social pressure?
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49 p 101, underlined
[On the mystic’s discipline “dressage”:]
||Of the mystical love which can be transmitted through an intermediary and cause the mystic to conform to that model.|| Is this the odious St. Paul of Loisy?1 1
Cf. marginalia to A. Loisy, Simples reflexions.
50 p 103, marked
[Final sentence of Chapter I, “Moral Obligation.”]
Let us give to the word biology the very comprehensive meaning that it ought to have, that it will have one day, perhaps, and let us conclude that all morality, whether imposed or aspired to, is in essence biological. capital. 51 p 107
[Chapter II, “Static Religion.”]
But there has never been a society without religion. I have a letter from a stranger informing me that the ancient Chinese had no religion. 52 pp 109–10
||Sense refers to things; good sense (bon sens) concerns our relations to persons.|| How can one not notice that one may be a profound mathematician, a wise physician, a psychologist of delicacy in self-analysis and in analysis of others, but deficient in calculating his own motives, never adapting himself to his milieu; in short, lacking in good sense? Bertie. 53 p 113, top
[Static religion: “La fonction fabulatrice”:1 ]
This theory is a fabulation evoked to prevent intelligence from seeing the fact of normal madness. 1
The function of imagination.
54 p 116, top
Summary of Bergsonism 1. Mechanism inadequate to explain life. 2. Selection & spontaneous variation inadequate to explain organisms. Variations are total and teleological. 55 p 117
3. Acquired adaptations not inherited. They are all potential in the seed from the beginning of time. [ They are the plan of the Holy Ghost . ]
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4. The power of adaptation is a positive factor, Life. [At bottom:]
Instead of élan vital say The Holy Ghost, or The Divine Will '' '' évolution '' Creative Spiritus créatice 56 p 118, marked
5. Vitalism a confession of ignorance: but also Signifies an inner act or movement leaving a complex trace in matter. 57 p 119, marked
6&7 ? Life is divided and made specific by the obstacle & instrument supplied by matter. [ Matter decides which roads are open? ] 8 The act was the common root of intelligence and instinct. [ like Spinoza’s substance ] 58 p 119, underlined
If we regard two or three grand lines of evolution freely continuing along the rails which end in impasse, […]. All forms of life are failures except those which suggest that man is the acme of evolution. 59 p 120, marked
9 Duration is a force and a continual new beginning, and its course unpredictable. 60 p 124, top
[“Static religion.”]
The horrible tyranny exercised by society is mitigated by religion—also by sport and festivities. But religion is often even a worse tyrant. [Santayana marks and further paraphrases:]
I see: religion is going to be a cataplasm for the wound which intelligence makes in the body politic. 61 p 124
Eh? Religion is a lie to hoodwink people into serving society. Cf. Kant’s postn later. 62 p 134, marked
Definition of intelligence. It has nothing to do with understanding: it is invention or perversion.
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63 p 135, underlined
Animals do not know that they must die. Has B. read the Life of Reason? There are other indications that he has. 64 p 148
[Bergson compares religion to roulette; the place of chance in its development.]
Tolerably cynical account of religion. 65 p 150
[On the religion of the “sauvages”:] He [the uncivilized man] thinks in the terms at hand in his
experience: it is no extension of the society in which he moves, but of the passions which he feels. He conceives others in the same dramatic way, and fills them with false virtues and inventions. 66 p 159
[Section: “Primitive Mentality among the Civilized.”]
Interpret savages by looking into your own breast! 67 p 164, marked
[Bergson quotes William James, cited in Horace Kallen’s Why Religion (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927).]
“Animus and intent were never more present in any human action.” [The reference is to earthquakes, interpreted by the primitive as animated spirits of earth.]
Yes: and what light that throws on the reading of human intent. It is dramatic fiction in the observer. 68 p 165, underlined and marked
The scientific conception of the trembling of the earth to which James alludes in his final passage will be the most dangereuse of all in relation to science, which brings us the vision of peril but will not provide us with any means of escaping it. For foolish love of life—which is what you recommend at bottom. [One may sense Santayana’s occasional hostility to William James in the above two passages.] 69 p 180
[Science versus magic; Bergson defines science.]
It measures and calculates, with a view to predicting and acting. This is modern science. The understanding of nature (or attributing essences to its substance and tropes) is another matter.
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70 p 183
||Repudiated by science, magic retreats and awaits its hour, which comes to pass as dream fulfilling a desire suppressed in waking hours.|| Freud accepted 71 p 192
This is the “nice lecture” tone: pleasant but prosy 72 p 193, marked Z and underlined
||Primitive religion moved from adoration of animals to adoration of spirits.|| At the same time that animal nature seems to be concentrated in a unique quality, one may say that its individuality is dissolved in the genre. Thin speculation about matters of fact. Cf. German Naturphilosophie. 73 p 199
[Section: “Belief in the Gods.”]
||In Latin, manes and penates have no singular forms.|| You can’t very well have only one parent. 74 p 204, underlined
||Bergson identifies Poseidon and says that|| Hades is the infernal kingdom. Is Bergson in his dotage? Why write out text-book mythology? 75 p 212, marked Z
||More truths about ancient religions.|| How inferior all this is! A sort of parson making up a sermon. 76 p 213, underlined and doubly marked
||One might treat mythology as a form of history, but such a comparison is impossible, for they are not of the same order.|| History is knowledge; religion is principally action: […]. imagination [for “action”]—is this why you dislike the word? You want to give to imagination a pragmatic ground. 77 p 217, underlined
When religion really became philosophy among the ancients, it counselled inaction and renounced that purpose for which it had come into the world. i.e. to its alleged worldly benefits, which is all that a Jew can really care for. 78 p 218
||Man alone deviates from the social line by renouncing his egotistical preoccupations for the social good.|| Don’t pigs sometimes eat their young? Cf. Darwin on the conscience of migratory birds.
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79 p 223, marked Z
[Chapter III, “Dynamic Religion.”]
||How a species comes about.|| It is analagous to stamping one’s foot on the sand, displacing thus thousands of grains of sand to make a design. i.e. there is no foot: only the act of stamping produces a design in the sand. But is there any sand? And is there any design? 80 p 225, underlined
||Static religion relates fables very like those told to infants; they are necessary to religion and not merely for pleasure;|| elles contrefont la réalité perçue au point de se prolonger en actions.1 “Poetry intervening in life”. Has Bergson read something of mine? “Prayer & Sacrifice” above suggested it: also pre-rational & post-rational. Also the scorn of “essence” & “imagination”. i.e. of the words because the things must be retained. 1
They subvert perceived reality by extension in actions.
81 pp 232–33
||One knows how William James was treated for having studied the inhalation of intoxicants to induce mystical states.|| Intoxicants remove obstacles to the élan vital and we cry Hurrah! 82 p 245, underlined and marked
[Section: “Christian Mysticism.”]
||The reversal of static to dynamic characterizes the mystic’s life.|| When the obscure depths of the soul are moved, what mounts to the surface et arrive à la conscience1 and assumes, if sufficient intensity is present, the form of an image or of an emotion. Sometimes l’élan vital is conscious; here apparently not. 1
And arrives in the consciousness.
83 p 251, underlined
||On the nature of divine love for creation;|| of God’s love for his work. i.e. in prose, the energy of matter, in so far as we see it taking forms that please us. 84 p 253
||All the efforts of the mystic converge on unity with God.|| The whole point is missed when you ignore salvation. Christians, after all, are not Jews.
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85 p 255, marked Z
||The early Christians partially adopted an Aristotelian neo-Platonism to provide themselves with a philosophical basis, together with borrowings from earlier religions to assist the popularity of their new creed.|| This is the view of a modernist Jew. 86 p 257, marked
[Section: “The Prophets of Israel.”]
||Contemplative mysticism could not result in action. The prophets supplied the missing quantity:|| they had a passion for justice; they demanded it in the name of the God of Israel; Christianity, which followed upon Judaism, owed a great debt to the Jewish prophets for their active mysticism, one capable of marching to world conquest. The polico-moral [sic] side of Judaism (& of Catholicism) makes religion a force transforming (and constraining) society. “Spiritual life” not concerned. 87 p 267
[Section: “The Philosophical Value of Mysticism.”] [Santayana summarizes:]
Introspection finds the élan vital. [ It is mere sensation of organic rhythm in disturbance. ] 88 p 271, marked
[Section: “The Nature of God.”]
||On the relationship between will, the art of music, and religious emotion, which is “infra-intellectual” and dependent on will.|| This “emotion” is very like a Platonic Idea, to which matter (or the psyche) may become sensitive. It is a form of the good approachable by that organ. 89 p 288, marked
[Chapter IV, “Final Remarks.”]
||Closed and open societies are not of the same essence.|| Cf. Benda 90 p 292, marked Z
[“Of an Ideal Good.”]
It is true that most Platonists materialize the good in this way: but essentially it is any good, any goal of life. 91 p 334, marked Z
||How mysticism can exist in a world of mechanism:|| man must evaluate matter if he would detach himself from it; mysticism cries out to the mechanical. Quelle erreur!1 1
What a mistake!
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92 p 342, marked Z
[Bergson summarizes the essential vitality of mysticism.]
The Jew can’t understand disdain of life. Henri Bergson
La Pensée et le mouvant Paris: 1934 (3rd edition). Columbia. Forty-nine marginalia.
1 p 17
B. here admits the esoteric character of his view which in fact is a hypostasis of ignorance. 2 p 21
God if he exists has a vegetating consciousness ignorant of own future. 3 p 23
American pragmatism at its crudest. The idea of the past & the past confused intentionally. 4 p 25
[Santayana’s general criticism of Bergson:]
His own mind is fanatically closed to almost all ideas. His smooth language and wide information (not always correct or impartial) are gathered as protective colouring for his bitter hatred of the intellect. 5 p 35, top
[On intuition:]
“C’est la vision directe de l’esprit par l’esprit.” Read, rather, C’est le vision sensation confusé de la matiére par ^ ^ la matiére. 1
It is the direct vision of spirit by spirit. … It is the sensation of matter confused by matter. 6 p 35, marked
[On intuition in philosophy:]
N.B. In the description (not explanation) of special things in terms peculiar to them. Yet if wholly peculiar there would hardly be an explanation: only a cliché Miscellaneous & desultory talk about odd things in odd terms. Yet you yourself are tightly systematic & narrowly dogmatic! 7 p 37
Monstrous notion that this sensualism is spirituel!
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8 p 65, top
[Summary:]
Biology the guide of “metaphysics”. “Life” is now physical life, to which “spirit” is to come as a sort of petrol to the motor. He forgets that if spirit has a physical function it is a physical force. The dualism thus breaks down, in spite of p. 60 [Where Bergson believed he had dealt with the difficulty.] 9 p 68
[Concerning “General Ideas”:]
||From the large number of received ideas in a population, only a few may be extracted by philosophy as fruitful.|| This is contrary to B’s insight that if anything were foreseen it would already exist. 10 p 97
What is intelligence? It is the human manner of thought. It is given to us, like instinct to the bee, to direct our conduct. […] Originally, it tended to fabrication. Intelligence = imagination, i.e. the intelligent force of it is removed. 11 p 172
[“The Perception of Change.”]
||Bergson believes that many psychological questions may be seen in a new light if we understand that distinct perception is simply “decoupé” (literally jagged = partial), according to the needs of practical life in a vast assembly of data. We like to proceed in psychology from the part to the whole.|| Quote note. The specious continuum is how things seem: the requirements of practice show us how they are. 12 p 173
[“The Enlargement of Perception.”]
N.B. pratique. B. sees disinterestedness in sensuality, but not in thought. 13 p 181
[“The Indivisibility of Change and Movement.”]
Le mouvement est la réalité même, […].1 The sense of movement = durée.2 1
Movement is reality itself. Duration, continuance.
2
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14 p 192
||That which is abandoned in the present becomes the past.|| The past is what we do not remember. 15 p 192
Does not distinguish singleness of essence from momentary existence. 16 p 193, underlined
[“The Survival of the Past.”]
||Thousands of “forgotten” details may be recalled, because the entire history of an individual unrolls before him|| en un mouvant panorama. He has put in this word to save his face: but the movement is specious. The whole is given now. 17 pp 240–41
Les démonstrations qui ont été données de la relativité de notre connaissance sont donc entachées d’un vice originel: elles supposent, comme le dogmatisme qu’elles attaquent, que toute connaissance doit nécessairement partir de concepts aux contours arrêtés pour étreindre avec eux la réalité qui s’écoule.1 Quote or use. The unknowable of Spencer is perhaps the source of this notion: only as the unknowable is the substance of ourselves, we know it in the sense of being or enacting, tho’ not in the sense of thinking it in terms of essence. We are acquainted or familiar with ourselves, without having any idea of what we are.2 1 Demonstrations of the relativity of our knowledge which have been given are thus embodied in a fundamental defect. They assume, like the dogmatism they attack, that all understanding must necessarily depart from established concepts in order to come to grips with unfolding reality. 2 Cf. Santayana’s published lecture “The Unknowable: the Herbert Spencer Lecture Delivered at Oxford,” October 24, 1923. Cf. also four holograph manuscripts on Bergson in the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Room.
George Berkeley
Selections from Berkeley Edited by Alexander Campbell Fraser Oxford: 1884. Georgetown. Ninety-seven marginalia
[Signed:]
GS 19 Hollis / Cambridge / 29 Thayer / 7 Stoughton [These marginalia are principally study- or class-notes of the undergraduate Santayana.]
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1 p 18, underlined
[Introduction:]
[…] the idea of a man that I frame for myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. ?Isn’t this really impossible to the imagination? 2 p 24
||It is generally held that|| all knowledge and demonstration are about universal notions,|| and Berkeley agrees,|| but then it does not appear to me that those notions are formed by abstraction. this is a question of the genesis of ideas. Cf. Wundt. 3 p 24
The subject is very much more intricate than this makes it. We gradually distinguish in the twilight of consciousness the outline of various objects and the type or ancestry of each idea remains as a sort of memory or echo attending to it whereby we place and classify it. 4 p 30
[“Remedies for the Abuse of Words.”]
May we not […] be affected with the promise of a good thing, though we have not an idea of what it is? Certainly not if we had no idea of “good” 5 p 31, underlined
The objects I consider, I clearly and adequately know. Criticise. Knowledge is theory about sensation, not causation. It is reliable fiction. 6 p 33
[“The Curtain of Words.”]
In vain do we extend our view into the heavens and pry into the entrails of the earth, in vain do we consult the writings of learned men and trace the dark footsteps of antiquity— quote 7 p 39, marked
[“Of the Principles of Human Knowledge.”]
For, what are the fore-mentioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived? The principle of this is that knowledge is impossible.
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8 p 43
Matter is an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion do actually subsist . But it is evident […] that extension, figure, and motion are only ideas existing in the mind, and that an idea can be like nothing but another idea, and that consequently neither they nor their archetypes can exist in an unperceiving substance. There is depth in this: we cannot imagine what sort of being a thing enjoys unless it be consciousness of its qualities. But this only proves that we cannot conceive the nature of things except by analogy to our own nature. 9 p 51, marked
[Paragraph 22.]
[…] to what purpose is it to dilate on that which may be demonstrated with the utmost evidence in a line or two […]? It is but looking into your own thoughts, and so trying whether you can conceive it possible for a sound, or figure, or motion, or colour to exist without the mind or unperceived. Would this not suffice to condemn the whole doctrine? It is a definition, not a theory. The theory begins with the hypothesis of Providence. 10 p 52
[Paragraph 23.]
||To the contention that one may conceive of trees in a park without anyone to perceive them, Berkeley writes that|| it only shews you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it does not shew that you can conceive it possible the objects of your thought may exist without the mind. N.B. This paragraph gives away the futility of the contention—ideas are ideas. 11 pp 56–57, underlined
[Paragraph 27.]
||Such words as will, soul, spirit do not stand for different ideas, or for any idea.|| Though it must be owned at the same time that we have some notion of soul, spirit, and the operations of the mind; such as willing, loving, hating—inasmuch as we know or understand the meaning of these words. Yes: just as we understand the meaning of matter—matter is just such a power, just such a reference to the order & system of phenomena.
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12 pp 58–59
[Paragraph 32.]
Of the consistent uniform working [of a] Governing Spirit whose Will constitutes the laws of nature. The weakness of this hypothesis is (its strength for the religious) lies in the unwarrantable notions and nature attributed to the cosmic power. Since the order of phenomena is its only manifestation, our conception of its nature should be derived from that order, not from sentiment or fancy. A power, then, that produces the phenomena of nature in the order in which we find and conceive them to be produced[?], that is all we know of God, and that will corresponds to a critical conception of matter. 13 p 80, marked
[Paragraph 62, concerning uniformity of natural phenomena:]
Berkeley here grants all that is required but with a slur, as if he had a better explanation than uniformity. But the efficiency of spirit is merely a fanciful fact, used as a type of explanation. Cf. gravitation. 14 p 109fn1, underlined
It may well be that we are intellectually obliged to think that each new event must have previously existed in the form of a preceding phenomenon. rot! 15 p 317, underlined
[Sirius: a Chain of Philosophical Reflexions, paragraph 234.]
Where intellect presides there will be method and order, and therefore rules, which if not stated and constant, would cease to be rules. if this be granted, then our idea of intellect is itself compromised and deprived of psychological reality. 16 p 324, marked
[Sirius, paragraph 254.]
As the natural connexion of signs with the things signified is regular and constant, it forms a sort of Rational Discourse, and is therefore the immediate effect of an intelligent Cause. If this is accepted, the nature of intelligence is reduced to comprehensibility, and we have as in Hegel an unconscious intelligence that is a reason in things, meaning only this intelligibility.
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17 p 326
[Sirius, paragraph 257.]
||No man blames himself if something is amiss with the systole and diastole of his heart.|| So that we are driven to a moral inspection of nature, as the effect of a responsible agent. What is meant by comprehension. Here is the intolerable substitution of occult quasi magical forms for laws of phenomena. 18 p 32
[Sirius, paragraph 259.]
The hidden force that unites, adjusts, and causeth all things to hang together, and move in harmony—which Orpheus and Empedocles styled Love—this principle of union is no blind principle, but acts with intellect. Why do we think intellect an explanation? Write about this. 19 p 344, marked
[Sirius, paragraph 301, “Evolution of Intellectual Faculties.”]
||Defense of divinity interposed in intellectual matters:|| Whoever considers a parcel of rude savages left to themselves, how they are sunk and swallowed up in sense and prejudice, and how unqualified by their natural force to emerge from this state, will be apt to think that the first spark of philosophy was derived from heaven. This is sancta simplicitas1 indeed. The verification of selected physical hypotheses is the work of dispassionate labour. 1
Holy folly.
20 p 346, marked
[Sirius, paragraph 305.]
As understanding perceiveth not, that is, doth not hear, or see, or feel, so sense knoweth not: and although the mind may use both sense and fancy, as means whereby to arrive at knowledge, yet sense or soul, so far forth as sensitive, knoweth nothing. For, as it is rightly observed in the Theaetetus of Plato, science consists not in the passive perceptions, but in the reasoning upon them— 1 This is good. 1
Drawing conclusions about them.
21 p 363, doubly marked
[Sirius, paragraph 350:]
And, whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the summum bonum may possibly make a thriving earth-worm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.
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Aureliano de Beruete
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Velazquez Translated by Hugh E. Poynter London: 1906. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Edwyn Robert Bevan
Jerusalem under the High-Priests
London: 1918. Georgetown at Le Balze. One marginale.
Thomas Bewick
A Selection of Engravings on Wood by Thomas Bewick London: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Bible: The Apocryphal New Testament
Edited by William Hone Philadelphia: 1880 (1st edition, 1820). Georgetown. No marginalia.
Martin Birnbaum
John Singer Sargent New York: 1941. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Martin Birnbaum
Jacovleff and Other Artists New York: 1946. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Elizabeth Bishop
North & South Boston: 1946. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
[Sent to Santayana by Robert Lowell, very probably.] 1 p 2, marked
[“The Imaginary Iceberg.”]
This is a scene where he who treads the boards is artlessly rhetorical.
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Carlo Bolaffio
Colui che si chiama “Io sono” Modena: 1936. Waterloo. One marginale.
1 p 647
||Nature as a principle of unification.|| Not likely. Isabel Bolton [Mary Britton Miller]
Do I Wake or Sleep?
New York: 1946. Waterloo. No marginalia.
F[rancis] H[erbert] Bradley
Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay
London and New York: 1893. Texas. 562 marginalia. 1 p 2, marked
[…] the would-be sceptic, who presses on us the contradictions of our thoughts, himself asserts dogmatically. The sceptic is a rationalist baffled. Indifference and frivolity are the only consistent scepticism. Superstition, in another way, is an expression of the same. 2 p 4, top
Reflection must exist: why not try to make it satisfactory? If you rest willingly in the unintelligible, you have no need of metaphysics. (to rest in the unintelligible is necessary at the end: why should it not be accepted at the beginning?) 3 p 6, top
It is a duty to pursue one’s highest interest and good: which for some persons may lie in knowledge of Being. New metaphysics, like new poetry, even if not the best, may have a function in its day which nothing else could fulfil. 4p7
[Santayana paraphrases:]
that the “mere intellect” (i.e. Scholastic reflection?) is the highest side of man or the only avenue to deity is a superstition and a deplorable error.
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5 pp 17–18, underlined
[“Primary and Secondary Qualities”:]
[…] the materialist, from defect of nature or of education […] worships without justification ||that extension from sensation is primary and may be demonstrated in the procedures of science.|| […] this is barbarous metaphysics. Barbarous because it neglects refinements and the coloured landscape through which it stalks: but Socratic and civilised (as this book, in this respect, is not) in that it looks to utility and practise for the sanction of dogma. 6 p 18
That certain qualities may be disregarded in calculation is no argument to show either that they are unreal or that the residuum can exist alone. To regard the hypostatical language of calculus as real is barbarous metaphysics. 7 p 30
[“Relation and Quality.”]
Have qualities without relation any meaning for thought? For myself, I am sure that they have none. Fun at Herbart Differences must preceed distinction. What is not relative is nothing, but nothings cannot be related. That terms cannot be made out of relations explains the failure of Hegel’s method. 8 p 32, top
A relation without terms mere verbiage. A relation cannot be grounded on a common quality in two things, for then they would be already related. 9 p 34, top
This chapter [“Relation and Quality”], if understood, makes the rest of the book superfluous. Experience, when relational, does not give final truth: but inconsistent aspects which when forced together bewilder. If they be attributed to human frailty, man becomes mad and the universe empty. 10 p 34, marked
Our intellect, then, has been condemned to confusion and bankruptcy, […]. Why not recognise its practical and aesthetic function, you who think the “mere intellect” of so little account?
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11 p 34
A transcendental or idealistic philosophy that is more than retrospective is at once retrograde. 12 p 38, marked
[“Space and Time.’’ On the difficulties of conceiving space:]
[…] knowing what we mean by it, we see inherent in that meaning the puzzle we are describing. Perceived Space, to be ontological space, must ^ ^ ^ ^ have space outside itself.” This is nonsense. Space has at least three distinct meanings: 1st perceived spaces with nothing beyond them. 2nd Extension, the quality of these spaces. 3rd A hypothetical single infinite motionless homogeneous space—the space of astronomy. This has “no space outside it”. 13 p 40, underlined
[“Space and Time.”]
[…] to make the relation of time an unit is, first of all to make it stationary, by destroying within it the diversity of before and after. And, in the second place, this solid unit, existing only by virtue of external relations, is forced to expand. i.e. if it is not solid. Bradley keeps two meanings or more going, in order to take which ever he needs to create his contradictions. 14 p 40, underlined and marked
[As with space:]
How to combine this in unity with the time which it fills, and again, how to establish each aspect apart, are both beyond our resources. And time so far, like space, has turned out to be appearance. Note the method. If I cannot understand a thing it is an appearance only. Say rather it is a reality not fully understood. The author ought not to object to this change since his reality is simply appearance completed. 15 p 43
[Written at the end of the chapter “Space and Time.”]
Idea of an Essay Reality may mean: 1) an external state of objects 2) an ultimate discoverable truth. The question whether the phenomenal world is (or can be so changed as to become) real can be asked with either of these meanings of reality in mind.
George Santayana’s Marginalia
To show that the phenomenal world is not even potentially an external state of objects we may invoke the subjective origin & seat of all ideas, and the inherent contradiction ^ ^ of time & space To show that the phenomenal world is not even potentially the form of ultimate truth we have to conceive the possibility of other forms and categories than those of experience, which we cannot do. The contradiction of time and space are to be treated as a defect of reason and method rather than of sense, because the reason is more superficial and changeable than the forms of perception. This reality is therefore a clarified appearance. 16 pp 50–51, top
[“Motion and Change and Its Perception.”]
Objections to saying that succession is perceived in one moment. 1. It breaks out within the moment, if this is truly synthetic. 2. It has a temporal locus, date, etc. But if in time how timeless? 3. To mean change you must undergo it (?) [ To mean anything you must live, and to live you must change. But the changing meaning has a fixed goal. ] 4. The timeless has no prow and stern to be moored in time by. 5. Many things without duration might succeed one another. 17 p 61
[“Causation.”]
Causation cannot be continuous. If, on the other hand, causation were continuous, there would be no enduring states, and history would consist of timeless somethings out of time. Their duration and mutual influence would be mere appearance, here = illusion. 18 p 61, bottom
Motto Faith—because everything is ultimately inexplicable: reason,—because nothing is ultimately contradictory.
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19 p 62
[“Activity.”]
In raising the question if activity is real or is only appearance, I may be met by the assertion that it is original, ultimate, and simple. I am satisfied myself that this assertion is incorrect, and is even quite groundless. If activity = sense of activity it is a mere quality or feeling, and as such mere appearance. If it be a transitive something not explicable, let it be explained or let us abandon metaphysics. 20 p 64
Activity is caused change, but it also must be more. […] If a thing carries out its own nature we call the thing active. All thought is metaphysical and the best understanding we can have of anything is to assimilate it to something given in sense—a picture diagram or motion. 21 p 76
[“The Meanings of Self.”]
In some sense, the self exist [sic]: but in no sense assignable. How obvious, then, that there is no reality! For nothing is thoroughly consistent or intelligible: nothing can be exhaustively translated into terms of discourse. 22 p 85
||The ambiguity of the self remembering the self past.|| The memory that appropriates a past must not be deceptive: that past must have been single and continuous. But this is a matter of degree and aspect. General sameness is meaningless. 23 p 89, marked
The ego that pretends to be anything either before or beyond its concrete psychical filling, is a gross fiction and mere monster, and for no purpose admissible. A bit strong for a Kantian. 24 p 97
If […] I wished to produce self-contraction, then that also would be enlargement because in it the idea, before limited by the fact of a greater area, would transcend that limit. Thus even self-destruction is relative expansion, […]. Suicide is the only means of making death an action.
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25 p 100
[Santayana summarizes and criticizes Bradley’s paragraph 7:]
7. Self may mean the irrelevant concomitants of any mental activity. This is a variable field. The chance self. 26 pp 103–4
[“The Reality of Self.”]
||On the puzzling diversity of change in the self, versus the conviction one may have that personal identity exists and is unchanging.|| Here is a fundamental slip. Their diversity is their unity. The cross-section, if it exists as a group phenomena is a particular and a fact. Failure to understand this omne eus unum1 explains the contradictions of the Absolute; for a mass of phenomena might exist in a double ring of apperception did not the latter constitute units in existence. 1
All out of one.
27 p 106, marked
||The doctrine that pleasure and pain belong to the self, not to the not-self.|| Cf. Sense of Beauty. 28 p 116
||Imprecision in the idea of energy, or force.|| Energy or force (Schopenhauer’s Will) is not simple or original. Its composition is clear. 29 p 117
[“The Reality of Self.” On monads:]
[…] the doctrine that each monad is an independent reality. […] plurality and separateness without a relation of separation seem really to have no meaning. And […] without relations these poor monads would have no process and would serve no purpose. Are you thinking of Leibniz? Surely not of Herbart. 30 p 122, marked
[“Phenomenalism.”]
This seems to understand by phenomenalism a doctrine that denies the existence of mental complexes. The nerve of the objection seems to be that complexes could not arise if there were no unifying powers and substances in nature. This doctrine is arbitrary. The author often confuses in this way the possibility of being with the possibility of explanation. An account of all the facts may mean a description or a logical deduction. Of course phenomenalism does not furnish the latter.
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N.B. Knowledge is impossible if its objects exist, though their inmost function is to be causes of knowledge. 31 p 128
[“Things in Themselves.” Paraphrase and criticism:]
Unknowable may mean 1st unfit to be known by any mind, even one constructed ad hoc. This is nonsense. 2nd unfit to be known by the human mind, even as to existence and function. This undiscoverable. 3rd unfit to [be] exhaustively known by the human mind (like the absolute). This enigmatical. 4th not possibly possessed, but fit to be represented adequately, by a given human mind (like another human mind or any science) This credible. 1
Cf. Santayana’s essay, “The Unknowable” (see footnote on p. 66).
32 p 130, marked
[…] a Thing without qualities is clearly not real. It is mere Being, or mere Nothing, […]. Hegel, who has minted you, says: “Die Sprache ist wahrhafter als die Meinung oder das Meinen.”1 1
Language is more true than opinion or meaning.
33 p 131, doubly marked
What is too visible is our own readiness to sacrifice everything which possesses any possible claim on us. Oh yes. Quite so. 34 p 135
[Book II, Reality. “The General Appearance of Reality.”]
Appearance falls into reality somehow. But how transformed? 35 p 137, top
[Santayana paraphrases:]
You might, assuming truth to exist, show that it could not be arrived at, even in psychology or whatever else your proof relied on. But you cannot say reality contradicts itself, although you may show that you and every body else perpetually does so. 36 p 140
[Santayana summarizes:]
The real contains appearance. The real is self-consistent. Therefore it contains appearance in a consistent form. It is the harmony of all phenomena.
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Discord appears; it is therefore contained in reality, like all appearance; but it is not a discord there: ∴ a discord is not a discord. But this is self-contradictory. ∴ in reality the discord is not harmonious, etc. etc. 37 p 141, marked
If the beings are not in relation, they cannot be many; but if they are in relation, they cease forthwith to be absolute. For, on the one hand, plurality has no meaning, unless the units are somehow taken together. There is need of a word in which a metaphysical separation may be expressed without attribution of number, which is a relation[?] of phenomena, and finite. 38 pp 142–43, marked Z
[End of the chapter “The General Nature of Reality.” On the impossibility of the existence of the Absolute:]
For, if the being exists outside of all knowledge, assuredly to us it can be nothing. And, if it knows itself as what it is, then, since it falls within itself, it so far is the universe, and certainly is not one being among others. But if it is known by another, then forthwith it cannot be self-existent, since this relation must clearly belong to its essence. And it is useless to distinguish its existence for another from its existence to itself. This is a good reductio ad absurdum. And so I can know nothing. […] we can insist that independent beings are impossible. Reals, not different from each other, are not several at all; but to be different, and yet not essentially relative, is to be a self-contradiction. And so we conclude that the Reality must be a single whole. [So ends the chapter.] Of course, if “a single whole” means any collection of things I can think of when I say “Reality”. They will certainly have number, coexistence, similarity or difference, and other relations making them pertinent to one another. This applies to the “Reality” I can construct and arrive at. But the other reality which I start with and which eschews capital letters has no conditions, no limits, no entrance examinations, no criterion. And while to call it many would be mythical, just as to call it one is, there is no telling how much of it there may be, or of what character. 39 p 146
[Chapter XIV, “The General Nature of Reality (continued ).”]
||Experience will not yield reality.|| What we discover rather is a whole in which distinctions can be made, but in which divisions do not exist. […] reality is sentient experience.
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It would be better to say “actuality” “active being” “actual existence” so as to avoid this danger of psychologism. The potential or abstracted—the material and ideal—should not be deemed reality; nor can feelings thought of be deemed sentience. Yet they are not actual. 40 p 148, marked
[…] if metaphysics is to stand, it must, I think, take account of all sides of our being. I do not mean that every one of our desires must be met by a promise of particular satisfaction; for that would be absurd and utterly impossible. But if the main tendencies of our nature do not reach consummation in the Absolute, we cannot believe that we have attained to perfection and truth. How can this distinction be defended? This is disgusting. Your Absolute reeks with evil: it is a poor and helpless man of sentience. 41 p 150, underlined
Pleasure and system perhaps are in truth a false compound, an appearance which exists, as such, only in our heads; just as would be the case if we thought, for example, of a perfect finite being. Strange! How physics dominates these brains! 42 p 156
Since reality is harmonious, want of harmony is not possible, and a mere collision of perceptive elements is assuredly want of harmony. The “reality” is here becoming very like a dream; i.e. it is the possibility of a view that should unite all contradictions—a heavenly truce that it is impossible for any actual view to contain the others, or any will not to will its own particular satisfaction, is what makes the idea a chimera and not the “reality”. 43 pp 162–63, marked
[Chapter XV, “Thought and Reality.”]
||Anything considered real has two aspects: we must be able to “say” both aspects, or reality is lacking.|| 44 p 163, underlined
There is a “what” and a “that,” an existence and a content, and the two are inseparable. […] If we try to get the “that” by itself, we do not get it. For either we have it qualified, or else we fail utterly. If we try to get the “what” by itself, we find at once that it is not all. It points to something beyond, and cannot exist by itself and as a bare adjective.
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This is one of the errors, as I think, of this author = adjectives are the original elements of things: the substance is one of them, or a substitute for one of them. Of course, it is true that the adjective is a substantial existence, i.e. an independent one. 45 p 163
||An image is a fact, as real as any sensation.|| But an idea is any part of the content of a fact so far as that works out of immediate unity with its existence. “Idea” here means an abstracted quality used as a predicate. 46 p 163
In judgment an idea is predicate of a reality. […] what is predicated is not a mental image. ||It is a|| mere “what,” a mere feature of content. […] And this predicate is divorced from its psychical existence in my head, […]. Isn’t there a danger here of conceiving a thing (this loosed element) to exist without existing! 47 p 167
Thus the truth belongs to existence, but it does not as such exist. Truth is potential. 48 p 167, marked
Hence truth shows a dissection and never an actual life. Its predicate can never be equivalent to its subject. And if it became so, and if its adjectives could be at once self-consistent and re-welded to existence, it would not be truth any longer. It would have then passed into another and a higher reality. The description which we tend to make and which is in terms of abstractions, would be the truth if completed. But the truth would be a description still, whereas the reality would be an experience. This experience, known, would be, unlike the description, diffuse and not concentrated in one moment. 49 p 188, top
[“Error.” Santayana’s generalized comment:]
Error is the false application of an idea, i.e. application to a subject that does not have it. 50 p 190, top
Error is qualification by what, when applied, produces selfcontradiction.
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The assurance that the “real” is consistent is itself a proof that your reality is an ideal of your mind, since it is governed a priori by mental law. 51 p 192, top
Error is partial truth (Existence and attribution are not here distinguished) 52 p 195, top
[“Error.” Santayana summarizes and extends Bradley’s meaning:]
Positive error is more than incompleteness: but its refractiveness may be a beauty. Falsehood is redeemed by the amusement it causes the Absolute to think it through. The fact that I hate the Absolute is one of its sources of satisfaction. 53 p 195, marked
[Concerning truth and false appearance:]
That both exists and is, as such, not real. Its arrangement becomes true in a wider rearrangement of “what” and of “that.” Error is truth when it is supplemented. And its positive isolation also is reducible, and exists as a mere element within the whole. Error is, but is not barely what it takes itself to be. This is the enormity. How can error “exist”? 54 p 202
[Chapter XVII, “Evil.”]
Idea and existence we find not to agree, and this discord we call evil. […] And, as with error, even our onesidedness, our insistence and our disappointment, may somehow all subserve harmony and go to perfect it. Wickedness is according to “heaven’s design” and is necessary not only for priggish morality, but for the Absolute’s luxurious ease—like snuff or curry.1 1
Santayana’s voice here is very like that of the Vicar of Iffley in The Last Puritan. 55 p 204, underlined
We do not know how all these partial unities come together in the Absolute, but we may be sure that the content of not one is obliterated. But it is obliterated in you when you take pleasure in the thought of an absolute whose life transcends all the terms of your own. And this mystical debauch is really what tempts you and wins your philosophy.
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56 p 226
[Chapter XIX. “The This and the Mine.” Experience is fragmentary:]
That experience should take place in finite centres, and should wear the form of finite “thisness,” is in the end inexplicable. [But] the universe is richer […] for all the dividedness and variety. […] [and] our ignorance here is no ground for rational opposition. Our principle assures us that the Absolute is superior to partition, and in some way is perfected by it. To acknowledge another is not to become him. Whenever he comes to the point, the author shifts his ground and talks of the possibility of a mind including all contents, instead of admitting that different contents make different minds. 57 p 245
[Bradley recapitulates his argument in one long paragraph. Santayana, in rare praise:]
Brilliant passage 58 p 253
[Chapter XXI, “Solipsism.”]
Bradley tries to meet the objection [to solipsism] based on finite existence, and does so by urging that all finite content may be a part of an infinite or perfect content. (The existences giving this content in different measures would nevertheless be eternally distinct existences.) 59 p 260, top
Truths to be extracted from solipsism God is also my state All reality is immediate I am an integral part of the Absolute 60 p 260, marked
That the real Absolute, or God himself, is also my state, is a truth often forgotten. The materiality of this psychic system could not be better betrayed. 61 p 276, underlined and marked Z
[Chapter XXII, “Nature.”]
Nature will not merely be the region that is presented [to sentience] and also thought of, but it will […] include matter which is only thought of. Nature will hence be limited solely by the range of our intellects. It will be the physical universe apprehended in any way whatever by finite souls.
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That this paragraph appears in this place, instead of at the head of the chapter, shows that B. has no sense for nature or science; he confuses one with landscape and the other with sensation. 62 p 277, top
Nature = landscape. The potential is not fact. The potential is not physical. (O ignorance!) 63 p 283
We have seen that in reality there can be no mere physical Nature. The world of physical science is not something independent, but is a mere element in one total experience. Science, thus dislodged from the office of describing reality, is dislodged from nothing of any use. 64 p 283, underlined
For the object of natural science is not at all the ascertainment of ultimate truth, and its province does not fall outside phenomena. The ideas, with which it works, are not intended to set out the true character of reality. After reducing God to mindless sentience you reduce truth to a useless chimera. 65 pp 302–3
[Chapter XXIII, “Body and Soul.”]
[…] the soul is […] not presented fact, but is an ideal construction which transcends what is given. It is emphatically the result of an ideal process. [At top of 303:]
The soul is a romantic figure, the heroine of an ideal history. 66 p 331
[Logical proof that:]
Every difference makes a difference. (This assertion is a gratuitous dogma. A thousand things make no difference, and are therefore excluded from natural existence.) (Of course everything has its consequences (more or less imputed but these consequences may not be relevant to the issue, as in superstition.) [sic] 67 pp 336–37
||A full knowledge of causation|| is theoretically impossible. Our known causes and effects are held always by a licence and partly on sufferance. [At top of 337:]
Cause, being a convenient fiction, connects abstractions. (Here B. seems to nullify all his captious criticisms that preceeded)
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68 p 344
[Santayana reduces a page and more of Bradley’s argument to one sentence:]
As all communication is through body, and all verification of communication is in body, how can we be sure of the character of other minds? 69 p 356
[Concerning the pre-existence of the soul (with respect to the question of identity):]
Further, similarities do not make memory, but memory displays identity. This would create a world of universal relativity. The same would not be identity. 70 p 360
[Chapter XXIV, “Degrees of Truth and Reality.” Santayana paraphrases:]
History is a rude essay in expressing reality; truth (which is itself appearance) already diverges from history into the eternal. 71 p 364
||For a relation to be defined from without|| is, in principle, to be distracted within. And, the smaller the element, the more wide is this dissipation of its essence—a dissipation too thorough to be deep, or to support the title of an intestine division. The more dissipated the more entire. In sensible language this means that the elementary is the simple. 72 p 364
Hence to be more or less true, and to be more or less real, is to be separated by an interval, smaller or greater, from all-inclusiveness or self-consistency. Facilis [ to the truth] descensus averno.1 1
Virgil’s Aeneid: The roads to hell are smooth.
73 pp 368–69, underlined
[On the negation, or wish to negate, reality:]
That which I desire is not consciously assumed to exist, but still vaguely, somehow and in some strange region, it is felt to be there; and, because it is there, its non-appearance excites painful tension. This thin sophistry is as bad as Royce’s. 74 p 374, underlined
||Feeling as the test of truth and value would destroy both and create anarchy.|| […] because some truth, however obvious, seemed in our opinion
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not favourable to the increase of pleasure, we should have to treat it at once as sheer falsehood and error. And by such an attitude, however impracticable, we should have at least tried to introduce some sort of unity and meaning into our world. How these words smell of sulphur after being used to construct this Absolute Hell. 75 p 377
[Sardonic paraphrase:]
Reality can be neither Human nor Platonic. For idea and existence are separable only in appearance: in reality they merge. 76 p 388
[…] there can be no such thing as unconditioned possibility. The possible […] is always relative. And, if it attempts to be free, it ceases to be itself. Idealism is to take the terms of discourse for the factors of existence. 77 p 389, top
The possible must have some footing in the actual. All possibility must be physical possibility: there is no merely ideal possibility. [ In other words, all that is truly possible is actual. Cf. Spinoza] 78 p 391, underlined
That which is unconditionally possible is viewed apart from, and is supposed to remain undetermined by, relation to the Real. […] The merely possible, if it could exist, would be, therefore, for all we know, sheer error. For it would […] be an idea, which, in no way and to no extent, is accepted by Reality. The possible is that which, being compatible with my intelligence, may not be compatible with other things; it belongs to discourse not to existence. Bradley would say that intelligence, where its standard differed from reality, was self-contradictory. Is reality existence only or existence + thought? All possibles of course exist in thought—in limbo. [Santayana’s theory of essence clearly is taking form and words here, and would seem to owe much to his opposition to Bradley’s many pages on possibility.]
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79 p 392–93, top
Absolute chance is absolute dependence (in discourse). It has a place in history, without ideal relation there. But history being itself ideal, this is impossible. Chance disregards the inner, possibility the outer relations in which every thing stands: for every relation, while it unites a thing with what is outside, unites it by its content. All relations are ideal. Nothing is contingent. 80 p 394
Every contact, even with a point in the temporal series, means ideal connection with a concrete group of relations. Hence the more widely possible is that which finds a smaller amount of content lying wholly outside its own area. It is, in other words, the more individual, the truer, the more real. [ [illegible]Superstition, in its decrepitude, yearns again for its primeval springs, and [illegible]would canonise1 the frothing maniac and vulgar liar.] 1
Santayana struck through words before ‘Superstition’ and ‘would canonise’.
81 p 398, top
Every idea, besides its place in discourse, has its place in existence. And the existent idea may misrepresent the eternal one. But, insofar as the fact realises the idea, the idea may be, by it, proved to exist. (Cogito ergo sum). 82 p 400
[Santayana comments at the end of the chapter on “Degrees of Truth and Reality.”]
In this chapter reality is less sentient and more conceptual than in the others. Hegel was not a sensualist. The reality of his idea was spiritual: and here Bradley inconsistently asserts that the spiritual is more real than the sensuous, although it is really sensuous and not spiritual at all. It is only a bigger sensation. 83 p 401
[Chapter XXV, “Goodness.”]
In a former chapter I tried to show, briefly, that the existence of evil affords no good ground for an objection against our Absolute. Evil and good are not illusions, but they are most certainly appearances. They are one-sided aspects, each over-ruled and transmuted in the Whole.
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This is metaphysical not moral thinking, and the author seems to mean that no object, no existence, is absolutely good or bad, i.e. good or bad antecedently. 84 p 405
Pleasure is not the only good because, though the rest would be worthless without it, so would pleasure be without the rest. [ That is, human nature is specific and can find pleasure only in certain things.] 85 p 408fn, marked
[The good is coextensive with approbation. Then in footnote 1:]
The real objection against making approval co-extensive with goodness is that approval implies usually a certain degree of reflection, and suggests the judging from an abstracted and impersonal point of view. What has not Royce made of this? 86 pp 413–14
||The answer to the question, “What is good?” is “Nothing,” for pleasure by itself|| is not the essence of goodness; and […] no feature of the world falls outside of what is good. Beauty, truth, feeling, and sensation, every imaginable matter must go to constitute perfection. For perfection or individuality is a system, harmonious and thus inclusive of everything. N.B. There is a solemn triviality in this way of taking the order in which a particular thinker traverses the landscape of thought for the order of nature. It is a result of the Protestant habit of seeing God in one’s internal revolutions and wrestlings with notions and vices really quite accidental. 87 pp 427–28, underlined
||How does moral harmony come about? Not through a deus ex machina,|| an idea which no serious student of first principles is called on to consider. A God, which has to make things what otherwise, and by their own nature, they are not, may summarily be dismissed as an exploded absurdity. Yet the great Kant is there! 88 p 435fn
Considered either theoretically or practically, ‘Free Will’ is, in short, a mere lingering chimera. Poor James! 89 p 449
But if […] facts are to stand for actual finite events, or for things the essence of which is to be confined to a here or a now—facts are then the lowest, and the most untrue, form of appearance. And in the commonest business
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of our lives we rise above this low level. Hence it is facts themselves which, in this sense, should be called illusory. Yes: yet the existence of appearance is the fundamental “reality” & “truth”. The most fictitious ideas are the most scientific and reliable, if the method of their construction is rational. 90 p 459, top
[Chapter XXVI, “The Absolute and Its Appearances.” On pleasure, pain, feeling:] They [pleasure and pain] are abstracted from their object or
occasion. Feeling, too, has a content, which is ideal and transcendent. 91 p 460, top
[Santayana’s very concise summary:]
Feeling is destroyed by discourse, and we do not get back to it except in the Absolute. 92 p 467, top
[Summary and criticism:]
If beauty expressed all truth it would cease to be beauty. [ This error is due to regarding all functions as included in sentience. Truth would be beauty put to practice, and goodness would be both, when felt and willed for all men.] ^
^
93 p 475, marked
For, ignore every other difficulty, and you have still on your hands the main question, Why is it that thought and will diverge or appear to diverge? It is in the real or apparent divergence that the actual world of finite things consists. This is all Schopenhauer meant. 94 p 480, top
[Summary:]
Synthesis and analysis produce thought (i.e. ideas) and are not made by it. (Of course they are thinking which issues in thoughts.) thought is secondary, both in origin and in essence, for it cannot explain its own course. 95 p 482, marked
||The universe is intelligible, but not in the sense that it can be understood.|| No single aspect of the world can in the end be explained, nor can the world be explained as the result either of any or all of them.
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Nothing can be explained. Apaga y vámonos.1 1
Switch off and let’s go.
96 p 484
An attempt may perhaps be made from another side to defend the primacy of will. Anathemas at Schopenhauer. 97 pp 487–88
Reality […] is not the sum of things. It is the ideal unity in which all ^ ^ things, coming together, are transmuted, in which they are changed all alike, though not changed equally. If this “Whole” is not the sum of things, i.e. Appearance & Reality, how is it the whole? It is the map of all being, but not all the being it maps. 98 p 491
[Nature as beguiling; nature as dead:]
Nature is […] that show whose reality lies barely in primary qualities. It is, on the other hand, that endless world of sensible life, which appeals to our sympathy and extorts our wonder. This tragedy is factitious. It matters very little how we distribute the secondary qualities: they are parts of Nature whether they are ideally attached to the material skeleton or to the psychic centres, (no less bare and schematic points). Nature is the life and movement of matter and mind in space and time—it is the psychic physical universe. 99 p 494, marked Z
The Nature that we have lived in, and that we love, is really Nature. Its beauty and its terror and its majesty are no illusion, but qualify it essentially. What sentimentality about nature, after so much dryness about mind! 100 p 496, top
[Santayana’s paraphrase and comment:]
Science may be mechanical if it chooses, but it will describe a nature which is externally ideal, i.e. invented and conditioned by what it has no inner reference to—the needs of man. [ But needs do not produce anything, not even science.] 101 p 509
Whoever argues that belief in a future life has, on the whole, brought evil to humanity, has at least a strong case. [ miserable contemptible childish & animal.]
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102 p 509, marked
It is the rule that a race of beings so out of agreement with their environment should deteriorate, and it is well for them to make way for another race constituted more rationally and happily. Good. The reason why some people are so eager for another life is that they rightly feel themselves unfit for this one. 103 p 520, marked
And it is true again that unity, in its more proper sense, is known only as contra-distinguished from plurality. Unity therefore, as an aspect over against and defined by another aspect, is itself but appearance. And in this sense the Real, it is clear, cannot be properly called one. It is possible, however, to use unity with a different meaning. [In Santayana’s later (1950s?) hand:]
This great truth, then is just Nothing. 104 p 522, top
[Chapter XXVII, “Ultimate Doubts.”]
Business done. I choose to call one what is one enough to be plural. 105 p 522
Reality is positive, negation falling inside it. In the second place it is qualified positively by all the plurality which it embraces and subordinates. And yet itself, in the third place, is certainly not plural. Having gone so far I myself prefer, as the least misleading course, to assert its unity. Business done: there is a universe! 106 p 522
Beyond all doubt then it is clear that Reality is one. It has unity, but we must go on to ask, a unity of what? And we have already found that all we know consists wholly of experience. Here there is an equivocation. Because the material of the conceived universe must be drawn from our experience, it need not, when projected, carry the form of our apperception with it. The material in being transmitted is rearranged and in being rearranged it ceases to be “one experience”, i.e. a successive and reflective experience in one man. 107 p 526, marked
And never in any case can what I experience be the mere adjective of my self. My self is not the immediate, nor again is it the ultimate, reality. Thank heaven for that!
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108 p 530, top
[Santayana’s general reflection on Bradley’s insistence on unity, on his notion of the Whole:]
A false religion is a better guide to life than a true morality. For where there is no without contemplation there is no peace, and where there is no without peace there is no justice. (The good side of the Stoic) a soul swept by large currents is necessarily purified, even if the currents be but cold and sterile air. 109 p 539, top
[A general reflection:]
“The Autobiography of God by Johann Gottlieb Fichte.” Francis Herbert Bradley
Ethical Studies
Oxford: 1927 (2nd edition). Georgetown. 429 marginalia. [See Santayana’s essay “Fifty Years of British Idealism: Reflections on the Republication of Bradley’s Ethical Studies” in Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy (1933).] 1 p 6–7
[Essay I, “The Vulgar Notion of Responsibility.” It involves:]
1) personal identity 2) voluntary action. [Here Santayana translates Bradley’s Greek:]
[Yet we feel most responsible & ashamed for involuntarily ry blunders & idle thoughts. ] ^ ^ [ The ghost of domestic punishment is walking here. ] 3) conscience 2 p 12, underlined
The doctrine of Indeterminism asserts that the actions are in no case the result of a given character, in a given position. The self, or the will, of Indeterminism is not the man, […] at all, but the mere characterless abstraction which is ‘free’, because it is indifferent. It has been well called ‘a will which wills nothing’. i.e. it is not a name for the things willed, but a faculty of willing any of them. Is this “willing nothing”? German logic. 3 p 15, underlined
[Bradley asserts the morality of a “plain man’s” actions as predictable.]
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[…] in a given position, he is sure to do this, and will certainly not do that; that he will not insult helplessness, but respect it; not rob his employer, but protect his interests. [At top:]
Morality not the object but the agent or motive or criterion of this whole discussion. Morality speaks. [ We should now hardly think this a philosophical attitude. We may be as zealous for the good: but that is our politics: and the expression of it we think of as action, wars, not as philosophy. (Patriotism, or class-war, or propaganda) ] 4 p 20, marked
[Outrage that one’s actions are predictable.]
To explain the origin of a man is utterly to annihilate him. Does B. accept this? 5 p 21, marked
We saw that a man was accountable, because he himself, and no other, has acted; and now, so far as I am able to see, the possibility of the explanation of his self means that his self does not exist at all, and therefore, of course, can not act. No idea of generation or “emergence”. If the “self ” is not elementary, it is nothing. What a muddle! 6 pp 23–24
[On the question whether abstractions about character are possible:]
If they are not, they ought to be, false outside the character, because they profess to be specially laws of the character; […]. I don’t understand this argument. Is it about minds in the air? 7 p 28fn, underlined
[Footnote 1. Bradley quotes Kant’s distinction between judicial and natural punishment.]1
The penal law is a categorical imperative; […]. This is only an assertion that, when the law exists, it is desirable for its own sake to obey it. But the law may have a purpose other than vindictive. 1
Bradley cites only Kant’s Werke, vi, pp. 331–32, and p. 333.
8 p 31, marked Z
Punishment to Mr. Mill is ‘medicine’; and, turn himself aside as he might from the issue […], he could not avoid the conclusion forced on him […] that if rewards carried with them the benefits of punishment, then I should deserve rewards, when, and because, I am wicked. There is a cord of fanaticism vibrating here.
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9 p 35, marked
[Bradley can see no connection between the theory of determinism and human actions themselves.]
Literary psychology taken to be an independent sphere—or the only sphere—in nature. 10 p 41, underlined
[Abstract theories of justice: deterministic or necessitarian, have no place for a third view.]
[…] a philosophy which thinks what the vulgar believe; […]. N.B. This is a key-note. Quote. 11 p 56, marked Z
[“Notes to Essay I.”]
If ‘must’ always means the ‘must’ of the falling stone, then ‘must’ is irreconcilable with ‘ought’ or ‘can’. […] But how if the ‘must’ is a higher ‘must’? And how if freedom is also positive—if a merely negative freedom is no freedom at all? We may find then that in true freedom the ‘can’ is not only reconcilable with, but inseparable from, the ‘ought’; […]. Beautiful instance of swinging the censer: see the nice last cloud rising to heaven. How sure, how satisfying! 12 p 61, underlined and marked
[Essay II, “Why Should I Be Moral?”]
||All moral doctrines agree that means and end are not identical.|| And if so, is it not foolish to suppose that its giving a reason for virtue is any argument in favour of Hedonism, when for its own end it can give no reason at all? It is a reason for the naturally non-virtuous. It belongs to an artificial morality. 13 p 61fn
[Footnote 1. On the question “Why should I do right?”:]
You might put it, and reply: For the love of virtue. This would give a ground, love, which would be a force in nature; it would not give a purpose to virtue. 14 pp 62–63fn, marked Z
[Footnote 1. Future punishment does not impede immoral action.]
In most cases there is […] no ulterior motive [for morality]. A man is moral because he likes being moral; and he likes it, partly because he has been brought up to the habit of liking it, and partly because he finds it gives him what he wants, while its opposite does not do so. Psychology of the conventional mind: no psychoanalysis in 1876!
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15 p 65, underlined
Morality implies an end in itself: […]. This is not the same as to call morality that end. Action also implies an end in itself. 16 p 65, marked Z
If you chose to change the position of end and means, and say my doing is the end, and the ‘to be done’ is the means, you would not violate the moral consciousness; for the truth is that means and end are not applicable here. N.B. Moralism. 17 p 67, marked Z
[A theory of desire:]
[…] we say with confidence that, in desire, what is desired must in all cases be self. ! 18 p 68, top
[With reference to ‘!’ on p. 67, and repetition of the idea on p. 68:]
Does this mean that the object would not be desired did not the self require such a goal? But the object is not the self, nor the goal the runner. 19 p 68, marked Z
[…] in desire what we want, so far as we want it, is ourselves in some form, or is some state of ourselves; and that our wanting anything else would be psychologically inexplicable. Bad psychology, because it regards the mind as rationally self-explaining. 20 p 68
||If we believe|| that what is wanted is a state of self, we wish […] to urge further that the whole self is present in its states, and that therefore the whole self is the object aimed at; and this is what we mean by self-realization. Is he thinking of heaven? But heaven is to love to see God: it is not to love heaven. 21 p 69, top
Ethics here is religious ethics: nothing about society: but all about salvation of the “self,” and a satisfied conscience
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22 p 69, underlined
[…] no man has disconnected particular ends; he looks beyond the moment, […] each situation is seen (consciously or unconsciously) as part of a broader situation, […]. Is this the source of this dreadful word? 23 p 73, marked Z
To adopt a system is to find the truth! As to the assumed rationality of the world, it is not assumed: it is obviously absent in any existence. What we attempt is to rationalize our practice & language in the face of the irrational 24 p 82
[“Note to Essay II.”]
How is it possible to will what is not one’s self, how can one desire a foreign object? My will may be realized in my death: is that self-realization? The term is chosen for the sake of its deceptive overtone. 25 p 84
[Comment on the end of Bradley’s chapter:]
Even this imaginative selfishness is unnatural, non-biological: impulse is more generous but less economic than this smug idealism 26 p 86, top
[Essay III, “Pleasure for Pleasure’s Sake.”]
This is like a bad sermon—Get to work! 27 p 90, marked Z
||Even though hedonism were accepted as workable,|| it has still to be proved moral—moral in the sense of explaining, not explaining away, morality. Ethics must be orthodox & hortatory: it must “explain” moral sentiments by justifying them. 28 p 91, underlined
[…] we choose most certainly for ourselves (and so also for others) what we think the highest life, i.e. the life with the highest functions; […]. What is “high” exactly? 29 p 91, underlined
If it is impossible in fact that a stage of progress could come, where, by advancing further in the direction of what seems to it highest, humanity would decrease its surplus of pleasure […].
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Is it mere opinion without grounds? And whose opinion? Humanity is not one voice. 30 p 92, underlined and marked Z
||Progress may involve pain and reduce pleasure.|| The necessity for choice can be imagined; and there is no doubt, on the one side, what the choice of the moral man would be; there is no doubt, on the other side, what, if pleasure were the end, it ought to be. In such a case, what we think the most moral man and people would be therefore the most certain to act immorally, if Hedonism is morality. ? How is the “moral” man to be distinguished? By public opinion? 31 p 92, marked Z
But yet we can not for a moment think that [this doctrine] has succeeded in satisfying the demands of morality. Assumption that “The demands of morality” are known and sure. 32 p 93, underlined
Ordinary morality is clear that, when it aims at virtue for itself and others, it has not got its eye on wages or perquisites; […]. in England in 1876. 33 p 93, underlined
To say that, in desiring the right, [ordinary morality] proposes to itself a pleasure to be got by the right, is to assert in the face of facts. To the moral mind that feeling is an accompaniment or a consequent, and it may be thought of as such. But to think of it as more, to propose it as the end to which the act or objective event is the means […] is simply to turn the moral point of view upside down. The “moral” mind is idolatrous. An act or “objective event” can’t be a good in itself. It may, at most, be the imagined aim of a passion, e.g. lust; but is this itself good? 34 p 94fn, marked
[Bradley’s objections to hedonism:]
[…] it abstracts and denies all but its abstraction, and […] you really do want something like a whole, and clearly all that side of the End falls outside the abstraction of mere pleasure. Yes: and the reason is that you have a specific nature: so that your morality can have no validity beyond that animal phase.
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[Santayana’s generalization:] x
Of course what the Hedonist holds is that there is no value in the objects of passion except the pleasure of pursuing and obtaining them. This pleasure is not the situation in which it is found, nor the material thing that yields it and that is snatched by the lover of pleasure. Cf. food & the pleasures of eating & of health. 36 p 96
[Further to the comment above:]
Bradley expects to find the good in the desired: the Hedonist is more wary, and asks whether the desired turns out to be pleasant—whether it is desired when obtained, or only before. 37 p 99, marked
||The hedonist’s morality says|| get what you never can get; never rest, never be satisfied, strive beyond the present to an impossible future. It is not very clever to impute sentiments so contrary to those which your opponent has. This is romanticism, not hedonism. 38 p 101, top
Man is not a consciousness, made up of reasoning and willing for reasons: man is an animal living by instincts and habits, controlled by circumstances. Morality is not a science: it is an institution. 39 p 102, top
It is not a defect in a moral system if it can’t support moral superstition: yet this is the chief argument here. 40 p 103, underlined
Our positive aim in life is given up; […]. Has it occurred to you to ask whether life can have any aim? All this is verbal fiction. A “highest good” may be distinguished in reflection, given a hypothetically fixed human nature & human environment: but life doesn’t aim at this or at anything. 41 p 107
||If I commit adultery,|| How shall I answer for it to my own conscience […]? [And in footnote 2:]
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‘And to my God’, I might add, against those who drag the Deity into the question. [At bottom:]
Like Browning, whose God likes adultery. And the trouble is not so much the admission of exceptions as the spirit of romanticism & gush. One might commit adultery wisely. “Eugenia”.1 1 “Eugenia, or an interesting condition” is a fragment of a play by Santayana, unpublished, on deposit at the University of Texas, Austin.
42 pp 110–11fn, marked Z
[Footnote 1.]
||Hedonism gives no guidance to whether prostitution is a good or bad thing.|| Do I or do I not add to the surplus of ‘grateful feeling’ by a given act or acts of sexual irregularity? This is a serious practical question, and I know that in many cases it is honestly answered in the affirmative; […]. But surely, all this is so: this is an argument addressed to British hypocrisy. 43 p 114
[Santayana’s general comment:]
“The happiness of the whole” is a phrase: the whole is not an animal: the only possible happiness is seated in the parts: but it is a question whether one does or does not ^ ^ desire the happiness of another or of all others. That would render the happiness of each a good for two reasons. If every part of a thing is desired, and objects of desire are good by definition, every part and in that sense the whole is good. This is a verbal argument unworthy of an honist [sic] man. 44 p 116, marked
||Self-interest versus the “whole” of society:|| The others are not mere means to me, but are involved in my essence; and this essence of myself, which is not only mine but embraces and stands above both me and this man and the other man, is superior to, and gives a law to us all, […]. It is this which modern Utilitarianism is blindly groping after ||and cannot have until it abandons Hedonism.|| There is in fact a disposition of the bourgeois which makes him in his aspiration only a member of society. It is snobbery or servility deified. All serve and all eat, but the good realised is Moloch.
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45 p 121, top
Sensitive, irritable, caustic, narrow-minded Don. Aggressive, too, and forcing his card. Domineering and fussing about trifles—perhaps misunderstandings. 46 p 138, underlined
[“Note to Essay III.”]
N.B. […] we must observe that we have no right to assume that higher function and more pleasure do on the whole go together. We have bitter proof that in particular cases and stages of progress this is not the case, […]. [At ‘progress’:]
evil word! 47 p 138, doubly marked
[Pleasure] shows whether function is impeded in discharge or not. But by it
you can not tell higher from lower function; and, if you go by it, you must prefer a lower state of harmony to a higher state of self-contradiction. Yes, you would, if you were not an idolater & a snob. 48 p 139, underlined
[…] to take human progress as the end, and to keep our eye on past progress, is not a useless prescription; […]. What is the criterion of “progress”? Time? 49 p 143, underlined and marked Z
[Essay IV, “Duty for Duty’s Sake.”]
To know what [duty] is we must go to the moral consciousness. Conscience is the test, not human nature perhaps misrepresented by conscience. 50 p 143, marked
The end does not fall outside the doer. I am to realize myself; and […] I can not make an ultimate end of anything except myself, can not make myself a mere means to something else. Why not? You have given no reason. That the choice of an end outside should be inside, doesn’t render the end a part of me. This is consistent, perhaps, with conscience being the test: conscience is a rule of action & sentiment or allegiance, not an ideal of the good. This is rather defined by reason or wisdom than by conscience.
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51 p 145
[Of the good:]
It is by being not this or that, that it succeeds in having nothing which is not common to every this and that. This is elementary. You mustn’t give an example of virtue, but a principle. You mustn’t be Christ, but the catechism. 52 p 147
Duty must be for duty’s sake, or it is not duty. You must hate to do it, before it can be right to do it. You must also do it without any reason. 53 p 151fn, underlined
[Footnote 1. On the imperative:]
A command is addressed by one will to another, and must be obeyed, if at all, by the second will. But here the will that is commanded is not the will that executes; hence the imperative is never obeyed; […]. Do you conceive the duty performs the act? I suppose you do, in Kant’s view. It is monstrous, if so. 54 pp 152–53, marked Z
||Everyone knows that duties must be performed.|| Everybody suspects, if they do not feel sure, that the acting consciously on and from abstract principles means self-deceit or hypocrisy or both. But people are scrupulous & superstitious about general rules. I don’t understand this point. 55 p 161, top
[Essay V, “My Station and Its Duties.”]
The life that filters, as through stained-glass, into an Oxford college, and that radiates from it again, like a feminine influence, profound but often irrelevant & inapplicable. 56 p 161, marked Z
||The falsity of asceticism. The|| self can not be realized as its own mere negation, since morality is practice, is will to do something, is self-affirmation; […] a will to deny one’s will is not self-realization, but rather […] a psychical impossibility, a self-contradictory illusion. Bradley has very scant spiritual experience. What is not life as he knows it—Oriel—is nothing. 57 p 169
||At birth, children of one race are not quite the same as children of another race. An|| English child is in some points […] the same as another.
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If an English a child has anything in common with other ^ ^ children, they are the same child! 58 p 173, underlined
[Bradley quotes Hegel, Philosophische Abhandlungen, Werke (1832) i, pp. 399–400:]
||As the child grows to manhood, the|| ‘positive side and the essence is that he is suckled at the breast of the universal Ethos, lives in its absolute intuition, as in that of a foreign being first, then comprehends it more and more, and so passes over into the universal mind.’ Is this innocent pedantry, or malice? He adopts current ideas & judgements, very likely: but he may react against them. 59 p 173, marked
The writer proceeds to draw the weighty conclusion that virtue ‘is not a troubling oneself about a peculiar and isolated morality of one’s own, that the striving for a positive morality of one’s own is futile, and in its very nature impossible of attainment; […]’. Hegel pooh-poohs morality, unless it is convention. 60 p 173, marked Z
||Without the help of metaphysics,|| the ‘individual’ apart from the community is an abstraction. It is not anything real, and hence not anything that we can realize, however much we may wish to do so. ? What does this convey? That history does not admit solitary or unique animals? 61 p 174
[Bradley separates ethics from politics in his discussion of Hegel.]
That ethics is a part of politics means in Aristotle a part of political policy: in Hegel, a part of social mechanics. 62 p 175
[…] self-realization, if it means will, does mean that we, in fact, do put ourselves forth and see ourselves actual in outer existence. You must be up to the times. 63 p 175, underlined and marked
Hence, by identifying ourselves with that which has not necessarily this existence, which is not master of the outer world, we can not secure our self-realization; since, when we have identified ourselves with the end, the end may still remain a mere inner end which does not accomplish itself, and so does not satisfy us. N.B. the world is master.
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By adopting the morality of the world, you may make room for your secret lusts. You must always remain a sinner, unless you see the biological necessity of your sins. 64 p 179, underlined
[Of “duty for duty’s sake”:]
The universal side in personal morality is, in short, the reflection of the objective moral world in ourselves (or into itself). Hurrah for country, king, and school, Hurrah for every bloody rule! 65 p 181
||Duty for duty’s sake has been seen to be deficient because of a standing contradiction between the sensuous and the non-sensuous sides|| which brought with it a perpetual self-deceit, or the depressing perpetual confession that I am not what I ought to be in my inner heart, and that I never can be so. Kant’s proof of immortality gone! Poor K.! 66 p 181, underlined
||The doctrine of|| ‘my station and its duties’ […] tells us that the heart is an idle abstraction; we are not to think of it, nor must we look at our insides, but at our work and our life, and say […], Am I fulfilling my appointed function or not? Away with sentimental sorrows! 67 pp 182–83, underlined
[…] the knowledge that as members of the system we are real, and not otherwise, encourages us more and more to identify ourselves with that system; to make ourselves better, and so more real, since we see that the good is real, and that nothing else is. Monstrous inversion of moral feeling. Aspiration is evil, because the world does not realize it. If you criticize the world, your criticism is subjective, and the world laughs at you. Vae victis.1 1
Woe to the vanquished.
68 p 183, underlined
||The individual’s self-consciousness|| is the self-consciousness of the whole in him, and his will is the will which sees in him its accomplishment by him; it is the free will which knows itself as the free will, and, as this, beholds its realization and is more than content. Spinoza? But this is not intellectual love: it is nasty identification in business.
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69 pp 183–84, top
War-psychology. [Marked Z.]
The non-theoretical person, if he be not immoral, is at peace with reality; and the man who in any degree has made this point of view his own, becomes more and more reconciled to the world and to life, […]. He sees the true account of the state (which holds it to be neither mere force nor convention, but the moral organism, the real identity of might and right) unknown or ‘refuted’, laughed at and despised, but he sees the state every day in its practice refute every other doctrine, and do with the moral approval of all what the explicit theory of scarcely one will morally justify. Do what I do, not what I say, says this preacher. 70 p 184, underlined
||The non-theorist|| sees instincts are better and stronger than so-called ‘principles’. [ This immoral ethics can be applied to the other forces in man, not the social ones. Then this theory becomes anarchical. ] 71 p 184
He sees in the hour of need what are called ‘rights’ laughed at, ‘freedom’, the liberty to do what one pleases, trampled on, the claims of the individual trodden under foot, and theories burst like cobwebs. And he sees, as of old, the heart of a nation rise high and beat in the breast of each one of her citizens, till her safety and her honour are dearer to each than life, till to those who live her shame and sorrow, if such is allotted, outweigh their loss, and death seems a little thing to those who go for her to their common and nameless grave. War-psychology. 72 p 184
Yes, the state is not put together, but it lives; it is not a heap nor a machine; it is no mere extravagance when a poet talks of a nation’s soul. Sparta? Prussia? Soviet Russia? 73 p 185, marked Z
First in the community is the individual realized. He is here the embodiment of beauty, goodness, and truth: of truth, because he corresponds to his universal conception; of beauty, because he realizes it in a single form to the senses or imagination; of goodness, because his will expresses and is the will of the universal. This is very young: Bradley must have been an insufferable person when young.
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74 p 189
[More on duty to the state:]
There is self-sacrifice: if it were total & universal, Moloch w’d reign. So that the test of a good state is its harmony with human nature in individuals. Are you going to say this? 75 p 190, top
Quote 76 p 190, marked Z
The notion that full-fledged moral ideas fell down from heaven ||violates all we know.|| […] At any given period to know more than he did, man must have been more than he was; for a human being is nothing if he is not the son of his time; and he must realize himself as that, or he will not do it at all. Quote 77 p 193, top
Quote 78 p 193, marked
||Moral philosophy cannot tell us what we are to do.|| All philosophy has to do is ‘to understand what is’, and moral philosophy has to understand morals which exist, not to make them or give directions for making them. Quote. Ethics is descriptive ethics. 79 p 193, marked Z
Who would go to a learned theologian, as such, in a practical religious difficulty; […]? Everybody, if they had a religion. 80 p 199, top
“Poor Boston had a conscience once”. . . Bradley cries, “Boston is a dunce! Quote My intuition finds it sin Not to be modelled on Berlin.” 81 p 199, underlined
[…] intuition tells you that, if you could be as good as your world, you would be better than most likely you are, and that to wish to be better than the world is to be already on the threshold of immorality. Quote
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||To hold opinions contrary to the world’s is self-conceit, and to act on them is immorality.|| Undergraduate naughtiness wrankles [sic] in the good Don. 83 p 207, marked Z
[“Note to Essay V.” Santayana makes many corrections to Bradley’s diction.]
Horrible language! 84 p 223, marked
[Essay VI, “Ideal Morality.”]
||On the obligation of the artist or “inquirer” to lead “the life of one.”|| […] to me it is a fact that the moral consciousness recognizes the perfecting of my intellectual or artistic nature by the production of the proper results, as an end in itself and not merely as a means. The good is to be pursued for its own sake: this is in one sense morality, but without precept. It is virtù1 1 Virtù is difficult to translate. It combines the concepts of duty, bravery, moral virtue, and conscience. It does not mean “virtue.”
85 p 223, doubly marked
To say, without society science and art could not have arisen, is true. To say, apart from society the life of an artist or man of science can not be carried on, is also true; but neither truth goes to show that society is the ultimate end, […]. Man is not man at all unless social, but man is not much above the beasts unless more than social. Socialism transcended. Society is something to be superseded: not as a foil, but as a standard or object. 86 p 225
May a man, for the sake of science or art, venture on acts of commission or omission which in any one else would be immoral; or, to put it coarsely, may he be what is generally called a bad man, may he trample on ordinary morality, in order that he may be a good artist? Goethe seeking self-realization in Rome—in his Rome. 87 p 225, marked
May I adopt a profession considered moral by the world, but which, judged by my ideal, can not be called moral? Be a clergyman for instance? 88 p 234, top
Quote
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89 p 234–35, doubly marked
||Morality involves a contradiction.|| […] if we became what we are, we should scarcely be ourselves. Morality aims at the cessation of that which makes it possible; it is the effort after non-morality, and it presses forward beyond itself to a super-moral sphere where it ceases as such to exist. Good: but how perversely expressed! Quote 90 p 245fn, underlined and marked
[Footnote 1.]
[…] moral imputation in the end breaks down in principle […]. How much better this is than the book generally! 91 p 252, marked
[Essay VII, “Selfishness and Self-Sacrifice.”]
No act is ever without a reason for its existence, and the reason is always a feeling of pain or of pleasure, or of both. Strangely sweeping assertions: perhaps they are attributed to the enemy, but even that is monstrous. 92 p 259, top
N.B. Quote 93 p 259fn, underlined and marked Z
[Bradley defines motive as that which we want but have not got. Then his footnote 1:]
I may desire the continuance of the present; but desire for continuance is desire for what is not, what I have not now, what I may have hereafter, what I think, what I do not feel. Here is an interesting abandonment of objective idealism for empiricism: the feelings are eventually external: the essences are the same. 94 p 260, marked
My pleasure (if it be pleasure), which moves me to act, is, because it moves, therefore not my motive; and my motive, because it is my motive, therefore can not be the pleasure which moves. Final causes can’t be efficacious. How jolly! 95 p 263, underlined and marked
The ideal voluptuary desires only pleasure […]. No: he has a very fine palate for different occasions: the different brands of wine & women.
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96 p 263, underlined and marked
Children are supposed to pursue the pleasant, but no one has ever called a young child a voluptuary, and everybody has been a child. Quelle erreur! 97 p 277
Most people are never themselves except at their very “worst”: the rest is artifice & window-dressing. “Morality is social”. 98 p 287, marked Z
A child, when it tries to please its mother, is as unselfish as the hen who faces death for her chickens, as unselfish as the dog who gives his life for his master. oh, oh, oh! 99 p 288, top
Quote 100 p 288
[On motive:]
||Rewarding an animal’s performance with food.|| Will he keep doing the trick if he never gets the biscuit? All this is a question for trainers of animals. 101 pp 291–92, underlined
[…] the good which the child thus lives itself into and lives in, is in the main harmony with itself. And hence the self, which feels itself to be one and a whole, feels in the good the answering harmony of its own true nature, and divines that what realizes it as a system realizes itself, and that the jarring and discrepant is false and untrue. Why? He means that it is disregarded in the subsequent march of affairs. This is true of loose pleasures, but not of false principles. Cf. Rousseau, still a power! 102 p 295, top
A possible description of a part of what may sometimes happen; but remote from any suspicion of the texture of events in animal life. 103 p 295, marked Z
Passionateness or laziness encouraged grows into habit; sensuous appetite reflected on grows into lust, the idea of sensuous satisfaction, and the habit of pursuing that idea; activities and pursuits opposed to the superior may
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be made objective and relatively permanent sources of pleasure, and become bad interests. ?Quote? 104 p 295
This psychology shows how soon a way of thinking some^ thing very good of its kind may become obsolete. Bradley ^ is acute, ingenious, profound (like Hegel) in sort of div^ ^ ination of moral certain implications & transformations of ^ ^ moral attitudes: but this is his way of describing a child: how he writes: p. 288. 105 p 297, underlined
The bad is contrary to itself, as well as to the good, and, for these two reasons, is already painful, and, apart from this or that external check, fails to satisfy. Yes: but the good (unless you limit it by abstraction) does likewise. James: “you can’t be a philosopher and a lady-killer.”1 1
A reference to a passage in William James’s The Principles of Psychology, chapter X, “The Consciousness of Self,” page 309. 106 p 298, top
Futility of ethics, save as an expression of “politics” or vital choice already decided. 107 p 298, marked
If a subject does not know what evil is, the words moral goodness are devoid of meaning to it. My case! 108 p 298
Hatred of evil means feeling of evil, and you can not be brought to feel what is not inside you, or has nothing analogous within you. Moral perception must rest on moral experience. The whole of ethics is then begged. 109 pp 299–300, underlined
Let us begin with the bad self. The result of self-conscious volition of this against the good is twofold: it gets a unity; and the particular bad is brought under that unity; it is now done as bad. I’m tired of your oughty-oughty. I wouldn’t do it, if it wasn’t naughty.
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110 p 307, marked Z
If good is not willed, it is not known, and therefore can not as such be hated: and if good is not willed, evil is not known as evil. Instance of obscure dialectic. Quote. 111 p 316, top
[“Concluding Remarks.”]
Bradley accepts the “not-ourselves”, but scorns the “tendency that makes for righteousness”, and substitutes “reality” = existence: so that he is a virtual materialist, whereas [Matthew] Arnold is a sort of superstitious idealist. 112 p 319, underlined
||Religion must have an object. Its object|| is nothing finite. It can not be a thing or person in the world; […]. God is just that for honest believers: he is King in his world, and a part of it. 113 p 319
The ideal self, which in morality is to be, is here the real ideal which truly is. “Real” can’t apply to such things as truth if it means “existent”. 114 p 320, top
God = perfection realised: this overlooks the fact that the ideal of morality, science, etc, is a human ideal, & can’t be realised except in a “non-natural man”. 115 p 320, underlined
||On the necessity that the ideal self be realized, because it is|| all and the whole reality. A statement […] which may stagger us; but the statement […] of a simple fact of the religious consciousness. The religious consciousness of Oxford in 1876? Not mine even then, when I had more than now-a-days. 116 pp 322–23
[Bradley writes at more than usually involved length about the struggle between the self and the ideal self, between good and evil. Santayana brilliantly and satirically paraphrases him in three marginalia.] It [the moral consciousness] was a rule covering everything: but
not obeyed. You feel guilty & damned. yet go on, & curse God.
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117 pp 325–26
||The glory of Protestant faith, even though often|| perverted, to its eternal disgrace. In mere morality this faith is impossible. Trust and obedience: but Protestant faith is rather faith in success. 118 p 344fn, marked
||To set up a “finite phenomenon” as God|| is an attempt to turn the history of religion backwards, and to close on us once more those Jewish fetters which Christian civilization, after so many efforts, has burst through. Christian = Pauline-Protestant mysticism & German transcendentalism. It is subjective. James Henry Breasted
The Dawn of Conscience
New York and London: 1933. Waterloo. Twenty-five marginalia. 1 pp 48–49, underlined
||When dead, Osiris became a soul by receiving from his son Horus the latter’s eye, gouged out in conflict with Set. From then on, an offering to the dead was called “eye of Horus.” The priest prays:|| “Raise thee up, […] for this thy bread, which cannot dry up, and thy beer, which cannot become stale, by which thou shalt become a soul.” corpus Dominis nostri Jesu Christi custodiat am manu tuam in vitam aeternam.1 1 Said by the Catholic priest in the Latin mass as he administers the wafer representing the body of Christ to the communicant at communion: May you guard the body of Jesus Christ our Lord in your hands in life eternal.
2 p 69, marked
||Breasted describes archaic words in texts about the pyramids.|| Hoary with age like exhausted runners, they totter into sight above our earliest horizon for a brief period, barely surviving in these ancient texts, then to disappear forever, and hence are never met with again. Lovely style. 3 p 121
[In “Emergence of a Moral Order,” Breasted quotes W. McDougall:]
“From this emotion [parental tenderness] and its impulse to cherish and protect, spring generosity, gratitude, love, pity, true benevolence, and altruistic conduct of every kind; […].”1 Is the comradeship of brothers due to their future feelings toward their children? 1
An Introduction to Social Psychology, Boston: 1926, p. 74.
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4 p 122
Don’t cats protect and suckle kittens? 5 p 133, underlined
More important than friends, however, are family responsibilities. “If thou art a successful man establish thy household. Love thy wife in the house as is fitting.” Not under the hedge. Cf. Herodotus on Egyptian vs. Greek custom, in keeping a rear. [sic] 6 p 146, underlined
||The concept of administrative moral order did not emerge in western Asia until Zoroaster, after the rise of the Persian Empire under Cyrus.|| N.B. Order established by force precedes order prescribed by moral sentiments or maxims. 7 p 168
[Verses quoted in which the gods are ignored and scepticism flourishes.]
Fuerunt esprits forts ante Epicurus.1 1
There were strong minds before Epicurus.
8 pp 168–69
[Breasted calls the verses “The Dialogue of a Misanthrope with his Own Soul” and says that it is a poem on state of mind, torture to an afflicted soul suffering unjustly. He is surprised at so early a treatment of the idea.]
It is thus the earliest known literary composition of which the subject is a spiritual experience. It is our earliest Book of Job, written some fifteen hundred years before a similar experience brought forth a similar book among the Hebrews. Children suffer in this way intensely: why not ancient man? Justus Buchler
Toward a General Theory of Human Judgment New York: 1951. Waterloo. Three marginalia.
Gerald William Bullett
Dreaming London: 1928. Waterloo. Five marginalia.
1 p 36
||Concerning the argument of “AE” [George Russell] against the rational explanation of images in revery or dreams as images of memory refashioned.|| “We must infer […] when the image is clear and precise, an original of which this is the reflection.”
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Images are not copies of things but creatures of the brain corresponding to things, in so far as they affect us. 2 p 45, marked
The scene of night-dreaming is not the airy, spacious, sunlit world of ordinary happy fancy. We are more or less confined: in rooms, in corridors, in narrow streets, or in dim fields. Our sight seldom soars higher than the faces of those we encounter; we do not look at the sky; we are not aware of wind, or trees, or birds singing. 3 p 82
Certain it is that love between human beings springs from a desire to be made free of another world than one’s own; every meeting of true lovers is ecstatic with the illusion of mutual discovery; […].” ^
^
4 p 86
||The dreamer awakes, and|| we […] may look through his eyes upon real life at last—this surely of all our human dreams is the most dazzling that we can entertain. Very good. But this really amounts only to the hypothesis that there is a comprehensive idea as well as many fragmentary ones. The “spirit” is one everywhere, because it is a mere term, but the acts, the intuitions, remain many & incommunicable. Have they a base? Have they an order of existence? Gerald William Bullett
Poems in Pencil London: 1937. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Prince Bernhard von Bülow
Imperial Germany
London; New York; Toronto: 1914. Fifty-five marginalia. [Personal library of Adelaida Sastre, Avila.] 1 p 17, marked
||On the necessity of a Navy for Imperial Germany.|| A fleet superior to the English is therefore required. 2 p 19, marked
||The “place in the sun” to which the oppressed German people had a right.|| Spurring on a contented people.
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3 p 21, underlined and marked Z
It would be foolish to dismiss English policy with the hackneyed phrase “perfide Albion.” In reality this supposed treachery is nothing but a sound and justifiable egoism, which, together with other great qualities of the English people, other nations would do well to imitate. And even to outdo? 4 pp 30–31, marked
Our neutral attitude during the Boer War had its origin in weighty considerations of the national interests of the German Empire. i.e. in fear of the British fleet and in the hope of being allowed a longer time in which to defeat it. 5 p 43
Respect for each other, on the basis and within the bounds of self-respect, will be the best means of preserving our friendship with America. Nothing about the Monroe Doctrine. 6 p 45
I also heard him [Bismarck] say on one occasion: “If Mr. N. proposes something to you that would be useful to him and harmful to you, it does not by any means follow that Mr. N. is a fool. But you are a fool if you agree to it.” E.g. “If Germany proposes to England that the neutrality of Belgium be violated by Germany” etc. 7 p 52, marked
||About the conference at Algeciras:|| […] the Emperor Nicholas gave the world a new proof of his wisdom and his love of peace by deciding on a friendly settlement of the existing difficulties. Eh? 8 p 61, marked
In 1897, during the Cretan affair, in 1908–9, during the crisis caused by the annexation of Bosnia, and in all phases of the Macedonian question, there was great danger that serious trouble in the Balkan Peninsula would have more unfavourable than favourable results for us, […]. Here is the real source of the Great War. 9 p 62
The difficult task of dividing Poland certainly gave rise to some temporary friction, but it did not result in any serious conflict of views. Note the tone of this.
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10 p 70, underlined
[The war of 1870.]
In France there is no comprehension of the fact that what seems to them the brutal severity of a conqueror was really a matter of national necessity to us Germans. This is the cover of all the German crimes. 11 p 94, marked
We need no longer take such care to prevent England from injuring our safety and wounding our dignity; with our own unaided strength we are able, as is meet for Germans, to defend our dignity and our interests against England at sea, as we have for centuries defended them against the Continental Powers on land. ah? 12 p 99, marked
When at last, during the Bosnian crisis, the sky of international politics cleared, when German power on the Continent burst its encompassing bonds, we had already got beyond the stage of preparation in the construction of our fleet. The Bosnian crisis was the prelude to the Serbian crisis; and to what has followed! 13 p 105, marked
The German nation, […] more than any other people, and particularly as regards the lower classes, is eager to learn and capable of so doing. Among many fine traits of character that is one of the finest our nation possesses. Kultur 14 p 106, underlined
We have achieved great things in all the sciences and arts; the greatest philosophers, the greatest poets and musicians are Germans. ! 15 p 107, marked
[Goethe’s remark about German talents:]
[…] the Germans are very capable individually, and wretchedly inefficient in the bulk. “Individually clever, collectively idiots.” 16 p 107, marked
||In a highly developed State, the individual is subordinate to the State.|| Supremacy of the “State”. No notion of freedom, security or delight.
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17 p 109, marked
||The best German writing occurred in periods of political weakness.|| N.B. The reverse is also true. Since 1870 Germany has been mediocre. 18 p 110
[On German national unity:]
There is a mania for doing things by the Imperial Government, in the Imperial Government, for the Imperial Government. 19 p 111, underlined
The most brilliant period of our history, the period when the German Empire led Europe unopposed, was a time of national unity, […]. N.B. This was only by virtue of representing the Roman Empire: the Germans never were unopposed. Cf. Dante. 20 p 119, underlined
[…] let alone if it appeared that the tactics of the party leaders were not in accordance with the aims and objects of the State. The “State” is the chosen Absolute Ego 21 p 130, marked
When we try to make of party principles a system by which to judge all political and non-political life, we harm ourselves politically and intellectually. Politically, we only intensify the differences which in any case we feel particularly keenly, because we attribute a special intellectual value to them, […]. Protestant fragmentariness vs. Catholic unification of Ethics! 22 p 131, marked
||It is a good thing to have a thick skin in modern political life.|| 23 p 160, underlined
||Parties in opposition|| have never endangered the fate of an Armament Bill. To serve one’s country and pay Armament bills are synonymous. 24 pp 168–69, underlined
[…] if the strength of the Social Democrats in the Reichstag is proportionately increased, the first duty of the Government is to neutralise the effect which the heavy Social Democratic poll has upon the election result. N.B. To defeat a just representation of the constituencies is an avowed principle!
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25 p 175, marked
If once the Government embarks on a course of violence there can be no turning back, for that would mean a confession of defeat. N.B. How absolute the gentleman is 26 p 176, underlined
If the Social Democrats should be stupid and criminal enough to resort to open rebellion, then, of course, all considerations and all doubts would have to be discarded, in the face of the necessity of defending the foundations of our State and our civilisation. The Social Democrats are not supporters of Kultur. 27 p 178, marked
Law must certainly not be considered superior to the needs of the State. Fiat jus et pereat mundus 1 does not apply to politics. Belgium 1
Let there be right though the world perish.
28 p 185, marked
[…] the objectionable German caste-feeling which stands in the way of natural social intercourse, and which has an adverse influence on our whole political life, […]. inverted snobbery. 29 p 188, marked
But when the authorities became weak and disheartened, timid and neutral in the expression of their will, Prussia experienced a more complete breakdown of her State machinery than any other country. Will this be repeated in this war?1 1
World War I.
30 p 241, marked
Every nation is convinced of the higher value and consequently of the better right of its own civilisation, and is inspired by a strong desire, which is like an unconscious natural force, to attain more and more authority for its own civilisation. Kultur = national characteristics & institutions: or national language, manners and institutions. 31 p 241, underlined
Not every nation is conscious of this force. The great Roman generals and statesmen were well aware of it, when they advanced, conquering as they went, into Greece, […]. Superior to the Greek! Superior = able to prevail.
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32 p 242, marked
||The superiority of Anglo-Saxon culture and institutions, thus the success of the British Empire. With high civilisation come political rights.|| The civilising mission of the French Revolution was based on a fundamental misconception of the nature of civilisation in which, compared with religion, morals, law and education, political institutions have a subordinate value, and it condemned itself by the growing brutality of Napoleonic rule. Very important passage. 33 p 252, marked
No consideration for the Polish people must hinder us from doing all we can to maintain and strengthen German nationality in the former Polish domains. 34 p 257
||Bismarck’s introduction of the German language in schools in formerly Polish territories.|| This is the most galling thing possible in an age that has nationality for its idol. 35 p 258, marked
Aggression the sign of virtue. 36 p 259, marked
[Polish vs. German nationality in the East.]
Only a well-thought-out scheme to further German nationality could prevent the latter from succumbing utterly. If the differences between the nationalities were thereby immediately intensified, it was certainly unfortunate, but it could not be avoided. In political life there are often hard necessities whose behests we obey with a heavy heart, but which must be obeyed in spite of sympathies and emotions. Politics is a rough trade in which sentimental souls rarely bring even a simple piece of work to a successful issue. Why is it weaker than Polish nationality? Evidently Poland will be restored. [Of the final sentence:]
This is the language of conscious wickedness. 37 p 263, marked
[Concerning Poland:]
The Dispossession Bill was the logical conclusion of the policy of colonisation begun in 1886; it makes the Settlement Commission independent of the variations of the estate market, […]. Facilis descensus Averno!
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38 p 264–65, marked
It is quite true that we have not nearly reached the goal of our policy in the Eastern Marches. Only if we pursue the course laid down by Frederick the Great, and later again adopted by Bismarck, […] can we hope, after a considerable lapse of time, to fulfil our national task in the East of Germany. Is he dead? You did not bleed him enough or give him enough hot water! 39 p 266, marked
We must also not deceive ourselves on the point that the German, in a struggle between nationalities, does not yet always possess the desirable power of resistance, and that only too often he runs the risk in such a struggle of losing his nationality, if the State does not protect and support him. Even the Germans prefer any other Kultur to their own. 40 p 268
Our policy crime in the Eastern Marches is a national duty which the ^ ^ German nation owes to itself. That crime can be a duty is the doctrine of every Absolute Will. 41 p 269, underlined
||Bülow takes stock, listing great German victories since Sedan and formation of the Empire; German armies victorious in Asia Minor,|| and in the heart of what is now France; and after the intellectual refining process of the Reformation, the greatest development of artistic and scientific life that the world has known since the days of Hellas and the Cinquecento. [At “artistic”:] Music Rudolf Karl Bultmann
Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition Göttingen: 1931. Waterloo. Sixty-five marginalia.
1p1
St. Mark a collection of legends. The oldest would be true! 2p6
||The problem of the “Urschriften”1 lies in the relationship of the Palestinians to Hellenistic writings.|| Even eye-witnesses are poets, and memory is legendary. 1
The earliest writings.
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3 p 13
||In the earliest texts, “Menschensohn”1 was circumlocution for “I.”|| Oh yes: that is Oriental rhetoric. The son of man = this here nigger. 1
Son of man.
4 p 59
[Bultmann finds biography in Mark 14:3–9; Mark 13:1–2; Luke 19:41–44; Luke 23:27–31.]
? The spikenard scene is a moral tale. Strange that you should think it biographical. So these prophecies about the fall of Jerusalem. 5 p 67
|| Jesus’ silence shows a novelistic technique and is “secondary.”|| [Allusion to John 7:53–58, 11?]
Rather mythical: because here we have the picture of a god in disguise. The thing is “numinous”. 6 p 68
N.B. the preoccupation with the biographical facts about Jesus, in spite of all the author says about the vanity of reconstructing them. 7 p 72
[The story of Lazarus.]
The more details the less truth—if you are looking for truth of that kind. 8 p 99
[The “christliche” changes in Judaism.]
Transformation of Jewish ideas. A real Jesus might have begun this: why not Hellenise and spiritualise a fanatical Judaism? 9 p 107
||Various words of Jesus do not indicate individual piety.|| This Jesus not Lutheran enough. 10 p 109
What lifts the Gospels above Poor Richard’s Proverbs is belief in the supernatural cataclysm about to take place.
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11 p 110
Proper to Christ are apocalyptic zeal & elevation above censorious morality. [ The latter is spiritual, the former is spirituality gone mad. ] 12 p 111, underlined
[Bultmann traces in other religions and traditions.]
“Der Gott für Morgen wird für Morgen sorgen.”1 Cras vel atra nube polum Pater occupato vel sole puso [ The rest in Horace is not Hebraic ] 2 1
The God of tomorrow will provide for tomorrow. Santayana quotes from Odes, Book III, lines 44–45: “Master of himself and happy the man who can say, ‘I have lived today. Tomorrow let Jupiter fill the skies either with clouds or full sunshine.’ ” 2
13 p 145
[ Jesus as “son of David” and “son of Man.”]
This passage seems to smack of antiquity. An actual Jesus might have mocked in this way the pretension to descend from David. He might have seen round that, as well as round some other things: e.g. his own miracles. 14 p 229
[Analysis of “Heilungswunder.”1]
And feel you not in this the charity? Listening to evidence may dull the eye. 1
Miracles of healing.
15 p 233
[“The Form and History of the History of Miracles.”]
The appeal is to the imagination: the report of a miracle becomes a ground of faith. For a rational mind it [is] a proof of falseness. 16 p 234
Miracles are not the work of consciousness. 17 p 256
||On the Hellenistic sources of miracles, and on the differences between the Q manuscript and the gospel of Mark concerning Christ.|| In Q, Christ is above all the eschatological prophet of atonement and forgiveness, the proclaimer of laws and teacher of wisdom. In Mark he is even more: the Son of God wandering the earth. .
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This (though not to be trusted, since it falls in with the author’s rationalistic Lutheranism) has a great plausibility, especially the Kingdom Come part. Between Q and Mk Christianity had arisen. [ Not that there need have been any written Q ] 18 p 271
This is very plausible. Become the son of God he abandons mankind, and lives in paradise at peace with the wild beasts for forty days. 19 p 274, marked
[Concerning Satan’s temptation of Christ.]
The 3 temptations are proper to Christians, not to Christ. The whole is a moral tale. 20 p 296
[Mark 15:42-47, the burial of Christ.]
Why do you wish this to pass muster? 21 p 297
[“History of the Tradition of the Passion of Christ.”]
4 elements Loose episodes (fictions) Elaborations The appeal Brief traditional reports (true?) 22 p 300
[The last supper.]
Farewell; no more wine in this world— [ The historic last supper according to Bultmann. ] 23 p 330
Lateness of the gospel stories, invented by the church. Jewish Hellenists predominant in the Christian sect & in the Synoptics. Contrast with the theological myths of S. Paul & S. John (who were Jews!) 24 p 331
[“The Virgin Birth.”]
The Incarnation is a philosophical myth.
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25 pp 332–33
||On the mixture of Jewish and Hellenistic elements in the Gospels. The last supper as a purely Hellenistic feast.|| The stories about the Sacraments are legends to explain the actual practice of the Church and give it an authoritative origin. 26 p 368
||The sick brought to Christ for healing; his mixing among the people.|| Jesus is re-preserved as a popular hero because the Church was recru[i]ted from the common people. 27 p 369
The Apostles put in some times, to be reporters of an invented episode. 28 p 370
[The number of apostles often given in Greek as ten.]
The 12 is a fiction. Literary and dogmatic motives at work. 29 p 373
[The gospel of Mark.]
The Gospels were written in the Church for the Church and by the Church. The Holy Ghost came first, and laid these (partly) duck’s eggs. [ ie Apothegmata] 30 p 396
||Gaps in the biography of Jesus mean that narrative had to be built from tradition.|| Which tradition was oral, confused, fantastic and composed in a foreign language. Imagine a French oral tradition about the life of Hamlet. [Part First of Santayana’s The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (1946) is clearly indebted to his reading of Bultmann’s book.]
Raymond Burgard
L’Expédition d’Alexandre et la conquête de l’Asie Paris: 1937. Waterloo. One marginale.
Samuel Henry Butcher
Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art With a Critical Text and Translation of the Poetics
London and New York: 1898 (2nd edition). Georgetown. No marginalia.
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[Bishop] Joseph Butler
The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature London: 1902. Georgetown. Twenty-eight marginalia.
1 p 83, underlined
But we cannot argue from the reason of the thing, that death is the destruction of living agents, because we know not at all what death is in itself; but only some of its effects, such as the dissolution of flesh, skin, and bones. What a mind! 2 p 84, marked Z
||Our “powers” may live on after death.|| Verbal deluge. 3 p 84, marked
||Nor are animals deprived by death of their powers.|| The fairy-story attitude towards things could not be more charmingly expressed. 4 p 93, marked
||When the senses are gratified, we live in a state of sensation. When not, we live in a state of reflection.|| Theologians have a right to be ignorant of everything. 5 p 96
||Despite the poets’ analogy of human life to that of flowers,|| the destruction of a vegetable is an event not similar or analogous to the destruction of a living agent. A person so dull as this is already judged. 6 p 98
Curious how Christian apologists always speak as if nobody believed any of their doctrines. 7 p 159, underlined
[“Moral Discipline.”]
[…] in general it is obvious that both self-love and particular affection in human creatures, considered only as passive feelings, distort and rend the mind, and therefore stand in need of discipline. What is this? B. seems a decidedly ascetic moralist here. 8 p 172, marked
||On the absolute authority of revelation, as proved by the appearance of religion in every society.|| Poor Bishop Butler.
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9 p 182 marked
Butler maintains ethical judgments against optimism. 10 p 187, marked
[“Conclusion.”]
The observations of the last Chapter [“The Government of God Incomprehensible”] lead us to consider this little scene of human life in which we are so busily engaged, as having a reference of some sort or other to a much larger plan of things. Quote in L. of R. Richard Butler, O.P. “The Notion of Essence in the Philosophy of George Santayana” Dissertation. Rome: 1952. Columbia. Twenty-one marginalia. [Published as The Mind of Santayana. Chicago: Regnery, 1955.] 1 p 15, underlined and marked X in red
Susana taught her young step-brother his catechism and hustled him off to early Mass on Sundays, […]. 2 p 26, underlined and marked X
||Near the end of Santayana’s Harvard career,|| he had begun to write for publication and increasing royalties promised future security. only in 1935. 3 pp 35–36, marked X
Actually it was through a Latin course, not a philosophy course, that the undergraduate Santayana found and fed upon a source that nourished the primary postulate and presumption of his own philosophy. Lucretius was never studied by me in a Latin course. A friend, on unexpectedly leaving College, when I was an undergraduate, gave me his copy; a small book with the text only as a memento. We had sympathised and he knew I should like the De Rerum Natura. 4 p 42, underlined and marked X
[As before, and to Santayana’s annoyance:]
||Butler writes of a “sabbatical” year to read Plato and Aristotle at King’s College, Cambridge.|| A year’s leave of absence without salary, longed for by me and granted by President Eliot.
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5 p 46, marked X
[Butler quotes from Santayana’s “Apologia” in The Philosophy of George Santayana, edited by Paul A. Schilpp, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1951, p. 604.]
“For better or for worse, I am a Scholastic only in my principles not in my ways. I detest disputation and distrust proofs and disproofs.” [Then Butler:] Here is an honest admission, one which, unfortunately, puts the professed philosopher in the position of an anti-intellectual. Certainly I am an anti-intellectualist. The human intellect cannot create anything but human ideas. And I agree with Schopenhauer (who had a great influence over me) on the primacy of the Will or Force on all things. 6 p 60, underlined and marked X
[On Cartesian dualism, restated by neo-realists:]
Emphasis on either side of this dualism leads to the disaster which has doomed the whole course of modern philosophy: concentration on the inaccessibility of the external world, […]. “Accessibility” may be imaginative or active. Vision is what distinguished the ghostly presence of a dagger to Macbeth: but it was not accessible to action. If it had been it would be a material dagger revealed by optical image. 7 p 61, underlined and marked X
Strong and Drake confused external sensation with imagination, giving the former the constitution of an image produced subjectively. Sensation cannot be external: it is a feeling, a shock in the organism, as in a dream. But it may have an impression produced by contact with or radiation from the object. It is by the study of reaction of the body in others that we learn scientifically when and how impressions produce ideas. Russell admits that Hume had no right to call his “sensations” “impressions”. They were (in his philosophy) only ideas arising by magic; but in his sane[?] life he of course believed that they were impressions made by things on his body, and exciting feelings in the mind. 8 p 72, underlined and marked X X
[How Santayana arrived at essence.]
Hence the terms of pure thought, transcending from their extra-mental object, are essences. effects of: in action signs of their external objectives of action.
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9 p 101
Essence can be neither physical nor (what is a false physical) metaphysical. It is a form of distinction or identity, logical or aesthetic: any distinguishable & recognisable character. Plato’s “definition” is that it is being incapable of change—a term by which change is made possible when it is acquired or lost. Nothing causal, “origin or purpose”, in essences. It may be acquired or sought by natural generation. Edward Caird
The Evolution of Religion (The Gifford Lectures, St Andrews, 1890–91, 1891–92.)
New York: 1893. Two volumes. Georgetown. Volume I: Seventeen marginalia. 1 p 10, marked
[“A Science of Religion.”]
[…] in the development of human thought there is always a double process, by which the ideas are brought to the facts, and the facts to the ideas, ||and the two are continually woven together to form intellectual life.|| This is a good example of the indistinctness of transcendental statements. The fact described is that facts suggest theories, and theories (or other apperceptive forms) guide our attention in the selection of facts to observe and remember. 2 p 13, underlined
||Folklore is always childish, and the superstitious customs of savages are coarse and repulsive.|| No civilised being could possibly look to such a source, either for moral guidance or intellectual light. What lends them their interest must, therefore, be their bearing on some new question which we are forced to ask; it must be their value as giving further definition or illustration of some principle which we seek to verify. Notice the unconsciousness of the egotistic character of the standard. The value of a superstition is its value to the superstitious. 3 p 56
||Although it is difficult to place different religions in genetic relation to one another, the drift has been|| towards a conception of God as one and not as many; […]. To make one religion the cause of another would be very artificial. Each is a product of its time, of all the forces of
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human nature at the moment. Compare the streams that flow in old channels, although the water is always new. 4 p 63, underlined
||On the possibility of a universal religion; it must be bound up with man’s nature, and|| it must be so, whether ultimately we are to regard it as a fundamental truth or a fundamental error. Religion is a joyful sacrifice of the soul: it is not true or false. What may be so is only the idea of the object to which the worship goes. Religion is a willing subordination of ourselves to heaven, whatever heaven may mean to us. It is an emotion and an art, not a belief. 5 p 125, marked
[Caird criticizes Spencer’s dualistic view of consciousness.]
[…] it is absurd to say that it is impossible to unite or to relate, what we are always uniting and relating; or to speak of two separate ‘consciousnesses,’ when what we have is only one consciousness, though with more than one element included in it. Good. 6 p 137
God, for this author, is a projection of our reflective attitude. 7 p 219, marked
||Concerning the consciousness of the savage; he is a rational being, even though he has not reflected on the categories which exist in the structure of his language.|| He could not know objects as in space and time, if he were himself entirely an object in space and time. i.e. he is, for the moment, not in the space & time that movement represents. He is not in the picture, he is the picture. Edward Caird
The Evolution of Religion Volume II: Ten marginalia.
1 p 14
[“The Two Types of Religion.”]
An eminent writer [Matthew Arnold] has said that the two great factors in modern life are Hebraism and Hellenism. But to make such an assertion correct, we must at once generalise and narrow it. We must regard Hellenism as the representative of all objective religions, in so far as they have a common pantheistic base. ||Hebraism is subjective,|| the religion of moral obligation and moral aspiration.
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Hebraism is also a fanatical Hellenism also a human system. There is more pantheism in Calvin than in the Greeks. 2 p 53
[“The Relation of Judaism to Christianity.”]
The type here called subjective is the moral, that called objective, the natural religion. Moral religion may be objective—may involve faith in the morality of nature, in the covenant between man and God—or may be purely human and subjective. 3 pp 54–55, marked
||The mind discovers in itself the principle of unity.|| In its recoil upon its own inner life ||it establishes a divine source of the universe even though that process violates the outward facts of experience.|| This is true on account of human folly. 4 p 62, marked
[…] that which makes man a religious being, his primary need for a God, arises from the presence in, if not to, his consciousness of a unity which is beyond the division of subject and object; and, till he realises this primary element in his idea of God, the form and the matter of that idea must be at variance. This is not bad, and would be excellent, but for its hypocrisy. Till we understand the facts of our nature of which religion is the result and mythical interpretation, the “matter and form of our idea of God do not agree”. 5 p 313, underlined
[…] Protestantism, in spite of its more spiritual idea of religion, has never been able decisively to conquer the less spiritual system of Rome; and it has failed just because of its negative and antagonistic character. Strange, yet comprehensible from the pen of a formalist without experience of Catholic piety. 6 p 317, underlined
||Caird sums up: the religious wars and the curious practices of ages past, such as Catholic asceticism, were|| the necessary results of the imperfection of ‘the earthly vessels’ in which the truth of Christianity was first presented to the world. And, if it has now become possible in some measure to detach such wood St. Francis and hay St. Dominic and stubble St. ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Ignatius from the gold Hegel and silver Royce and precious stones ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Caird of the temple built upon the foundation of Christ.1 ^
1
^
Santayana inserts his terms above each of Caird’s.
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Callimachus
Poems of Callimachus: Four Hymns and the Epigrams Translated by Robert Allanson Furness London: 1931. Waterloo. No marginalia.
V[ictor] F[rancis] Calverton
The Liberation of American Literature
New York: 1932. Georgetown. Twenty-three marginalia. 1 p 59, marked
||Calvinism broke down into Congregationalism; aristocratic attitudes tended to dissolve into democratic ones.|| Nevertheless the fact that the Puritan clergy as a whole had descended from a more cultured tradition was sufficient in itself to endow it with intellectual advantages superior to those of the less-cultured traditions. Very important in Boston, more in the other professions than in the clergy. 2 p 79
But [ Jonathan] Edwards fought a losing battle. The odds were too heavy against him. The system of life which he advocated belonged to an age that was already dying. His eloquence had lost its force upon the people long before he died. Of his successor President Wilson. 3 p 85, heavily marked
The common notion of the American Puritan as evasive and prudish […] is based upon a totally false conception of his attitudes and ideals. Above all, he was not prudish. He was not afraid of sex. He condemned its laxer manifestations, but he did not deny or try to evade them. […] It was the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie that was evasive and prudish. 4 p 169, marked If one thought of European nations in terms of their bourgeoisie alone one’s reactions to them, or opinion of them, would not be vastly different from the European reaction to America. ||The English, French, and German bourgeoisie were and still are not|| widely different from the American bourgeoisie in their attitudes and reactions. No: but they are different in their hearts (worse) & in their manners (better). 5 p 183
||Middle-class literature in the nineteenth century is concerned with individuals who do or do not observe the sexual codes of the bourgeoisie.|| […]
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literature became a triangular affair in which the tug of sexual impulse and the pull of moral duty provided the main source of conflict. The attitude of mind thus, which made the Greek critics upbraid Euripides for picturing the maudlin spectacle of a woman in love, was completely reversed, and […] it was the woman in love who became the cynosure of middle-class literature. Weren’t the men in love too? 6 pp 228–29, marked
||The religious motive was uppermost in emigration to New England. In the founding of the West,|| religion played an inconspicuous and infinitesimal part—it was the economic motivation there which was paramount. 7 p 231, underlined and marked
The cultural pattern of the North, once the theocracy was overthrown and the civil state based upon the commercial interests of the time acquired control, was dominantly upper bourgeois; the cultural pattern of the South, once the plantation system had taken form, and continuing down until the Civil War, was pseudo-aristocratic. 8 p 231, underlined and marked
||In the West, however, lacking centralized control,|| it was that difference which made the realized individualism of the West into such a dynamic, driving element, and which made its cultural pattern more creative than imitative in type. 9 p 232, marked
[On the western frontier:]
Individuals found themselves for the first time in their lives unfettered by class or rank, unencumbered by the cultural and economic vestiges of the past. To be classless is to be all lower middle class. 10 p 233
[On the opportunities for the new individual in the west:]
Why are these individualists all alike? 11 p 245, underlined
[Whitman wrote:]
“Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up a new world.” he meant the western hemisphere 12 p 282, marked
Emerson wrote many of his most stirring essays, reflecting the rising power of the West, long before he ventured into the frontier territories.
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13 p 295
Weren’t Americans in 1890 more conceited than in 1930? Certainly my acquaintances were. Also they write better English now than they did then. 14 p 348
[Concerning Joaquin Miller:]
I once saw him in Cambridge, Mass. horrid sight. Lewis Campbell
Religion in Greek Literature London and New York: 1898. Georgetown. No marginalia.
George C. Campion Elements in Thought and Emotion: An Essay on Education, Epistemology, & the Psycho-neural Problem London: 1923. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Albert Camus
Le Mythe de Sisyphe Paris: 1942. Waterloo. Forty-six marginalia.
[Fly-leaf, in Santayana’s hand: “From Philipson and Hillman 1947”.] 1 p 18, marked
This disparity between a man and his life, between the actor and his setting, is really the feeling of the absurd. Every healthy man having dreamed of his own suicide, we may recognize that there is a direct line between that feeling and the aspiration toward nothingness. 2 p 22, marked
When Karl Jaspers, discovering the impossibility of forming a unified world, exclaimed: “This limitation drives me into myself, there where I can no longer retire behind an objective point of view which I can only point to: there, and neither myself nor exterior existence can ever become an object for me,” he evokes many other of those empty, dry places in which thought arrives at its limits. 3 p 23, marked
[…] Princes of the mind [esprit] have also abdicated, but it is to the suicide of their thought that they have proceeded in their purest revolt. Evasion or solipsism a kind of suicide.
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4 p 28, marked
||A man turns thirty, realizes that he belongs to his own time, and horror seizes him as he recognizes his enemy.|| 5 p 34
||Camus’ despair of attaining real knowledge. Any history of significant human thought must be a listing of error and impotence.|| There could be no faux pas if there were no highway. 6 p 58
||Kierkegaard wanted to cure ills, not merely to live with them.|| All Protestant philosophy is schief.1 It is off the track. 1
Oblique, or crooked.
7 p 64, underlined
[Husserl’s idea of intentionality:] [It] only affirms that in the absence of any principle of unity, thought
may again find its joy in describing and understanding each aspect of experience. This is the snare in Husserl. 8 p 66, bottom
“Truth” ought not to have been introduced before “matter” which is required to lend existence to any essence or give it cognitive value for the world. 9 p 67
Husserl pretends to set up a rational rule: after having denied the integrating power of human reason, he leaps with his prejudice to eternal Reason. Does he represent these themes as privileged? No: then there is no leap from pure logic to metaphysics. 10 p 68
[Camus sums up his anti-Husserl thoughts.] This world is not reflected in a higher universe, but the heaven of forms figures in people’s ideas of the world. This changes nothing for me. It is not the taste for the concrete, the sense of the human condition that I find in all that, but an intellectuality too unrestrained to generalize about the concrete itself. Complex essences are as primitive as simple ones. But they are not more existent. You are simply annoyed, not critical.
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11 p 74
||Camus: the only firm truth I know is that of the senses. What I touch, what resists, that is what I understand.|| This is a diseased system. The point is not what you can prove but what you are forced to assume. Proof holds only in the realm of essence. 12 pp 117–18, marked
||In the past, lovely paintings were made in the midst of horrible wars; the artist could separate himself from the event. Camus cannot separate himself from his time, thus he will join it, make common party with it.|| Knowing there are no victorious causes, I have a taste for lost causes. They demand a complete soul, equally so in its defeat as in its transitory victories. 13 p 118
Between history and the eternal, I have chosen history, because I love certainty. Of history at least, I am sure, and how deny a force that will annihilate me? Existential certitude in essential confusion. 14 p 121
||Camus prefers intelligence to genius. Intelligence knows its limitations and illustrates them. It dies as the body dies. But to know it, there is its freedom.|| Too much noise to be sure that anything has been said. 15 p 166
||Sisyphus’ tragedy begins in his knowledge, as he begins his task again. So Sophocles’ Oedipos, and Kirilov of Dostoievski.|| The Will has receded into ideation. The fact busies the conscience. 16 p 167
[Further to the above:]
This is not a propos. Man may change his will into harmony with the gods. 17 p 175
[Camus discusses Kafka’s The Trial.]
Cf. Christ. Condemned to be a man & to suffer & the explanation afterwards in St. Paul. (or supplied falsely to him by the prophecy of the Messiah.)
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18 p 186, marked
Kafka refuses moral grandeur, evidence, kindness, and coherence to his god, but all the more to throw himself into his arms. i.e. the reality that the idea of God symbolises: the true nature of things. 19 p 186, marked
||In that divinity “without surface,” Camus sees a lucidity that renounces itself and that characterizes all existential thought.|| That renunciation would be fertile, but this changes nothing. They cannot diminish the value of lucidity for me in calling it sterile, like all pride. For by definition, a truth too is sterile. All evidences of it are so. In a world in which all is given and nothing explained, the fertility of a value or of a metaphysics is a senseless notion. The truth is a true refuge, because in removing will it preserves all that caused, defeated, and might have fulfilled the will. i.e. preserves it in idea. Albert Camus
La Peste Paris: 1947. Waterloo.
[Heavily marked margins throughout, but no marginal comment. Santayana appears to have been studying how Camus achieved his narrative intensity. For example, he numbers the steps that confirm the presence of plague in the city.]
Francis Carco
Images cachées Paris: 1929. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Francis Carco
La Lumière noire: Roman Paris: 1934. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[Final ten pages are uncut.]
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Law and Literature, and Other Essays and Addresses New York: 1931. Waterloo. No marginalia.
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Paul Carus
The Canon of Reason and Virtue: Being Lao-tze’s Tao Teh King London and Chicago: 1927. Waterloo. Thirteen marginalia.
1 p 17
[Concerning “un-goodness,” evil:]
On the other hand, Lao-tze speaks of both […] “lack of reason” or “anti-reason” […] and “un-reason,” which soon ceases, while “the reason that can be reasoned” […] is declared to be “by no means the eternal Reason […].” Say: Your reasoning reason is not Heaven’s law. 2 p 19, underlined
Undoubtedly the best sayings of Lao-tze are: “Requite hatred with goodness”; and “the good I meet with goodness”: […]. Moral mania: is this also Chinese? 3 p 20, underlined
Other remarkable ideas of Lao-tze are his preference for simplicity, for purity, for emptiness, for rest and peace, for silence, for tenderness, especially the tenderness of water, […]. Jesuitical rather than Quaker-like. 4 p 104
The ten thousand things are sustained by Yin (the negative principle); they are encompassed by Yang (the positive principle), and the immaterial breath renders them harmonious. The Father gives them substance, the Son form, and the Spirit life. 5 p 106
When the world possesses Reason, race horses are reserved for hauling dung. When the world is without Reason, war horses are bred in common. “Reason” = indifference. But small physical ills prevent indifference. Therefore haul away the dung. 6 pp 119–20, marked
[…] the holy man desires to be desireless, and does not prize articles difficult to obtain. He learns, not to be learned, and seeks a home where multitudes of people pass by. Piazza Barberini1 1
Location of Santayana’s hotel in Rome.
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Enrico Castelli
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Idealismo e solipsismo, e saggi critici Rome: 1933. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
1 p 28, bottom
The idea of my past experience is that of scattered experience, each moment equally central and self-existent. The notion that this manifold never existed deployed, but is a romantic fiction in me now, called memory, is a second intuition, contrary to the first, and equally fugitive.1 1
In ink, unusual medium.
Jacques Thomas de Castelnau
Le Paris de Charles V, 1364–1380 Paris: c. 1930. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Guido Cavalcanti
Rime Genova: 1931. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[A gift from Ezra Pound, probably.]
Louis-Ferdinand Céline [Louis-Fuch Destouches] Mea culpa; suivi de la vie et l’oeuvre de Semmelweis Paris: 1937. Waterloo. Eight marginalia. [One may recall that Céline’s virulent pre-World War II anti-semitism, together with his pro-Nazism during that war caused him to be condemned to death in absentia in 1945, a sentence commuted in 1947 because of his age and illness.] 1 p 16, marked
Politics has putrified mankind more profoundly in the last three centuries than in the whole of pre-history. We were more united in the middle ages than we are today: then a common spirit took form. 2 p 16, marked
Since the end of the period of belief, leaders exalt every defect, every kind of sadism, and gain all the more through their vices: vanity, ambition, war, death in a word. 3 p 18, marked
||Industrialized man, drunk on alcohol and gasoline, becomes a confusion of sheep, bull, and hyena.|| Charmant. Le moindre obstrué trou du cul se voit Jupiter dans la glace.1
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Cf. Stearns on America.2 1
Charming. The least obstructed little asshole looks on himself in the mirror as a Jupiter. 2 Santayana’s reference is to Harold Stearns’s Liberalism in America (1919). His copy contained no marginalia and many uncut pages. 4 p 45, marked
||Music symbolizes the loss of faith, of common belief.|| The small, intimate church is closed, the organs are dead, it is sadder than before. Only those whom fate designs for the eternal mass of infinite love remain. They compose only a very small chapel of clarity in space and time. 5 p 99, marked
In this society which we are induced to frequent, composed above all of politicians and artists, one cannot realize one’s true worth. Louis-Ferdinand Céline
L’École des cadavres Paris: 1938. Waterloo. Fifty-four marginalia.
1 p 36, marked
||Céline attacks writers as|| larbins1 ||of the Left, thus creating a new worker-Christian-Soviet conformity in France.|| There is everywhere a certain pressure to drive all writers to the left. 1
Flunkeys.
2 p 50, underlined and doubly marked
It is in the United States that one may better see, if one has the taste for it, panique du Juif 1, the mad anguish that strangles, the camouflaged arrogance, at the slightest evocation of a possibility of their regulation for the general, world-wide good. Lost leadership! Luther, Rousseau, Jefferson, if not “Jews” were Protestants. 1
The vast Jewish panic.
3 p 51, marked
The three radios, the six cars, the four refrigerators, the seven telephones in each of the 300,000 Jewish households, and the super-television! The new Jerusalem.
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4 p 62
||Célíne is revolted by the Jewish Roosevelt, Sassoon, Litvinof, and writes that|| personally I find Hitler, Franco, Mussolini fabulously debonaire, admirably magnanimous, infinitely more sympathetic […] than 250 Nobel Prize winners. ||He would throw vitriol in the face of Roosevelt and other grandiose men.|| Rottenness can be left to rot. They are already suffering. 5 p 75, marked
The judeo-Americans are notorious idiots, bellylanding in foolishness: look at Roosevelt, Otto Khan, Morgenthau, Filene, Barush [Baruch], Rosenthal […] Observe these cunts […]. 6 p 100, marked
||The fascist states want no war, for they have everything to lose.|| Why? Because the fascist states realize, before our very eyes, among Aryans, without gold, without Jews, without Freemasons, the famous socialist program, of which the communists have had their mugs full and have never brought off. That money is not needed is evident in Spain. 7 p 101, marked
||Célíne rants against materialists.|| You are fried. […] Your system of producing wealth, factories, mines, cooperatives will fall apart, like everything else, under the attacks of the people, in the delirious, popular boulimia. This has the advantage that rubbish would not be produced in such great quantities. But no necessities either until appropriated. 8 p 102, marked
Spiritually we are at ground zero, sunk, bored to perdition. All our arts prove it. Since the renaissance, so mechanized, we repeat with almost futile variants the same hackneyed sentimentalities (we call them eternal values!) Love! Re-Love! No Love! More Love! This is the point Will must not be reflected and turned into pleasure-seeking. 9 p 105, marked
||For 150 years, you the materialists have been lyrical in praise of the mechanical order,|| the material bungling, the ladder-climbing and the shit, you are going marvelously to be served! Shitty! You yourselves are promised to the revolutionary puppies! Bulging eyed, abberrant, pontificating, cock-up cancers, you committed at the outset the capital, inexpiable mistake: you have bet according to your guts, you have adulated, exalted, fawned on and glorified your tripes.
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10 p 105
[Santayana marks more in the vein of the above, then:]
La tripe itself knows better. It is the brain & the tongue that have ruined the belly. 11 p 128, marked
Tetês d’épingles,1 you have not understood in communism its admirable, instantaneous manner of appeasing all your ruined tax-payer grudges ferociously, in the name of a new purity, a non-existent proletarian virtue, you deceived jackals. Your intimate, personal plan won’t wash. I am well acquainted with you. Hand to mouth revolutionaries. 1
You pin-heads.
12 p 130, marked
Above all communism is a poetic vocation. Without poetry, without a burning, purifying altruistic fervor, communism is only a farce, the receptacle of all anger, of all plebian resentment, the decadent playhouse of sharks, of all the tragic pimps, of all Jews performing their Talmudic imposture. 13 p 145, marked
Le peuple c’est un vrai Musée de toutes les conneries des Ages, il avale tout, il admire tout, il conserve tout, il défend tout, il comprend rien.1 1 The populace is a true museum of all the stupidities of the ages: it swallows everything, it admires everything, it preserves everything, it defends everything, it understands nothing.
14 p 177, underlined
||The press, from right to left, is corrupt. It will say anything if the bribe is large enough.|| […] rosir les évenéments selon la couleur de subsides, dérober, pourfendre, trucider, rodomontader, piroutter, selon l’importance des enveloppes.1 At bottom that is the power at work: but passion is fed by money. 1 … gloss over events according to the color of the subsidy, undress, attack, traduce, rant, all according to the sum in the envelope.
15 p 180, doubly marked
In democratic politics it is money that commands. And the money is Jewish. 16 p 183
||The Soviets would have fallen apart long since without the support of banks, industries, and Jewish propaganda.||
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Very good: but why should all Jews & the whole Left wish to defend the Bolshies? Aren’t they safe and more comfortable in London? In New York? Aren’t the brothels better in Paris? 17 p 183
||Rant against the|| bobarderie crapuleuse1 ||by the|| youtres2 ||over the centuries.|| [Santayana inserts:]
Themselves, Christianity! Islam! The Holy English Bible! 1
Crapulous rumor-mongering. Yids.
2
18 p 185
||Céline asserts that the Jews have killed 30,000,000 Aryan Russians since coming to power. They are frightened therefore of any change in the Soviet system.|| Is this one reason for inaction on the part of Stalin? He doesn’t dare arm the people? 19 p 191, marked
||Paris is glutted with Jews.|| Paris la ville lumière.1 1
Paris, the city of light.
20 p 218
||Racial purity is a matter of “sperm,” of sexual conduct; the cause of racial purity is the genuine revolution if a white race is to emerge, communist or not.|| This is absurd: but perhaps we shall really have to start afresh in a comparative void, to breed a natural man. 21 p 219, marked
Our French Republic is no more than a great gullet swallowing the negroizing of the French at the command of the Jews. Our governors are a clique of sadistic yids and yellow-bellied masons sworn to swallow us up, to bastardize us further, tous ramener par rous les moyens au grotesque alluviant primitif, mi nègre, mi jaune, mi blanc, mi rouge, mi singe, mi juif, mi tout.1 The Proletariat of all classes 1
To boil us down by all the grotesque, primitive means of inter-mixture, part negro, part yellow, part white, part red, part monkey, part Jewish, part everything.
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22 p 222
“To be or not to be” Aryan? That is the question! Et pas autre chose! Toutes les doctrines d’inexistence des Races, de plus grand confusionnisme racial, tous les apostilismes du méli-mélo racial a toute force, l’espérantisme du trou du cul, “a la Romain Rolland”, au plus grand babélisme copulateur, ne sont qu’autant de virulentes vacheries destructrices, toutes sorties de la même boutique talmudique: “A la destruction des Blancs”.1 1 And nothing more! All the doctrines concerning the absence of Race, concerning the vast racial confusion, all the spreading of racial jumbling at full pace, the esperanto-ism of the anus “Romain Rolland style,” resulting in the greatest fornicating Babel, are no more than destructive, foul tricks, all emerging from the same Talmudic shop: “To the destruction of the Whites.”
23 pp 222–23
Au royaume des “écroulés dans la merde” les tordus sont rois.1 A little of this in the U.S. where the meanest little intellectual airs himself as a superior person. But there is the physical recovery to make up.2 1
In the kingdom of the “fallen in the shit” the lunatics are king. The literary meaning of “tordu” is “twisted”; the slang is “loony.” Céline favors slang, but Santayana’s “physical recovery” suggests that the literary meaning was in his mind. 2
24 p 267, underlined and marked
||Since the ancient Egyptians, history has unrolled as predicted by the magicians and soothsayers, but now, in 1940, predictions fail.|| Leur charabia s’épaissit, c’est la nuit. C’est plus qu’un ergotage horrible dans les rangs magiques. Ils nous laissent en panne devant les abîmes.1 True. In the last ten years all is funk. 1 Their gibberish thickens, it is night. It is more than a horrible quibbling in the ranks of the magicians. They leave us broken down at the edge of an abyss.
25 p 270, marked
||Bishops as well as Jews implore absolution. An empire of holy confession. Everyone to his knees, from the emperor to the lowliest serf. A fanatical masochism on all sides.|| Superstition cows the spirit in seeming to purify it. 26 p 294, underlined and doubly marked
[Concerning efforts of the Jews to fight back against their oppressors; Céline addresses them:]
You terrify no one. The sun sinks, you swank about to the right, to the left. L’Europe se forme contre vous.1 Jan. 1939. 1
Europe forms up against you.
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27 p 299, marked
||Céline praises his own consistency, his independence, and the fact that no one pays him to write as he does. Everyone else sells himself, or tries to.|| Même les plus riches, les plus superbes. Ils arrêtent pas de s’offrir. En fait, leur vie n’est qu’un putanat perpétuel plus ou moins decoratif, plus ou moins miteux, plus ou moins chichiteux, somptueux, preténtieux.1 Wretchedness of the successful. 1 Even the richest, the most superb. They continue to offer themselves. Indeed, their life is no more than a perpetual whoredom, more or less decorative, more or less seedy, more or less affected, sumptuous, pretentious.
John Jay Chapman
Notes on Religion New York: 1915. Georgetown. Eighteen marginalia.
1 p 2, marked
In all this matter we are dealing with the influence of Christ. His power shines not only forward down through the centuries, appearing in history as Christianity, but it also casts light backward upon that Jewish history and religion out of which he stepped. Rot 2p5
||The portability of the Bible|| which can be packed in a box, laid western Europe at the mercy of Israel. What cool inventions! People did not read the Bible: they couldn’t read. Cf. Boethius 3 p 20, underlined and marked X
The experience of fourteen hundred years has provided the theory for every sort of private indulgence. The result is that so far as doctrine or conduct is concerned, one may be a good Catholic and believe or do almost anything, so long as one concedes the authority of the church. 4 p 23, marked
The Catholic church in all its disintegrations should be regarded as a crumbling unity. It is the greatest historic residuum in the world, the most perfect piece of the past, and it gives us a more accurate measure for judging of the past than any other extant institution. 5 p 38, marked
[On religion in America:]
We have not been interested in religion; we have forgotten the principles of the matter. The extraordinary ignorance of our people in matters of history, their belief in destiny, their inability to stop and reflect about
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anything, their desire that our politics shall not contain any religious question, their sense of security, due to the presence of the Atlantic Ocean between themselves and Europe—all these things have led the Americans of the last fifty years to hide their heads in the sand in regard to the doings of the Roman Catholic Church. 6 p 45, marked
||If you ask the average American|| in the name of liberty of conscience and the Right to worship God to awaken out of his dream: These appeals mean little to a mind that has forgotten that there ever was any serious trouble about religion in the world, and that cannot see how such things are of importance. This is true of the American Catholics also. 7 p 51, underlined
[High praise for the Old Testament; Chapman quotes:]
The battle is not to the strong, neither is the race to the swift etc. With all this profundity, with all this human feeling, there is never a note of falsetto in Jewish sentiment. Why? Because the English translation is noble? The thought is only: [“]the best laid plans of mice and men” etc. 8 p 57
[Concerning the desire for salvation:]
to feel saved is to be saved. How Protestant! 9 p 82, marked
We live in a universe whose development we cannot assist, save by accepting its operations as wiser than we. Way to the jungle. Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer
London: 1929. Illustrated Medici Society edition (1st edition, 1913). Waterloo. [Seven marked passages, as follow, but no comments.] 1 p 94
“The Miller’s Tale.” [The miller sings the “Angelus ad virginem.”] 2 p 162
“The Man of Lawes Tale.” I pray yow al my labour to relesse; I may nat telle hir wo un-til tomorwe, I am so wery for to speke of sorwe.
George Santayana’s Marginalia 3 p 164
[King Alla and his Custance to England in “joye and quiete”:]
But litel whyl it lasteth, I yow hete, Joye of this world, for tyme wol nat abyde; Fro day to night it changeth as the tyde. 4 p 171
“The Shipmannes Tale.” [Concerning the merchant’s wife:]
Myn housband is to me the worste man That ever was, with that the world bigan. But sith I am a wyf, it sit nat me To tellen no wight of our privetee, Neither a-bedde, ne in non other place; God shilde I sholde it tellen, for his grace! A wyf ne shal nat seyn of hir housbonde But al honour, as I can understonde; Save un-to yow thus muche I tellen shal; As help me god, he is noght worth at al In no degree the value of a flye. But yet me greveth most his nigardye; And wel ye woot that wommen naturelly Desyren thinges sixe, as wel as I. 5 p 314
“The Wyf of Bathes Prologue.” I trowe he [Salomon] wyves mo than oon; As wolde god, it leveful were to me To be refresshed half so ofte as he! 6 p 423
“The Marchantes Tale.” [Of Januarie and May:]
The lusty lyf, the vertuous quiete, That is in marriage hony-swete; 7 p 424
[Januarie does not want an old wife:]
She shal nat passe twenty yeer, certayn; Old fish and yong flesh wolde I have ful fayn. ‘Bet is,’ quod he, ‘a pyk than a pikerel; And bet than old boef is the tendre veel. I wol no womman thritty yeer of age, It is but bene-straw and greet forage.’
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André Marie Chénier
Bucoliques Paris: 1923. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Winston Churchill
The Dawn of Liberation: War Speeches Boston: 1945. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Classic American Philosophers
Edited by Max H. Fisch New York: 1951. Waterloo. Seven marginalia.
[Also, a correction of one typographical error from The Life of Reason.] 1 p 26, underlined
[Fisch’s Introduction.]
||In an unpublished notebook, Peirce said:|| […] that all it concerns us to know is how to conduct ourselves on future occasions. What Santayana criticized as “that strange pragmatic reduction of yesterday to tomorrow,” future historians may perhaps discern in all our philosophers, including himself; for it was he who suggested that “the backward perspective of time is perhaps really an inverted expectation.”1 [In reference to the underlined words:]
These are not the past or the future. 1
Journal of Philosophy 22 (1925): 686; Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), 36.
2 pp 29–30, underlined
[Santayana paraphrases a quotation from Peirce on the theory of signs and sensation.]
Sensations signs of one another and standards [Peirce’s text continues:]
The idea is not a sign of an external existence numerically distinct from itself and a counterpart of itself, but only a sign of the sources of those other mental states which as real pleasures and pains can be expected as concomitants or consequences of it. 3 p 38, underlined
[Introduction.]
||That Dewey, like Peirce and Royce,|| saw in the community of investigators a pattern for society at large. Alas!
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Cyril Clemens
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My Chat with Thomas Hardy Webster Groves, Missouri: 1944. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Cyril Clemens
The Man from Missouri: A Biography of Harry S. Truman Webster Groves, Missouri: 1945. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Cyril Clemens
The Man from Limehouse: Clement Richard Attlee Webster Groves, Missouri: 1946. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Samuel Clemens [See Mark Twain]
William Kingdon Clifford
Lectures and Essays
Edited by Leslie Stephen and Sir Frederick Pollock London: 1901. Volume II. Georgetown. Sixty-one marginalia. [End-paper:]
GS in re Hyde 1905 1 p 7, marked
||In early society, or any, the earliest precept is to put oneself in one’s place.|| And this belief, which the lowest savage got, that there was something else than the physical organisation in other men, is the foundation of Natural Ethics as well as the modern Science of Consciousness. This unreal: savages are not Cartesians. 2 p 22, marked
Any beginning of an action is what we call a judgment. Pragmatism. 3 p 58, marked
Your body is an object in my consciousness; your mind is not, and never can be.
!
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4 p 67, underlined
[Clifford uses the phrase, “brain-motion.”]
How can this exist if not known, according to you? 5 p 71, marked
[A] cerebral image is merely an idea of a possible perception in my mind.
What depths of nonsense for consistency! 6 p 94
How shallow this profundity! After all, the utilitarians go much deeper than their critics. 7 p 101, marked
Observe that I am endeavering to describe the facts of the moral feelings of Englishmen, such as they are now. N.B. = “I am no moralist.” 8 p 107, marked
||The Greek moral sense, wherever it had come from, was|| there in the people before it could be enforced by a Prophet or discussed by a philosopher. Again, we find a wonderful collection of moral aphorisms in those shrewd sayings of the Jewish fathers which are preserved in the Mishna or oral law. Some of this teaching is familiar to us all from the popular exposition of it which is contained in the three first Gospels. 9 p 119, marked Z
||The physical universe is a dream,|| only it so happens that all our dreams agree in many respects. This doctrine of Berkeley’s has now [1871] been so far confirmed by the physiology of the senses that it is no longer a metaphysical speculation, but a scientifically established fact. [Santayana’s loose set of lines indicates utter disapproval.] 10 p 120, top
N.B. The bankruptcy of idealism turning mind into matter. 11 p 125, underlined
I am not aware that any one has rested the claim of science to judge moral questions […]. Kant. 12 p 152
Aristotle defines an organism as that in which the part exists for the whole. i.e. an organism is so much of nature as subserves a given soul—as generates or sustains a positive interest. [An example of Santayana’s moving beyond his source to clarify his own ideas, rather than merely to comment upon or to criticize.]
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13 p 183, marked Z
No belief is real unless it guides our actions. Pragmatism 14 p 228, marked
The moral teaching of Christ, as partly preserved in the three first gospels, or—which is the same thing—the moral teaching of the great Rabbi Hillel, as partly preserved in the Pirkè Aboth, is the expression of the conscience of a people who had fought long and heroically for their national existence. 15 pp 242–43, marked Z
Can the favour of the Czar make guiltless the murderer of old men and women and children in Circassian valleys? Can the pardon of the Sultan make clean the bloody hands of the Pasha? As little can any God forgive sins committed against man. When men think he can, they compound for old sins which the God did not like by committing new ones which he does like. This is good doctrine ill expressed. God is never thought of so personally as this, and therefore this language—touching a symbol of what is truly good—is truly blasphemous. 16 p 245
I am afraid Clifford was a Philistine. Adrian Coates
A Sceptical Examination of Contemporary British Philosophy New York: 1929. Georgetown. No marginalia.
G[eorge] D[ouglas] H[oward] Cole The World of Labour: A Discussion of the Present and Future of Trade Unionism London: 1920. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Edited by T. Ashe Two volumes. London: 1890. Volume II. Georgetown. No marginalia. [Fly-leaf: “G. Santayana 7 Stoughton Cambridge.” Santayana lived in Stoughton Hall, Harvard, as an undergraduate.]
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Friend London: 1899. Georgetown. 12 marginalia.
1 p 38, marked
[Essay X.]
Acting or abstaining from action, delivering or witholding thy thoughts, whatsoever thou doest, do it in singleness of heart. In all things, therefore, let thy means correspond to thy purpose, and let the purpose be one with the purport. Without foresight! 2 p 39, marked Z
||On the relationship between citizen and state; the state limits individual freedom for the good of all,|| but likewise by the relation which the facts bear to its (the state’s) own instinctive principle of self-preservation. For every depositary of the supreme power must presume itself rightful: and as the source of law not legally to be endangered. What thinking! 3 p 96
[“The First Landing-Place: Essay V.”]
Thus God, the soul, eternal truth &c. are the objects of reason; but they are themselves reason. We name God the Supreme Reason; and Milton says, ‘Whence the soul reason receives, and reason is her being.’ What a hodge-podge. R[obin] G[eorge] Collingwood The New Leviathan, or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism Oxford: (1942), 1944. Waterloo. 160 marginalia. 1 p 3, underlined
[“Body and Mind,” paragraph 1.43:]
The beginner has in his head a definition of the science; a childish definition, perhaps, but still a definition; […]. Indication only in both cases.1 1 The great majority of the marginalia here are quarrels and minor points about usage on the order of this example.
2 p 6, underlined
[“Body and Mind,” paragraph 1.75:]
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||A man does not already know|| whether by the organized or systematic knowledge called ‘science’ or by the random, unsystematic knowledge called ‘experience’, which is the raw material out of which ‘science’ is made by arranging it in systematic form. N.B. Experience is thought, not contact with a power not thought. Animal faith rejected. 3 p 100, top
[“Reason”:]
“Knowledge” used for alleged knowledge: which has the form of cognition, but no sanction. 4 p 104, underlined
[“Utility,” paragraph 15.12:]
Here, then, are two purposes with a relation between them; each is, therefore, a second-order purpose; we will call them x and y, y being the reason for x. Almost always not a purpose but a proclivity. I am going for a walk and I take my hat and stick Are they useful? Yes & no: they are customary. 5 p 106, top
[“Utility”:]
This is wretched psychology because it splits hairs in language, while ignoring the whole vital process of living. 6 p 113
[“Right,” a discussion of rules:]
A rule belongs to art, not to morals It tells how to do something—if you wish to do it. 7 p 140, bottom
[“Society and Community,” Collingwood discusses rules in society, Santayana sums up:]
Does fashion rule itself? People wish to follow it: hardly anyone cares to set it. I suspect it is set by people who wish not to follow it, but to be singular. 8 p 141, top
[“Society and Community”:]
Are communities always generative? Are societies always militant?1 1 As is so often the case, Santayana uses words and concepts that are prominent in Dominations and Powers.
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9 p 145, top
[“Society and Community,” the place of obligation and liability in society:]
N.B. this definition of obligation in fellowship, fits Anglo saxon sporting “team work.[”] cf. Feudal loyalty. 10 p 146
[“Society and Community,” paragraph 20.91:]
Society is the sharing of certain persons in a practical social consciousness verbally expressed in a formula like: ‘We will go for this walk’ or: ‘We will sail this boat’. The false notion of society as possessing a consciousness, is avoided. 11 p 151, underlined and marked
[“Society as Joint Will,” paragraph 21.5:]
The reason why no actual society can be the universal society is that no actual society can ever lose all trace of the non-social community out of which it has emerged. i.e. can have an all-unanimous will. 12 p 155, marked
[“Society as Joint Will,” paragraph 21.74:]
Reward and punishment have no weight with free men, and the theory of them has no place in the theory of society. A great maxim 13 p 159
[“Society as Joint Will,” paragraph 21.97, last in the chapter:]
||A society for study of antiquities may lapse, expectations unfulfiled,|| but it is the expectations, not their fulfilment or non-fulfilment, that make the society permanent or temporary. So that society is a matter of intention, while community is a matter of fact— 14 p 176
[“The Family as a Society,” paragraph 23.9:]
‘Man is born free’, says Rousseau, ‘and everywhere he is in chains.’ 15 p 176, marked
[“The Family as a Society,” paragraph 23.92:]
The facts of human infancy are dirtier and less picturesque, perhaps, than the fancies of Rousseau; but they are a safer foundation on which to build a science of the relations linking a man to his fellow men.
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16 p 180
[“The Body Politic, Social and Non-Social,” paragraph 24.5:]
||According to the Greeks, society is a collection of citizens and non-citizens, corporately ruling themselves. In the Middle Ages, society was thought of as non-social,|| a human herd which strong men rule and good men would wish to rule well. [Paragraph 24.51:] Hobbes said: ‘It is both.’ Did he? I think it is you. 17 p 182, underlined
[“The Body Politic, Social and Non-Social,” paragraph 24.63:]
Plato’s discovery was how the intellect could find its way about in a Heraclitean world. The answer is: think dialectically. By fixing the eternal terms through which it passes, the intellectual traces the movement of things in these fixed terms. C. is too fond of misinterpreting Plato and all other people. 18 p 186, marked
[“The Three Laws of Politics,” paragraph 25.3:]
||A state is a permanent society.|| But what you call a permanent society may easily “wither away”. e.g. a religion. 19 p 191, underlined
[“The Three Laws of Politics,” paragraph 25.97:]
It is no use raising the question whether freedom is a good thing or not: freedom in the ruling class is nothing else than the fact that the ruling class rules, and the cry against freedom which accompanies the rise of Fascism and Nazism is a confused propaganda for the abolition of one thing (freedom for the ruled ) where the distinction between that and another thing (freedom for the ruler ) is overlooked. Of course no Fascist or Nazi protests against freedom for the ruler! Quelle erreur! This was the pride of the Fascists, to feel that to these the fate of their country was intrusted. But they were not wisely led in the end. 20 p 191, underlined
[“The Three Laws of Politics,” paragraph 25.98:]
||Hitler, like the philosopher-king of Plato, was tossed to the surface, passively shoved into power, to do|| the desires which the mob feels. This was Hitler’s mysticism He thought himself guided by Fate, by the Destiny of Germany.
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21 p 199
[“Democracy and Aristocracy,” paragraph 26.66:]
||The people in the French Revolution were|| not a rabble; it was the bourgeoisie; and the bourgeoisie was already an organized body corporately possessed of economic power. The problem of the revolutionaries was to bestow political power where economic power already lay. It was also aristocratic intellectually . . as American “democracy” is not. 22 p 201
[“Democracy and Aristocracy,” paragraph 26.78:]
||Historians habitually find heroes and villains in their work.|| Don’t you? 23 p 208
[“Force in Politics,” paragraph 27.64:]
||Unlike Germany after World War I, no anti-dialectical system was imposed on England, nor will it be if the English retain the mental vigor to hold on to the lesson that political life is essentially dialectical.|| i.e. a series of compromises & incoherencies. 24 p 212, underlined
[“The Forms of Political Action,” paragraph 28.1:]
Political action pure and simple is will pure and simple; but differs from will as such in being, first, the joint will of a society […]; secondly, that will exercised immanently upon those who exercise it as the self-rule of that society; and thirdly, the same will exercised as force in transeunt rule over a non-social community, the ruled class of the body politic. Is will action? Isn’t it rather strain or potential action suspended and pre-figured? 25 p 212, underlined
[“The Forms of Political Action,” paragraph 28.16:]
Without joint language or discussion, again of a highly developed kind, there is no joint will. “Will” is then articulate will & government always party government justified consciously by a “dialectical” thesis. (Not true. The best government is silent.) 26 p 213, marked Z
[“The Forms of Political Action,” paragraph 28.22:]
Granted that the rulers discuss their various views, and arrive at a joint decision, this decision will next be issued as a joint command to the nonsocial community of their dependants, the ruled.
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1946: What a contradiction! Now the ruled are ready to act reasonably, the rulers caught in the selfish rivalries & hatreds. 27 p 213
[“The Forms of Political Action,” paragraph 28.26:]
||Full knowledge of purpose between ruler and ruled will enable the body politic|| to stand up to the rough-and-tumble of political life. The tough game of life is rather welcome to healthy young organisms without a purpose. To live well without purpose is part of English virtue. 28 p 226
[“External Politics,” paragraph 29.35:]
Men […] only convert themselves from involuntary members of a nonsocial community into voluntary members of a society by deciding to do it. This artificial notion excludes brotherhood & friendship. 29 p 229, underlined
[“External Politics,” paragraph 29.68:]
It is equally war whether the threat is explicit or implicit. A hectoring diplomat who never actually threatens war is making war. Roosevelt vs. the Japs. 30 p 243, underlined
[“War As the Breakdown of Policy,” paragraph 30.93:]
||In a war that would destroy an enemy,|| (its destruction as a body politic, not the destruction of all its members […] ||who though politically incompetent, could live usefully|| under the shelter of men more intelligent than themselves) […]. The hypocrite peeps out in the best of Englishmen. Why not say whip? 31 p 249, underlined
[“Classical Physics and Classical Politics,” paragraph 31.37:]
Only a very cretinous pupil will fancy […] the ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism’ ascribed to seventeenth-century thinkers, rival theories of scientific method. Do you mean Russell? 32 p 256, marked
[“Classical Physics and Classical Politics,” paragraph 31.93, concerning the various kinds of partnership, ancient, Mediaeval, and modern:] N.B. [Down arrow.]
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This suggests that “classical” modern politics substitute militant for generative principles. Typical modern government would therefore not be an art but an enterprise, the government party being a militant band, formed by free agents on purpose to impose a theory upon the body politic. 33 p 272, underlined
[“Decline of the Classical Politics,” paragraph 33.42:]
||Kant and his successors rejected Hobbe’s “artificial man” because there is no such thing, and because the state was|| for them neither artificial in its origin nor human in its essence, but natural in its origin […] and divine in its essence: though, as Hegel scrupulously says, it is not God but only an avatar of God, der Gang Gottes in der Welt.1 A turn in the “ways of the Lord.” 1
The way (route) of God in the world.
34 p 272
[“Decline of the Classical Politics,” Santayana glosses paragraph 33.44:]
Human morality can supervene on moral chaos. This brings about The Rational Order. 35 p 273
[“Decline of the Classical Politics,” paragraph 33.46:]
Why did they [Hegelians and Marxists] deny the existence, even the possibility, of free joint activity? Business is no doubt a part of the rational order in its method, as agriculture is: but it belongs to the militant order in its motive power. And because it is part of nature Because the Germans worshiped the order of nature. 36 p 287
[“What ‘Civilization’ Means: Generically,” paragraph 34.83:]
||A scientist who defines terms as meaning what they do not mean in the language to which they belong falsifies facts of science.|| Cf. the unjust steward (wiser than the Oxonian children of light.) 37 p 288
[“What ‘Civilization’ Means: Generically,” end of chapter:]
So you imply that if anyone has an ideal of civilization it is the same ideal as that of every other political moralist? Has Bentham the same ideal as Nietzsche or Marx?
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38 p 293
[“What ‘Civilization’ Means: Specifically,” paragraph 35.53:]
||The “savage” community gets out of nature only|| what it can extort thence through sheer labour unmitigated by thought; […]. Labour is not civility towards nature but enterprise or prudence towards oneself. The rational order intervenes. 39 p 304
[“The Essence of Civilization,” paragraph 36.59: How is civilization transmitted?]
Mothers teach their daughters and maids. 40 p 319, underlined
[“Civilization and Wealth,” paragraph 38.24, concerning relative demands for produce in communities of varying resources:]
For there can be no such difference between communities; because a type of demand which a community lacks even the power to satisfy soon ceases to be a demand. Ask the simpler class or tribe or woman about this! 41 p 320
[“Civilization and Wealth,” paragraph 38.35, Santayana paraphrases:]
wealth = abundance, without the idea of possession. To call a man “wealthy” is vulgar. 42 pp 322–23
[“Civilization and Wealth,” paragraph 38.63, on barter and distribution of wealth:]
Well-distributed wealth is better not greater than is ill-distributed. You play too much with questionable definitions of words and call it “Science”. 43 p 323, underlined
[“Civilization and Wealth,” paragraph 38.66:]
[…] how can A force B to a make an exchange by which B thinks he will not be better off? […] A arouses in B emotions which he cannot control and which prevent him from making a genuine bargain or exchange with A. He says “Lord X has just telephoned an order for this very cheese!” 44 p 332, marked
[“Law and Order,” paragraph 39.92:]
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Law and order mean strength. Men who respect the rule of law are by daily exercise building up the strength of their own wills; becoming more and more capable of mastering themselves and other men and the world of nature. This is merely saying that reason is reasonable. It clears the way. But quo vadis?1 1
Where are you going?
45 p 332
[“Law and Order,” end of chapter:]
Wealth—resources—prevail in long wars; law makes for wealth. Therefore it is not a miracle that a well ordered nation should prevail on the whole, so long as law is vitally rooted and not Pharisaical. 46 p 339, marked
[“Peace and Plenty,” paragraph 40.74:]
I have […] been deeply impressed by the good manners I have found all my life in English public-houses, where I have never had a cross word or a cross look […]. I wish I could say as much for what is called polite society. 47 p 347, marked
[“What Barbarism Is,” paragraph 41.63:]
||The barbarian’s advantage over his victims is their unpreparedness.|| This advantage can be protracted for as long as he can keep the situation fluid. What he must not allow is that the ice should pack round him. Is this why Stalin keeps public opinion at home ignorant and foreigners out? 48 p 382
[“The Fourth Barbarism: The Germans,” paragraph 45.67:]
||Germans of the Bismarckian period did not know whether they were innocents or heroes.|| If a man is as muddle-headed about himself as this implies […] he is a liar; or […] a man addicted to self-deception; […]. ||His judgments about himself and all else will be wrong, and get worse as he ages.|| Coll. at times is like Chesterton or Bernard Shaw. 49 pp 386–87
[“The Fourth Barbarism: The Germans,” paragraph 45.95:]
I do not know what the reason is why barbarists [sic] have always in the end been beaten. Haven’t all natives been beaten in the end?
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R. G. Collingwood
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The Idea of Nature Oxford: 1945. Texas. Seventy-nine marginalia.
1 p 19, marked
[Of J. J. Thompson, succeeding Dalton on the idea of the molecule:]
[…] the ‘atom of oxygen was made up of parts which taken separately were not oxygen but something else, namely, electricity. = Pullings. But a pull of nothing by nothing would have to be a self-existent feeling of pull. But it is said to be unconscious so that it is an unfelt feeling. Cf. Hobbes on “bodiless body”. 2 p 19, underlined and marked
[Collingwood quotes Aristotle:]
[…] that being happy is an activity which requires a whole lifetime, and cannot exist in less. [At “activity”:] ? Good fortune cannot be attributed to a man until we see that he had a good end. The whole must be beautiful. It is the Greek way of being saved. Not what Collingwood says. 3 p 25, marked
If two historians gave each his own answer to the question: ‘What kinds of events happen, or can or might happen, in history?’ their answers would be extremely different if one habitually thought of an event as something that takes an hour and the other as something that takes ten years; and a third who conceived an event as taking anything up to 1,000 years would give a different answer again. 4 p 26, marked
[Of the second law of thermodynamics:]
[…] an intelligent organism whose life had a longer time-rhythm than man’s might find it not so much unnecessary as untrue. I never believed it. 5 p 27, marked
That history is a process in which tout casse, tout lasse, tout passe, is doubtless true; but is also a process in which the things that are thus destroyed are brought into existence. Only it is easier to see their destruction than to see their construction, because it does not take so long. May it not be the same in the world of nature? May it not be the case that the modern picture of a running-down universe, in which energy by degrees exchanging a non-uniform and arbitrary distribution (that is, a distribution not accounted for by any laws yet known to us, and therefore
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a given, ready-made, miraculously established distribution, a physicist’s Golden Age […]? The ancients did not expect a final destruction of the cosmos: they said sometimes that it would repeat itself literally: but Aristotle, when he said that “the arts” had been many times rediscovered, did not say they were identical arts each time. 6 p 41, underlined
[“Limits of Ionian Natural Science.”]
||Unless God has a reason for choosing (to create the world) it is not a choice.|| Choice is choice between alternatives, and these alternatives must be distinguishable, […]. Choice of a world presupposes vision of the [illegible] of essence. [Up arrow.] You mean [God] chooses where there is no differ-
ence. He cannot have a fundamental reason for his presence for one thing rather than a different one. 7 p 52, top
An existent shape is more than an essence. it has size, position, and substance. i.e. it can change its shape. 8 p 67
[On nominalism:]
Nominalism contrasts in each case in each man is different fact: only the name is constant. But not as even the meaning of this name since that is a new fact in each judgment. 9 p 70, underlined
[“Plato: The Theory of Forms.”]
Plato’s doctrine is that all there is to know about the physical or natural world is known to us by perception: […]. ||It does not delude us,|| it is the best way there is of studying things in which because they are always changing have no determinate characters and therefore cannot strictly speaking be known or understood at all: […]. ? It is so by perception independent; but not by sensuous intuition which yields only an essence. 10 p 70, underlined
Thus […] Plato by anticipation defends, as against the Eleatics, what we nowadays call the empirical sciences of nature, that is, the collection and organization of perceptually observed natural facts: […].
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Not in the English psychological way, though. It is natural existence & transformation that were added. 11 p 71, underlined
[Concerning Plato’s theory of form:]
The plate’s shape is not an instance of true or absolute roundness. Not the material shape, but the intuited shape given to attention is so. (Strange that Collingwood is so blind to the immediate. Perhaps only when arguing or teaching.) 12 p 84
[On mediaeval notions of development in nature:]
The seed is a body with internal tensions potential in it, requiring certain external conditions and a certain time to develop. All these elements are material and they suffice to assure heredity form with variations. Mediaevalism therefore not only admits development but admits metamorphosis. 13 p 121, underlined
[“Hegel: the Transition to the Modern View of Nature.”]
Kant admitted that we can and may think of the thing in itself: but he set his followers the task of discovering how in fact we must and do think of it. [Hegel set himself this task as the beginning of all cosmological theory.]
Rejecting the exclusive claim of scientific thought to the title of knowledge, and consequently rejecting the idea that the thing in itself is unknowable, he affirmed that the thing in itself is the easiest of all things to know: it is simply pure being, being as such, […]. [At ‘unknowable’:] except by faith [At ‘things to know’:] by definition 14 p 121, underlined and marked
||The transition from one concept to another|| is an objective transition, a real process by which one concept evolves itself logically out of another which it presupposes. Rather relation implying another essence as its complement or negative. 15 p 121, underlined
[…] a process, but not a process in time or a movement in space, still less a change of mind or process of thought, but a process of the notion, a logical movement inherent in concepts as such. Thus Hegel has answered the question how the thing in itself can be creative or a source of something other than itself: It is ‘logical necessity.’
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The assignment of movement to the eternal is absurd. Pure being implies all forms of being, it does not generate them. The mind of an animal [illegible] it is that passes from one to another as its organ vegetates. Cf. dreams. 16 p 168, underlined
[…] since there is no intrinsic reason why […] other worlds should not exist […] they must all exist […] and therefore must be. This “great” philosopher does not see the contingency or scandal of existence. L’existence n’est qu’un defaut etc. 17 p 169
[End of page:]
Myth. An object has to have some essence: if it has an ideal that is only the essence which it tends to have. 18 p 172
||Collingwood addresses|| the question how the world of eternal objects, the realm of essence, is organized in itself. […] If I ask Santayana to show that this shade of blue is an essence logically implied by his general conception of a realm of essence he replies that ‘no essence can have implications: implication is something imposed on essences by human discourse, leaning not on logic but on the accidents of existence’ (Realm of Essence, p. 81). Hence, for him, every essence is completely self-contained and atomic; […]. Quotation partial and incomplete. The text is defensible. I was thinking of suggestion in discourse not of companionship in being. The latter is an inevitable corollary to each essence which being specific involves the exclusion of every different thing. John Stewart Collis
While Following the Plough London: 1946. Waterloo. One marginale.
1 p 63
In the plum harvests, his job was to cut currant bushes; he ate the currants left by the pickers, hating to throw away a piece of bread. Immoral materialism, put forth as piety. Everything turns into something else. But are the things all equivalent?
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Horatio Colony
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Bacchus and Krishna N.p. N.d. (Privately printed.) Waterloo. No marginalia.
Confucius
The Unwobbling Pivot & The Great Digest Translated by Ezra Pound with notes and commentary on the text and ideograms Norfolk, Connecticut: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[Pound sent this to Santayana in Rome from St. Elizabeth’s hospital for the criminally insane, Washington, D.C., where he was then confined.]
Pierre Corneille
Oeuvres de Pierre Corneille: Théatre complet Paris: 1869. Waterloo. One marginale.
[The frontispiece of this work: “Walter Evans Darley [sic] Abbey” is a probable source of the Darnley family in Santayana’s novel, The Last Puritan.
Norman Lewis Corwin
On a Note of Triumph New York: 1945. Waterloo. No marginalia.
J[ohn] A[dam] Cramb
Germany and England
London: 1914. Personal library of Adelaida Sastre, Avila. Sixteen marginalia. 1 p 55, underlined
[On Frederick the Great; the Reformation:]
It is then that the destinction arises between just and unjust wars.
! 2 p 64, underlined
A nation’s military efficiency is the exact coefficient of a nation’s idealism. ideal passion 3 p 69, underlined
Almost the last time we see Treitschke, those noble features of his lit up, as they always were instantly lit up by any enthusiasm, […]. I heard him in Berlin: He was fat, flabby, violent, with a horrible impediment in his speech caused by the fact that he could not—lucky fellow—hear himself talk!
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4 p 89, underlined
Treitschke showed them [France, Spain, England, Holland] German unity, and therefore German freedom, lying like the fragments of a broken sword, […]. i.e. an open career for whatever is German. 5 p 101
For History, the course of events, is not the light, but, as its name, , implies, a continuous searching for the light—the world-spirit down the ages seeking the realization of its ultimate desire, a tragic realization because it can only end in the destruction of the world-soul’s Being as such. What rot! 6 p 112, underlined
Force alone, violence or brute strength, by its mere silent presence or by its loud manifestation in war, may be necessary to establish this [world-] dominion; but its ends are spiritual. ! Geistig1 is not “spiritual”. 1
Intellectual.
7 p 113
Germany and the whole Teutonic people in the fifth century made the great error i.e. of becoming Christian . ^ ^ 8 p 114
||The Moslems’ continuing fidelity to their world-vision.|| Frederick II liked the moslems, but was it for this or because of their Epicurean side? 9 p 115, underlined
Hence the significance of Nietzsche. Kant compromises, timid and old; Hegel finds the Absolute Religion in Christianity; of his own equivocal ^ sort. […]. ^ Rather he foists his own Absolute upon the Lutheran theologians, calling it true Christian faith. 10 p 116, marked
[Nietzsche] attempts to set the German imagination back where it was with
Alaric and Theodoric, fortified by the experience of twelve centuries to confront the darkness unaided, unappalled, triumphant, great and free. Quite so.
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Crisógono de Jesús Sacramentado
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San Juan de la Cruz , su obra cientifica y su obra literario
Two volumes. Avila: 1929. Waterloo. 187 marginalia. [Volume I.] 1 p 41, marked
[Concerning spiritual suffering in the sanctification of the soul:]
Spirit struggling to assert its trans human affinities. 2 p 45
[Santayana paraphrases:]
No essence impedes or attaches a pure spirit in act: it is readiness for all. 3 p 48, marked
The highest grade of perfection one may attain in this life is to remain in perfect quiet and silence; the man himself not working, but allowing God to work in him. The more perfect is the negation of mental images, and the more empty of all things, the higher the readiness to recieve in the self the Word and the operation of God. Which does not impede action and speech, as if those of another, of my animal self. 4 p 62
||The mystic’s aim: unity with God.|| Experience is only subject-matter for understanding, the interpretation, besides being the only truth possible in the case, is itself the best part of experience. [An unclear try (therefore unusual) at paraphrase of a mystical statement in the text.] 5 p 63, underlined
||The mystic’s discipline for attaining union with God.|| Es menester llegar a tierra firme, descubrir a través del elemento sujectivo y sensacional, que pasa, el objetivo, que permanece, y, elevándose por encima del mundo de los efectos, descansar en el inmutable de las causas.1 Why must “causes” be immutable Because, in this mythological metaphysics, Ideas are “causes” of the facts that illustrate them. By “causes” therefore, through our understanding types and perfection. 1 It is necessary to get down to essentials, to discover across the subjective and sensational, what is taking place, the object that remains, and, rising over the world of effects, to rest in the immutability of causes.
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6 p 67
Union does not have to be metaphysical but affective. Moral hypostasis & myth, Hebraic & Platonic. Subtract the fabulous part, and you have left a record of moral aspiration and discipline. 7 p 67, underlined
La penitencia […] ha de ser severa pero no feroz.1 1
Penitence should be severe but not ferocious.
8 p 68, top
This might be called The Higher Moralism. [Underlined.]
||Normally the object of contemplation is|| dios. I.e. the Good of the soul. The spirit here has a moral aspiration, it acts in the mode of love. 9 p 69
[Santayana’s translation and paraphrase:]
Conformity first of will, then of understanding, then surrender of self—not by forgetfulness but by expropriation: the final assumption of the divine point of view, reduplicating it without conciousness of the reduplication. 10 p 71
||Various orders have different disciplines along the mytics’ path.|| The Carmelites dig at the Dominicans. 11 p 86
Curious identification of sensation with “matter”. “Spirit” is conceived not to have a material organ. 12 p 87, underlined and marked
||On the question of how to move from the life of sensation to the life of the spirit.|| In St. John of the Cross’s system the operation of the understanding agent does not create an entity—the species—as is the case in the doctrine of certain scholastics. Su actuación sobre el fantasma se reduce a prescindir en la imagen sensitiva de las condiciónes materiales, que impiden su inteligibilidad actual, no viendo en ella más que su entidad desnuda.1 Does this mean sensible essences? The pure sensible world then be “intelligible”. 1 Its operation in the apparition [Santayana translates “fantasma”—ghost or apparition, as “pictoral objects” in a note on p. 91.] is reduced to omitting it from the sensitive image of material conditions, which impede its present intelligibility, not seeing in it more than its naked entity.
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13 p 88fn, underlined
[Footnote 1:]
[…] quod quidditas rei materialis formaliter de se est intelligibilis: […]1 Doctoris resoluti Jo. Bachonis […] quaestiones in iv libros. Cremonae MDCXVIII, qu 2 par v, pág. 18. [For intelligibilis:]
intuitible?—Of course all essences are that. 1
… that essence of material things formally of itself is intelligble.
14 p 107fn, marked
[Footnote 2:]
||Crisógono discusses, with citations from Aquinas and Bacon, the question of whether a “real” relationship exists between a perfect God and his imperfect creatures.|| The existence of the creature certainly detracts nothing from the perfection of the creator: but the point is whether it adds anything or draws anything from him. 15 p 131
[On San Juan’s discussion of the spiritual aspect of the soul:]
[…] no puede llegar al Ser, porque no puede tener en si dos formas contradictorias.1 Why should the soul care about Being? Is this a practical or a logical prejudice? 1 It cannot arrive at [have] Being, because it cannot contain two contradictory forms in itself.
16 p 131, underlined
||The appetite for vice is a function of the will,|| con olvido del Creador […].1 This recurrent phrase has a conventional religious sense, but it might cover also spiritual alienation from the transitory & contingent. 1
… in forgetfulness of the Creator.
17 p 160
||San Juan’s mysticism was pure, in the sense that he ruled out the possibility that God takes notice of the particularities of human existence; for that he was criticized by other mystics.|| This is a splendid position, and raises our saint to the level of a pure philosopher.
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18 p 254
||Aquinas on the superiority of the passive over the active for contemplative power and effectiveness.|| All contemplation of essence, or of anything external, must therefore be passive: it cannot modify its object. But the contemplation, for the psyche, is pure act. 19 p 279, marked
||The process by which the mystic attains union with god, the pain and difficulty involved, is the movement from the “noche oscura” to the “noche serena,” from the dark night of the soul to the clear, untroubled night. This is compared to the struggle to set fire to green wood:|| Es el fuego que lucha primero con la humedad de un leño verde, que le pone negro, que le hace quejarse y llorar; luedo arde triunfante y al fin le trona ascua viva y chispeante. Es el orden y natural proceso de toda introducción de formas. San Juan de la Cruz se complace en aplicar la semejanza a la contemplación ¡Genial concepción de la contemplación y de la mística! Así concebidas y así entendidas, las obras del sublime Maestro resultan claras como la luz del sol del mediodía.1 1
It is the fire that first fights with the humidity of the green log, that turns it black, that makes it complain and cry. Afterward, it burns triumphantly and in the end it turns to lively and crackling embers. It is the order and natural process of every introduction of forms. San Juan de la Cruz pleases himself in applying resemblance to contemplation. What a conception of contemplation and of the mystic! Conceived and understood in this way, the works of the sublime Maestro result in clarity, like the mid-day sunlight. 20 p 320, underlined
[Santayana queries San Juan’s use of “la esencia.”]
What is this “essence”? Life, psychic movement? Material harmony of the psyche & the universe? It would be by grace—attractive assimilation—that such a union would recur. 21 p 323
[Aquinas on the place of faith in communion with God.]
This sounds as if God too were blind direction or suspended energy—something essentially transitive. Cf. Plotinus. 22 p 335, top
[Interpretation of discourse on the place of love and charity.]
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Disproof of God’s existence; love is essentially discerned sub specie boni:1 but good is relative to animal life: therefore God is a mere ideal. The God that exists must be otherwise defined. 1
In the aspect of the good.
23 p 335, underlined
[Crisógono misspells “Diótina” (properly Diótima) in a reference to the Symposium.]
! 24 p 336, doubly marked
[Santayana’s paraphrase and comment:]
In unselfish love the object is not the beloved but the good to be bestowed upon him. The good must be a source of happiness or misery to the lover: that is so by definition. 25 p 337, top
The Moral Essence of Spirit might be Chap. II of the R. of S. [In the event, there was no such chapter-title to The Realm of Spirit. It is clear from this and many other comments on Crisógono’s work that Santayana drew a good deal from it in writing The Realm of Spirit.] 26 p 363, top
The essence of the psyche is a certain specific direction of life and choice of activities, physical, mental, and emotional. 27 p 369, doubly marked
Faith does not offer us a notion or image of God; therefore we should have to eliminate any such image before coming to God; […]. This amounts to a definition of faith which abstracts from doctrine & image. It is rather super-Catholic. 28 p 381, underlined
[A quotation from St. Bernard:]
[…] ‘ to love God thus is a marriage.’ This union, the Saint tells us, has nothing to do with corporeal matters […]. Very well: but then why this tiresome talk of marriage 29 p 411, underlined and marked X
||The rationalists interpret San Juan as a disciple of Plotinus and a precursor|| de Schelling y de Hegel.
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30 p 445, marked X
||Concerning the doctrine of San Juan and St. Teresa of Avila that soul does not communicate with the body.|| They couldn’t know this physiologically: but they knew it morally—pure spirit is irrelavant to the self that it enters— and transfered [sic] this (as is usual) to the carnal sphere. [Volume II.] 31 p 279, top
Quote This is splendid. Note that it involves the multiplicity of the themes of love. Perfection cannot lie in essence or matter nor in Being, which are dead, but only in life and in life ^ ^ that has a particular organ & potentiality, so that it may have a culmination: in other words, perfection is possible (though difficult) only for the spirit, that[?] discovers the flame of intuition, or (as S. John says) of love. And love without intuition would not be love but restlessness: and [Brief remainder is illegible.] 32 p 313
[San Juan:]
All creatures are pleasing. Harmony of nature mystically revealed in invisible beauty. This harmony is a participation in the Logos. 33 p 317, underlined
[…] la gloria de su resurrección según la carne. […]1 This point of the resurrection is typical of the Christian view: nature must be carried over into the supernatural. The church is terribly human. 1
The glory of his [Christ’s] resurrection in the flesh.
Benedetto Croce Ce qui est vivant et ce qui est mort de la philosophie de Hegel: étude critique suivi d’un essai de bibliographie Hegelienne Translated by Henri Buriot Paris: 1910. Waterloo. Forty-six marginalia. 1 p 23
||Hegel’s logic is glorious, his glory residing in his destruction of that false idea of logic that is identified with arbitrary abstraction, and to have added to logic concreteness and the intuitive faculty.||
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That is, logic is a bore, and I must call autobiography logic as well as physics and religion, so that I may be all in all. 2 pp 25–26
||Hegel’s refusal to believe in|| the false application of the principle of identity. Bestial absorption in becoming and not being—in running and not stopping—in looking and not seeing. The madness and the agony of existence are there: but unrelieved by a single ray of attainment or beauty or supervening truth. 3 p 27, underlined
Et la pensée ne se disloque pas, ne se disperse pas, la pensée qui suprême réalité, réalité de la réalité, saisit l’unité dans l’opposition et la synthétise logiquement.1 The cat out of the bag. 1 And thought does not go astray, is not dispersed; thought which, the supreme reality, the reality of reality, seizes unity in opposition and synthesizes it logically.
4 p 47, marked Z
True happiness, human happiness, or rather virile, is not the ignorant bliss of sadness, that bliss which approximates futility and madness. Conditions for such a manner of bliss may not be found in any part of world history, in which, Hegel says, where struggle is lacking “we are presented only with blank pages.” What ignorant bluff. You can’t possess happiness but the South Sea islanders according to Melville can. 5 p 49
||Hegel is beyond pessimism or optimism on that philosophical Olympus where one neither weeps nor laughs.|| Yes: but what of that? To describe a thing is not to justify it. 6 p 57, underlined
||For Hegel, history is immanent.|| […] chez Hegel, toute l’histoire devient histoire sacree.1 Without the natural conditions and moral alternatives surrounding history, history is mere antiquarianism. The élan comes from the psyche & and the outer world. 1
All history becomes sacred history.
7 p 58
||Those questions that philosophy does not answer should not have been asked, according to Hegel.|| I am the Absolute
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8 p 64, top
N.B. Reasons for adhesion to Hegelianism Dialectical malice, appearance of psychological insight, congruity and satisfaction with the concrete, the passions, the romantic imagination, and the dramatisation of history. 9 p 65, top
The more people talk about Life, the less they seem to know about the art of living. 10 p 107
Thus Hegel’s system may be explained: the principle of the concrete concept, united to the dialectic, derives from an inspiration frankly aesthetic. Yes: and theological: it is all a matter of changes of view, of intuition. 11 p 123, underlined
||The poets of Sturm und Drang form|| cet héritage critique.1 ! 1
This critical heritage.
12 p 155, marked
[Croce’s chapter on the application of Hegelian dialectic.]
There have been many caricatures of Hegelian dialectic, but no caricature can equal that which Hegel himself unknowingly provided when he tried to consider Africa, Asia and Europe; or again the hand, the nose and the ear; or again the familial patrimony, paternal power and the last will and testament, according to the same rhythm in which he had considered nothingness and becoming. Yes, but the notions are notions, the continents continents: and dialectic would not be physics (as you both think it is) if things as well as ideas did not obey it. 13 p 160
Hegel does not understand nature empirically; he constructs a philosophy of nature. That is why he understands nature not as the empirical element in rapport with the speculative element, but as a speculative concept. All in discourse. (i.e., not experimental) 14 p 163, top
Apotheosis of the pedant [After a page of verbiage, Santayana sums up:]
Nature is the science of nature.
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15 p 166
Il fallait tirer la pensée hégélienne hors «de la gaîne de ses membres»,1 […]. [Santayana, wickedly translates this into Italian:]
dalla vagina delle membra sul? 2 1
He had to draw Hegelian thought out of the +++++ of its members. From the vagina of the member above?
2
16 p 175, underlined
La conscience moderne ne peut accepter Hegel tout entier, ni le repousser tout entier, […].1 This is the substitute for truth. 1 The modern mind [or conscience] cannot completely accept Hegel, nor completely reject him.
Thomas Crosfield
The Diary of Thomas Crosfield London: 1935. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Niccolò Cuneo
Spagna cattolica e rivoluzionaria Milan: n.d. [Preface dated 1934.] Waterloo. No marginalia.
[An egregiously fascist work.]
Dante Alighieri
La Divina commedia di Dante Alighieri With comments of G. Biagioli Three volumes. Paris: 1819. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Dante Alighieri
La Divina commedia Florence: n.d. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Dante Alighieri
The Comedy of Dante Alighieri Translated by Louis How New York: 1934. Waterloo. No marginalia.
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Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy Translated by Lawrence G. White New York: 1948. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Surendranath Dasgupta
A History of Indian Philosophy
Cambridge, England: 1922. Volume I. Georgetown. 144 marginalia. 1 p 17, marked
The [Vedic] gods here do not preserve their proper places as in a polytheistic faith, but each one of them shrinks into insignificance or shines as supreme according as it is the object of adoration or not. 2 pp 58–59, marked
||Emancipation is our only true end, for it is our true nature and essence.|| It is the realization of our own nature that is called emancipation. Since we are all already and always in our own true nature and as such emancipated, the only thing necessary for us is to know that we are so. This could be rationalised into saying that when we see what we are, we are reconciled to being that, since all other things are us also. 3 p 110, marked
||The Upanisads speak of self as bliss, for it is eternal.|| So that a timid fear of death is the root of this whole religion. 4 p 133, underlined
[…] Buddha teaches that all beings are from all eternity abiding in Nirvana. The Realm of Essence. 5 p 137, doubly marked
It is called universal illumination, because there is nothing for it to illumine. 6 p 138
[Santayana’s paraphrase:]
Infinite love for their angels, infinite pity for their lives. 7 p 141, marked
[Chapter V, passage on “Essencelessness”:]
That which appears as being, neither comes from anywhere nor goes anywhere, and that which appears as destroyed also does not come from anywhere nor go anywhere, and so a process (samsara ) cannot be affirmed of them. Essence clearly conceived.
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8 p 149, marked
[Brilliantly, Santayana boils down a long, involved paragraph on “Voidness of all phenomena,” one replete with only vaguely translatable Sanskrit terms.]
The nothingness (sunyata ) of things may be viewed from seven aspects— Relativity is self-destructive if made absolute. Relative, unsubstantial, unknowable, irrelevantly grouped, indefinable, presumed or posited, falsely projected into time & space. 9 p 152, marked
Right knowledge is thus the knowledge by which one can practically acquire the thing he wants to acquire (arthadhigati ). 10 p 153, underlined and doubly marked
Right knowledge […] directly indicates the presentation, the object of desire, but so far as the object is a mere presentation it is not a subject of enquiry. Pragmatism in a strange quarter. 11 p 154, marked
It is because we have an awareness of blueness that we speak of having perceived a blue object. How good all this is! 12 p 164, underlined
The existence of a jug […] is known by the power it has of forcing itself upon our minds; if it had no such power then we could not have said that it existed. We can have no notion of the meaning of existence other than the impression produced on us; this impression is nothing else but the power exerted [ by things ] on us, for there is no reason why one should ^ ^ ^^ hold that beyond such powers […] there should be some other permanent entity to which the power adhered, and which existed even when the power was not exerted. This power exerted by nothing is fatality: it is passivity in the ego posited as activity in the non-ego. 13 p 168, marked
||Concerning the Vedanta, where|| forms of the external world were no doubt illusory, but they all had a permanent background in the Brahman, which was the only reality behind all mental and physical phenomena. Brahma is matter, conceived metaphysically.
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14 p 205, marked
[“Anti-theistic Arguments.”]
Again, even if we should grant that the world was created by an agent, then such an agent should have a body, for we have never seen any intelligent creator without a body. If it is held that we should consider the general condition of agency only, namely, that the agent is intelligent, the objection will be that this is impossible, for agency is always associated with some kind of body. This is a better argument than it seems: if no instrument is dis coverable, [sic] the effect is absolute: if one is discoverable, it is the agent. 15 p 209, underlined
Thus we see that Buddhism regarded all production and destruction as being due to the assemblage of conditions, and defined truth as that which could produce any effect. ? 16 p 209, underlined
But to such a logical extreme did the Buddhists carry these doctrines that they ended in formulating the doctrine of absolute momentariness. Turning to the Jains we find that they also regarded the value of knowledge as consisting in the help that it offers in securing what is good for us and avoiding what is evil; […]. ? Does the author identify truth with the value of knowing the truth? 17 p 210
||Discussion of a course of right conduct to be followed merely for moral elevation.|| What is moral elevation? 18 p 211, marked Z
[Follows on from p. 210:]
[…] through a gradual process of development […]. What a mess of big words with shadowy meanings! 19 p 217
This is horribly expressed but seems to mean that the appropriation of accidents by the spirit has no ground in the spirit, which is itself indeterminate. Be thy self, thy spirit, and all determinations drop away.
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20 p 339, underlined and marked
In the proposition, “It is a cow,” the cow is a universal, and this must be intuited directly before it could be related to the particular with which it is associated. Not “associated” because the particular is not a second datum, but the object of intent. 21 p 374–75
||A disquisition on the|| self-validity of knowledge. Does this amount to hedging? If you really trust your perceptions until contradicted, you believe them to be expressive of latent facts, not self-sufficient experiences with merely internal objects. 22 p 381, marked
||On the theory of inherence (samavaya ).|| When any individual is destroyed, the class-character does not go elsewhere, nor subsist in that individual, nor is itself destroyed, but it is only the inherence of class-character with that individual that ceases to exist. 23 p 381, marked Z
That all things are said to be sat (existing) is more or less a word or a name without the corresponding apprehension of a common quality. Our experience always gives us concrete existing individuals, but we can never experience such a highest genus as pure existence or being, as it has no concrete form which may be perceived. ! 24 p 383, underlined and marked
||The self-revealing character of knowledge. The self|| has no illumining or revealing powers, for then even in deep sleep we could have knowledge, for the self is present even then, as is proved by the remembrance of dreams. This “self” is then not spirit, by the individual psyche or even mere substance, since it is that which persists in deep sleep. 25 p 383, marked
The cognition (samvedana ) of a person simply means that such a special kind of quality (dharma ) has been manifested in the self by virtue of which his active operation with reference to a certain object is favoured or determined, and the object of cognition is that with reference to which the active operation of the self has been induced. This is true, but not as the author conceives.
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26 p 383
Cognitions are not indeed absolutely formless, for they have the cognitional character by which things are illumined and manifested. Cognition has no other character than this, that it illumines and reveals objects. How good this is! 27 p 387
[Concerning doubtful cognitions:]
“Is this a post or a man?” How urgent is the need of discriminating essence! 28 p 427, marked
If it is said that things come into being from that which has no production, there is no example with which such a case may be illustrated. Nor can we consider that anything is born from that which has itself suffered production. [At “production”:] “origin” Cf. Spinoza It is the previous mode, not the substance, that is the cause of a given mode. 29 p 427, marked
It is not in any particular case that the mind produces the manifestations of objects while they do not exist so that it could be said to be an error, for in present, past, and future the mind never comes in touch with objects which only appear by reason of their diverse manifestations. Dreadful phraseology: = illusion is not incidental: it cannot be corrected by a better view: it must be suppressed. 30 p 428, marked
[Concerning “The Sankara School of Vedanta”:]
As the movement of burning charcoal is perceived as straight or curved, so it is the movement (spandita ) of consciousness that appears as the perceiving and the perceived. i.e. as a flying spark is seen as a line, although it is only a point, so a mere intuition of essence is seen as a permanent mind viewing a permanent object. 31 p 428, marked
All things are regarded as being produced from a relative point of view only (samvrti ), there is therefore nothing permanent (sasvata ). Again, no existent things are produced, hence there cannot be any destruction (uccheda ). Only essences appear, not things. Things do not exist; therefore there are only non-existent essences.
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32 pp 438–39
[Santayana summarizes and criticizes two pages of discourse:]
If the self is Brahma only in deep sleep, how is Brahma the cause of waking illusion? He might still be the substance; but only in manipulation by another person in another medium. 33 p 443, underlined and marked X
||In what sense is the world-appearance false?|| In the case of the illusory perception of silver, the “this” (pointing to a thing before me) appeared as silver; in the case of the world-appearance, it is the being (sat ), the Brahman, that appears as the world; but as in the case when the “this” before us is found to be a piece of conch-shell, the silver is at once dismissed as having had no existence in the “this” before us, so when the Brahman, the being, the reality, is once directly realized, the conviction comes that the world never existed. Brahma is substance or object of intent. [At “the world never existed”:] X The substance of it did, with all the variety requisite to
render those illusions pictures of that substance. If “the world” means the picture of the world, it never existed; if it means the substance of the world, it did: and Brahma is only a mask for it. 34 p 445, underlined
Just as the silver-appearance of the conch-shell is not its own natural appearance, so the forms in which consciousness shows itself are not its own natural essence. In the state of emancipation when supreme bliss (ananda) shines forth, the ananda is not an object or form of the illuminating consciousness, but it is the illumination itself. Certainly not. Spirit is equally addressed to anything. This bliss of pure spirit is the happiness of not thinking. 35 p 446, underlined
So long as the right knowledge of the Brahman as the only reality does not dawn, the world-appearance runs on in an orderly manner uncontradicted by the accumulated experience of all men, and as such it must be held to be true. It is only because there comes such a stage in which the world-appearance ceases to manifest itself that we have to say that from the ultimate and absolute point of view the world-appearance is false and unreal. Then enlightenment is only a stage in the history of illusion, and has no cognitive authority.
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36 p 446, underlined
[…] it will be evident that the true reality in all our experience is the one self-luminous flash of consciousness which is all through identical with itself in all its manifestations of appearance. Is this Vedanta, or only Dasgupta? The context suggests substance, not spirit. 37 p 449
||Consciousness of underlying reality, the shedding of illusion, is suddenly revealed, illuminated.|| This is another philosophy altogether—some pupil thinking for himself and not seeing that he contradicts Vedanta. 38 p 450, underlined
Vedanta […] holds that it is necessary that before the operation of the mental states can begin to interpret reality, reality must already be there and this reality is nothing but pure consciousness. Is this genuine? There seems to be confusion between pure substance and pure spirit.—Existence and the sense of existence. 39 p 451, doubly marked
Something besides Being is absurdly supposed to Be. 40 p 451, underlined and marked Z
[…] even in dreams we feel happy and sad, and dreams may be so bad as to affect or incapacitate the actual physical functions and organs of a man. X It would be hard to pack more misunderstanding into a few words. In a man whose functions are perfectly healthy? 41 p 453, marked
[The definition of Ajnana (Nescience):]
This suggests that spirit could never be without illusions. The dissipation of illusion and fruition of pure spirit would then be only a euthanasia or vanishing point of spirit. Salvation would be: The last illusion of the sickly mind. 42 p 492
[Santayana sums up:]
But what is a man? He cannot pass into Brahma because, in so far as he was not Brahma from the beginning, he dissolves as he progresses in knowledge: and what remains and is saved is not he, but Brahma who never needed salvation.
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Dhirendra Mohan Datta
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The Chief Currents of Contemporary Philosophy Calcutta: 1950. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[A few underlinings, but not Santayana’s.]
Russell W. Davenport
My Country New York: 1944. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Delphic Club
Quinquennial Catalogue of the Delphic Club of Harvard University
Three volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1885–1936; 1946; 1950. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Henri Denifle
Luther et le Luthéranisme Translated by J. Paquier Paris: 1911. Volume II. Georgetown. No marginalia.
[Pages cut to 177 only of 460.]
Deutsche Lyrik
Edited by Karl A. Buchheim London: 1883. Georgetown. Eleven marginalia.
[Signed:]
George Santayana . 19 Hollis: Cambridge .
1
[Marginalia include translations of words and titles marked by Santayana with an “X”: Goethe’s “Wenn ich ein Vögelein wär,” “An den Mond,” and “Ein Gleiches;” Schiller’s “Das Mädchen aus der Fremde;” and Heine’s “Leise durch men [sic] Gemüth,” “Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,” “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam,” and “Am fernen Horizonte.”] 1
Santayana’s undergraduate quarters in the Harvard yard.
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John Dewey
Reconstruction in Philosophy London: 1921. Georgetown. Forty-four marginalia.
1 p 70, marked
The banishing of ends and forms from the universe has seemed to many an ideal and spiritual impoverishment. […] But when it is recognized that the mechanical view is determined by the requirements of an experimental control of natural energies, this problem of reconciliation no longer vexes us. I.E. if we assume it usefully, it exists only in our service? 2 p 100, underlined
[Chapter 4: “Changed Conceptions of Experience and Reason.”]
[…] a resolution of experience into atomic elements that afford no support to stable organization or a clamping down of all experience by fixed categories and necessary concepts—these are the alternatives that conflicting schools have presented. “Experience” here means the picture of the world in the average mind, not the course of events. 3 p 119 marked
[On “The Ideal and the Real”:]
||Distance creates difficulty, it provokes discontent and illusion about the state of affairs.|| Now there are two ways out. One way is to pass from a mere dream of some heavenly realm in which distance is abolished and by some magic all friends are in perpetual transparent communication, to pass, I say, from some idle castle-building to philosophic reflection. Space, distance, it will then be argued, is merely phenomenal; or, in a more modern version, subjective. It is not, metaphysically speaking, real. Hence the obstruction and trouble it gives is not after all “real” in the metaphysical sense of reality. Pure minds, pure spirits, do not live in a space world; for them distance is not. Their relationships in the true world are not in any way affected by special considerations. Their intercommunication is direct, fluent, unobstructed. Does the illustration involve a caricature of ways of philosophizing with which we are all familiar? But if it is not an absurd caricature, does it not suggest that much of what philosophies have taught about the ideal and noumenal or superiorly real world, is after all, only casting a dream into an elaborate dialectic form through the use of a speciously scientific terminology?
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4 pp 120–21, underlined
||The interaction between ideal and real results in inventions in the real world.|| Invention proceeds, and at last we have the telegraph, the telephone, first through wires, and then with no artificial medium. The concrete environment is transformed in the desired direction; it is idealized in fact and not merely in fancy. The ideal is realized through its own use as a tool or method of inspection, […]. Heaven made real by the radio. 5 p 123
||Questions of epistemology|| all spring from the assumption of a merely beholding mind on one side and a foreign and remote object to be viewed and noted on the other. They ask how a mind and world, subject and object, so separate and independent can by any possibility come into such relationship to each other as to make true knowledge possible. i.e. forget the mind and think of the aptitude of the body, the art. This is a part of the material world, a mode of it in its plasticity. 6 p 125
||Technical and economic progress has not been matched by social and moral progress.|| i.e. Philosophy is revolutionary politics. (not founded on what is, but on (why?) [sic] what ought to be. 7 p 126, underlined
||Contemplation has usually been associated with high development in esthetics, not in science.|| On the other hand, the scientific attitude that has actually proved itself in scientific progress is […] a practical attitude. It takes forms as disguises for hidden processes. “Knowledge is faith mediated by symbols”. 8 p 127
||Without esthetics,|| mankind might become a race of economic monsters, restlessly driving hard bargains with nature and with one another, bored with leisure or capable of putting it to use only in ostentatious display and extravagant dissipation. rather in football & fox trot. 9 p 129
It is not surprising that some men are brought to regard all idealism as a mere smoke-screen behind which the search for material profit may be
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more effectually carried on, and are converted to the materialistic interpretation of history. But this is your doctrine! 10 p 130, underlined
||Short views and falsified evidence are not scientific.|| It is false that the evils of the situation arise from absence of ideals; they spring from wrong ideals. What is the criterion of right? 11 p 130, underlined
Philosophy […] cannot “solve” the problem of the relation of the ideal and the real. That is the standing problem of life. But it can at least lighten the burden of humanity in dealing with the problem by emancipating mankind from the errors which philosophy has itself fostered—the existence of conditions which are real apart from their movement into something new and different, and the existence of ideals, spirit and reason independent of the possibilities of the material and physical. ? He means that life is always generating something new. Is anything new, or about to be, “ideal”? 12 p 136
[On logic:]
Some sorts of thinking are shown by experience to have got nowhere, or worse than nowhere—into systematized delusion and mistake. Say Catholicism? 13 p 136
Others have proved in manifest experience that they lead to fruitful and enduring discoveries. Say, Geography? 14 p 139, underlined and marked Z
||In the natural state, without troubles to overcome, men do not think.|| A life of ease, of success without effort, would be a thoughtless life, and so also would a life of ready omnipotence. Beings who think are beings whose life is so hemmed in and constricted that they cannot directly carry through a course of action to victorious consummation. This hints at the American meaning of “success”. 15 p 139
Wherever external authority reigns, thinking is suspected and obnoxious. Thinking is being in trouble.
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16 p 141, underlined
Thinking […] is not aimless, random, miscellaneous, but purposeful, specific and limited by the character of the trouble undergone. And now what is your trouble?” 17 p 144
||Dewey describes the thought and action of a man who sees an automobile bearing down on him.|| This is good if translated into behaviourist terms. Thought is a bodily adjustment. 18 p 145, marked
||Dewey describes the tentative nature of conclusions based on untested logic.|| They are to be accepted as bases of actions which test them, not as finalities. To perceive this fact is to abolish rigid dogmas from the world. “Truths” = creeds. 19 p 158, top
[Santayana, in his fashion, paraphrases Dewey:]
The true is the useful for describing the fact truly! 20 p 169, top
Tis trouble makes the world go round The hare is swift because the hound Pursues her: freedom is—to be unbound. And freedom’s lost, if ever found. 21 p 169, underlined and marked Z
Moral goods and ends exist only when something has to be done. The fact that something has to be done proves that there are deficiencies, evils in the existent situation. [At “done”:] No notion of action. 22 p 169, underlined
[…] the good of the situation has to be discovered, projected and attained on the basis of the exact defect and trouble to be rectified. It cannot intelligently be injected into the situation from without. Yet it is the part of wisdom to compare different cases, to gather together the ills from which humanity suffers, and to generalize the corresponding goods into classes. Health, wealth, industry, temperance, amiability, courtesy, learning, esthetic capacity, initiative, courage, patience, enterprise, thoroughness and a multitude of other generalized ends are acknowledged as goods. All determination of good comes from the character of some actual evil.
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23 p 169
But the value of this systematization is intellectual or analytic. Where is human nature? Moral maxims are rules of art. Quite so. John Dewey
Experience and Nature London: 1925. Georgetown. 775 marginalia.
[Santayana annotated this volume so copiously, we may readily deduce, for many reasons. He was reviewing it: “Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics” ( Journal of Philosophy 22 [1925]: 673–88), a cogent essay which is damning but polite, and all the more damning for being polite. The marginalia are often impolite. He expressed his antipathy to Dewey by writing at the top of the title page, “The Latest Oracle of the Zeitgeist The Metaphysics of Enterprise.” His dislike is based in his conviction of Dewey’s muddiness in thought, therefore in expression. Along the route, Santayana paraphrased a great deal, often sarcastically; himself a naturalist, he shows contempt for Dewey’s expressly American variety of naturalism, disdain for his politics and for his readings of the past. As so often is the case, Santayana’s humor and power of intellect preserve him from mere waspishness.] 1p2
||Dewey declares allegiance to the scientific method over psychologism, notes the slipperiness of the term “experience,” and tells the reader|| […] he should interpret “experience” in the sense in which he himself uses the term when he professes to be faithful to the empirical method, not in the sense in which he uses it when he implies that experience is momentary, private and psychical. Do you mean: The things that time has shown to be true about the world—the lessons of experience? e.g. that men are mortal? Or do you mean: the subjective experiences of all men as conventionally conceived to run on? E.g. the feelings of lovers? 2 p 2, underlined
We may begin with experience in gross, experience in its primary and crude forms, and by means of its distinguishing features and its distinctive trends, note something of the constitution of the world which generates and maintains it. N.B. This is assumed, is it? Animal faith is requisite to experience.
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3 p 3, top
[Reproduced in Santayana’s review.]
Cf. Sorel on the desire of James to justify all the current and approved postulates of American life.—The justification of enterprise. 4p3
The subject-matter of science, for better or worse, is at least “there;” […]. But coarse and vital experience is Protean; a thing of moods and tenses. Science is experience made articulate. 5p4
Too often, indeed, the professed empiricist only substitutes a dialectical development of some notion about experience for an analysis of experience as it is humanly lived. Romantic humanism. The novel & newspaper world. 6 p 4, underlined
||When the term “experience” is used in empiricism, the question of|| “Whose experience?” ||arises.|| The implication is that experience is not only always somebody’s, but that the peculiar nature of “somebody” infects experience so pervasively that experience is merely somebody’s and hence of nobody and nothing else. What do you imply? That it is a common experience to many people? Then you begin by trusting convention in conceiving what convention contains. 7p4
||When looking at a chair, Dewey sees only some elements that go to make up a chair.|| 8 p 5, top
[With reference to 7 p 4:]
This sounds like Strong. Is it? 9 p 5, underlined
||Such remarks about sense data prove nothing.|| But they suggest how far away from the everyday sense of experience a certain kind of philosophic discourse, although nominally experiential, has wandered. […] ||Theorizing about sense-data may be ingenious and convince the student that|| he gets nearer to the reality of experience the further away he gets from all the experience he has ever had. Cf. “religious experience” Experience = the home life of my good old days. The world we think we are living in. The
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world we thought we lived in with the good old folks at home. 10 p 6, underlined
[At top:]
Quote
[With reference to:]
[ Othello’s perception of a handkerchief ( to simple elements of color ^ ^ certain conditions of light and shapes ^ ^seen under certain angular under conditions of vision. But the actual experience ) was charged with history ^ ^ ] […]. and prophecy; full of love, jealousy and villainy, ^^ The facts included villainy. 11 p 6, underlined
The way of approach that sets out from that which is closest at hand, instead of from refined products of science no more signifies beginning with the results of psychological science than it does with those of physical science. […] It signifies beginning back of any science, with experience in its gross and macroscopic traits. Science will then be of interest as one of the phases of human experience, but intrinsically no more so than magic, myth, politics, painting, poetry and penitentiaries. [Doubly marked at “Science … experience.”] NB 12 p 8, marked
[…] experience denotes whatever is experienced, whatever is undergone and tried, and also processes of experiencing. N.B. Experience denotes its specious objects as they are believed to exist. 13 pp 8–9, underlined
||History could not be without sun, moon, and the phenomena of nature.|| These things are not just external conditions of history and experience; they are integral with them. [At top, p. 9:]
Experience goes on in nature. [In right margin:]
Hedging here. Integral because posited in it: or rather because commonsense posits them together with it. 14 p 10, marked Z at last sentence
Experience includes dreams, insanity, illness, death, labor, war, confusion, ambiguity, lies and error; […]. It includes that bent which keeps one from learning from experience as well as that skill which fastens upon its faint hints. This fact convicts upon sight every philosophy that professes to be
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empirical and yet assures us that some especial subject-matter is experience and some other not. Are all subject matters experience? Then, by definition, there is nothing else possible in the universe. 15 p 11
But as long as men prefer in philosophy, (as they so long preferred in science) to define and envisage “reality” according to esthetic, moral or logical canons, we need the notion of experience to remind us that “reality” includes whatever is denotatively found. “Reality” is a eulogistic or at least distinguishing term applied to experience and its objects. Essences, truth, & spirit are “unreal” except when and as “found”. Very well, but when unreal they still are essence, truth, & spirit. 16 p 20, top
||Dewey discusses theories of knowledge, and the relationship between presentative knowledge and sensory acquaintance.|| Being & Having is Knowing }: being dead is not “knowing” death being grieved is " grief. but it need not be knowing about grief in its extent. 17 p 21, marked
[Santayana paraphrases, in his special, often scornful language:]
Pragmatism No 1. Knowledge is knowing what to do & get. 18 p 22
Because empirical method is denotative, it is realistic in the unsophisticated sense of the word. 19 p 23
Only when vanity, prestige, and property rights are involved does the natural man tend, like Jack Horner with his plum, to employ a subjective or personal interpretation. Psicologia inglesa Perico de su gâteau una ciruela sacó el dedo se relamió y satisfecho exclamó ¡Ca, no hay chico corno
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YO!1 1
Peter picked a plum from his cake / licked his finger / And, satisfied, exclaimed / My horn is not small, not at all / Look at me!
[“Corno” may be obscene, and probably is so intended here.] 20 p 24, top
What could be more subjective than to assert that things are objective because they are thought of as objective before they are thought of as subjective? 21 p 26
The things which a man experiences come to him clothed with meanings which originate in custom and tradition. From his birth an individual sees persons about him treat things in certain ways, […]. The things are thereby invested for him with certain properties, and the investiture appears intrinsic and indissoluble. Materialism is then sure to be victorious, if experience extends, because the true occasions and organs of all beliefs are only discoverable in the material world. 22 p 28, top
Experience = non-Shelleylike contact of man with things. 23 p 31
Uses of Empiricism. 1. Historical criticism of philosophy (as if history or historical romance were not open to criticism) 2. Knowledge & science are conditioned biologically & valuable only practically. 24 p 32
3. Against favouritism among classes of things. 25 p 35
Pragmatism No 3. Bias made innocuous by being confessed. Pragmatic cure for pragmatism. 26 p 38, marked
[…] it may be asserted that the final issue of empirical method is whether the guide and standard of beliefs and conduct lies within or without the shareable situations of life. Social piety and democratic courtesy.
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27 p 38, marked
The ultimate accusation levelled against professedly non-empirical philosophies is that in casting aspersion upon the events and objects of experience, they deny the power of common life to develop its own regulative methods and to furnish from within itself adequate goals, ideals, and criteria. Thus in effect they claim a private access to truth and deprive the things of common experience of the enlightenment and guidance that philosophy might otherwise derive from them. N.B. 28 p 40, marked Z
[Dewey’s Chapter Two: “Existence as Precarious and as Stable.” Dewey quotes the anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser (probably Early Civilization: no pagination cited) approvingly.]
“Cultural reality is never wholly deterministic nor yet wholly accidental, never wholly psychological nor yet wholly objective, never wholly of yesterday nor yet wholly of today, but combines all of these in its existential reality. … A reconstructive synthesis re-establishes the synthetic unity necessarily lost in the process of analytic dismemberment.” Horrible, horrible, horrible. 29 p 41
The sacred and the accursed are potentialities of the same situation; and there is no category of things which has not embodied the sacred and accursed: persons, words, places, times, directions in space, stones, winds, animals, stars. Emersonian rhetoric. 30 p 44, top
Substance is a “datum of Experience”! The non-ego is, however, posited by the ego—and that is its sole being. 31 p 45
What has been said sounds pessimistic. But the concern is not with morals but with metaphysics, with, that is to say, the nature of the existential world in which we live. What then is physics? 32 p 51, underlined
Concerned with prudence if not with what is honorifically called wisdom, man in America naturally prizes knowledge only for the sake of its ^ upon success ^ and failure in attaining goods and avoiding evils. bearing
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33 p 52, marked Z
The love of knowledge for its own sake is an ideal of morals; it is an integral condition of the wisdom that rightly conceives and effectually pursues the good. No: that is the case with honesty or with study: the love of knowledge is an ultimate exercise of faculty, like dancing. 34 p 55, marked Z
Wisdom then consists in administration of the temporal, finite and human in its relation to the eternal and infinite, by means of dogma and cult, […]. Hostility to religion: because this is religion. 35 p 63, marked
We long, amid a troubled world, for perfect being. We forget that what gives meaning to the notion of perfection is the events that create longing, and that, apart from them, a “perfect” world would mean just an unchanging brute existential thing. Yes: but you don’t see that to be rid of life is the aim of life. Cf. Freud. 36 p 63, marked Z at final sentence
The contrast to other things of […] detachment from toil and labor in a world where most realizations have to be bought, as well as the contrast to trouble and uncertainty, give esthetic objects their peculiar traits. If all things came to us in the way our esthetic objects do, none of them would be a source of esthetic delight. N.B. No organs of experience. [ Make this the chief point of criticism ] . 37 p 64, top
Remnants of turbid Hegelian logic. 38 p 64, underlined Z and marked Z
But need and desire are exponents of natural being. They are, if we use Aristotelian phraseology, actualizations of its contingencies and incompletenesses; as such nature itself is wistful and pathetic, turbulent and passionate. Curious lapse, even in quotation, into barbaric prejudices. 39 p 65, top
This logic is all psychology, and this psychology is half physics.
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40 p 75, top
Shibboleth of “events”. What is an event in the absence of a substance, a medium, and a variety of essences shuffled in them? In so far as event means a fact including change all existence is indeed an event: but change involves substance, since one essence, in vacuo, can neither succeed nor transform another. 41 p 75
“Experience” = the world (in the sense of the world the flesh & the devil) the dream of life, the world of convention, all that a mob orator may appeal to as well established. 42 p 83
[Chapter Three: “Nature, Ends and Histories.”]
But Jesperson finds that the prosaic side of early culture was capable only “of calling forth short monosyllabic interjections; […].” damn! ? 43 p 86, marked
For knowledge is a memorandum of conditions of their [things in their immediacy] appearance, concerned, that is, with sequences, coexistences, relations. Immediate things may be pointed to by words, but not described or defined. Substances & existences & events are named, not intuited: intent dominates, but of course an intuition exists, of the nature of feeling, else intent could have no term or direction. 44 p 88
Objects are certainly none the worse for having wonder and admiration for their inspiration and art for their medium. Patronising God. 45 p 89, underlined and marked Z
Imagination is primarily dramatic, rather than lyric, whether it takes the form of the play enacted on the stage, of the told story or silent soliloquy. Have you been reading Soliloquies in England? 46 p 90, underlined Z
Form was the first and last word of philosophy because it had been that of art; […]. It was the ideal of Lycurgus long before there was any Greek art to speak of.
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47 p 93, marked Z
[…] Greek thinkers were fortunate to find ready-made to hand and eye a realm of esthetic objects with traits of order and proportion, form and finality. No. They were civilized men. 48 p 97, top
||Dewey’s discussion of “ends.”|| N.B. Every intuition of essence is an end in nature, and a terminal phase in which values are realised. 49 pp 99–l00
||Causality as sequential, versus the mechanists’ causality in which a first term has a generative force transmitted to its successor.|| 50 p 100, marked
Both isolate an event from the history in which it belongs and in which it has its character. This is profoundly naturalistic because it implies a substantial process beneath all the terms which are obvious and named. 51 p 101, marked Z
There are no changes that do not enter into an affair, Res, and there is no affair that is not bounded and thereby marked off as a state or condition. This is an instance of Dewey’s fundamental obscurity. It is a sort of objective idealism imposed on common sense. 52 p 102, marked
A natural end which occurs without the intervention of human art is a terminus, a de facto boundary, but it is not entitled to any such honorific status of completions and realizations as classic metaphysics assigned them. Man at the age of forty is not the aim of nature. 53 pp 109–10, underlined and marked
||Dewey discusses the tendency to see superior reality in causes, and to see times past as good times.|| Since existence is historic it can be known or understood only as each portion is distinguished and related. For knowledge “cause” and “effect” alike have a partial and truncated being. It is as much a part of the real being of atoms that they give rise in time, under increasing complication of relationships, to qualities of blue and sweet, pain and beauty, as that they have at a cross-section of time extension, mass, or weight. [At “the real being”:] In the realm of truth. Cf. Hegel [Doubly marked from “in time” to end of paragraph.] N.B.
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54 p 113, top
Definition of “consciousness”: The collectivity of immediate qualities. 55 p 113, underlined and marked Z
[…] discovery of the indifference of natural energies to the production of good and bad endings, and the discovery of the over lapping [sic ] and intermixture of processes leading to different outcomes, so completely overthrew the classic doctrine of ends, that it seemed to abolish any and every conception of natural ends. The logical result was to cut off “consciousness,” as the collectivity of immediate qualities, from nature, and to create the dualism of physical nature and mind which is the source of modern epistemological problems. Very likely in American consciousness has had this meaning. Discourse. 56 p 119
Participation in [genuine thought, not revery] has, however, been confined to a few. Since it was conceived of as an end given spontaneously or “naturally” to a few, […] it was concluded that some men are servile by nature ||and fit only to provide the needs of their betters to free them for thought.|| You forget poetry and religion, feasts & triumphs. 57 p 120, marked Z
Since nothing in nature is exclusively final, rationality is always means as well as end. The doctrine of the universality and necessity of rational ends can be validated only when those in whom the good is actualized employ it as a means to modify conditions so that others may also participate in it, and its universality exist in the course of affairs. Dewey at his worst. “means” = cause: “end” = effect: and the value of a human condition is confused with its mechanical sequels. 58 p 121
[Chapter Four: “Nature, Means and Knowledge.”]
||In Genesis, it was not pleasure in the apple of knowledge that brought about forced labor.|| The exacting conditions imposed by nature, that have to be observed in order that work be carried through to success, are the source of all noting and recording of nature’s doings. As a matter of fact love play war & religion have sharp^ useful ^ labour. ened man’s wit more than
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59 p 122, marked Z
A tool is a particular thing, but it is more than a particular thing, since it is a thing in which a connection, a sequential bond of nature is embodied. Dreadful way of writing. 60 p 125
||In ancient Greece, it was the artisans, the farmers, navigators and builders who|| supplied the pattern of logical and metaphysical subordination of change to directly possessed and enjoyed fulfillments. How little people understand Greek life! They forget love and athletics and war. 61 p 125
While thinkers condemned the industrial class and despised labor, they borrowed from them the facts and the conceptions that gave form and substance to their own theories. ? Nature is more purposive than art. 62 p 126, underlined
By the days of the Sophists and their great Athenian successors there is marked change in mood. The conditions then existed that have occasioned the myth of Greek serenity. No: that is tragic. What you have in mind is only Greek shrewdness or impudence, like that of the Jews now. 63 p 128, underlined Z and marked Z
An intellectual sign denotes that a thing is not taken immediately but is referred to something that may come in consequence of it. Intellectual meanings may themselves be appropriated, enjoyed and appreciated; but the character of intellectual meaning is instrumental. ill expressed: that which the meaning indicates is instrumental. 64 p 135
The notion of knowledge as immediate possession of Being was retained when knowing as an actual affair radically altered. Even when science had come to include a method of experimental search and finding, it was still defined as insight into, grasp of, real being as such, in comparison with which other modes of experience are imperfect, confused and perverted. became science i.e. animal faith elaborately distributed.
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65 p 135
Hence a serious problem. If the proper object of science is a mathematico-mechanical world […] and if the object of science defines the true and perfect reality (as the perpetuation of the classic tradition asserted), then how can the objects of love, appreciation—whether sensory or ideal—and devotion be included within true reality? This “problem” remains, because people want God to be dynamic. 66 p 136, top
Ends are dependent instead of creative: voilà! 67 p 139, underlined
[…] we […] recognize that it is only with respect to the function of instituting connection that the objects of physics can be said to be more “real.” In the total situation in which they function, they are means to weaving together otherwise disconnected beginnings and endings into a consecutive history. Contrast this with having supplied e.g. a drunkard instituted the connection between drink & delirium and an innocent law-abiding youth, drinking down a glass of gin thinking it is water has the connection supplied to him. 68 p 141
Burlesque of Hegelianism. 69 p 145, top
Fallacy: { The objects of sense = terms of sense '' '' '' science = '' '' science whereby |language is| substituted for facts. |descriptions are| 70 p 147
||Dewey discusses his belief that efforts at “scientific” history lead to historicism.|| It is no wonder that Historismus has become the preoccupying problem of a whole school of thinkers, many of whom now hold that the only attitude which can be taken toward historic situations and characters is non-intellectual, being esthetic appreciation, or sympathetic artistic rehabilitation. [At top:]
Dewey: While intuition is not knowledge, the objects of intuition exist, but the objects of knowledge do not, being only abstracted elements or relations in the objects intuited.
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71 p 149, underlined Z
||Modern dualistic epistemology and its rival, idealistic, representational theories|| have a single origin in the dogma which denies temporal quality to reality as such. Who does? Existence (which is what Americans mean by reality) is ipso facto in flux. 72 p 150, top
False historismus. […] since in olden time the practice of the arts was largely routine, fixed by custom and ready-made patterns, ||the necessity for experiment would have been essential|| if the occurrence of ends was to be a real fulfillment […]. [Marked at “olden time.”] Happy days 73 p 152, underlined
In modern science, learning is finding out what nobody has previously known. It is a transaction in which nature is teacher, and in which the teacher comes to knowledge and truth only through the learning of the inquiring student. Very good: but you were on the point of saying: where nature is constructed. 74 p 155
[Santayana paraphrases Dewey:]
All early beliefs are wrong: all later ones are hypotheses to be corrected: the experiments, then, would seem to be the only points of contact with real truth. They, as least, are as they seem. 75 p 156, marked
||Dewey’s question: what is discovery in science?|| That there is existence antecedent to search and discovery is of course admitted; but it is denied that as such, as other than the conclusion of the historical event of inquiry in its connection with other histories, it is already the object of knowledge. N.B. Who says that? 76 p 159
Implications of instrumental science. 1. There are culminations in events. 2. Events are evolving: they may be turned to use. 3. There is a nature that makes art possible: but it is only an instrument. This seems to contradict the admission on p. 156
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77 p 160, marked
||Concerning hypothesis and experimentation:|| The incomplete and uncertain gives point and application to ascertainment of regular relations and orders. These relations in themselves are hypothetical, and when isolated from application are subject-matter of mathematics (in a non-existential sense). Hence the ultimate objects of science are guided processes of change. N.B. 78 p 161
Sometimes the use of the word “truth” is confined to designating a logical property of propositions; but if we extend its significance to designate character of existential reference, this is the meaning of truth: processes of change so directed that they achieve an intended consummation. […] The instrumental objects of science are completely themselves only as they direct the changes of nature toward a fulfilling object. Thus it may be said intelligibly and not as mere tautology that the end of science is knowledge, implying that knowledge is more than science, being its fruit. i.e. art. ^ ^ “Truth” = skill: i.e. a “true” method of achieving an intended object: cf. the true road, the true way. “The way, the truth, & the life.” Art might say so according to Dewey. 79 p 163, underlined
“Pure” science is of necessity relational and abstract: it fulfills its meaning and gains full truth when included within a course of concrete events. i.e. becomes a means of understanding something else. 80 p 163
||Science enables man to be seen within nature,|| and not as a supernatural extrapolation. Man is not the spirit in man. 81 p 164
Pure speculation may be allowed provisionally. 82 p 165, marked Z
||Pure science has been perverted for private (upper class) privilege and gain. It has also|| established another class-interest, that of intellectualists and aloof specialists. And it is of the nature of any class-interest to generate and confirm other class-interests, since division and isolation in a world of continuities are always reciprocal. Hail, thou divine average!
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83 p 166, top
[Chapter Five: “Nature, Communication and Meaning.”] [An example of Santayana’s moving by association far from his text to refine and re-phrase his own thought.]
Intuition is not knowledge, because not transitive: the essence present is non-existent, in its own medium, & only ^ ^ the fact of its presence exists in the unpresented medium of nature and its history. Intuition is an articulate feeling: and every feeling, if actual, is an intution of some sort of essence. 84 p 167
Where communication exists, things in acquiring meaning, thereby acquire representatives, surrogates, signs and implicates, which are infinitely more amenable to management, more permanent and more accommodating, than events in their first estate. Transcendental rhetoric in the place of a naturalistic account of signs, names, etc. 85 p 167, marked Z
Even the dumb pang of an ache achieves a significant existence when it can be designated and descanted upon; it ceases to be merely oppressive and becomes important; it gains importance, because it becomes representative; it has the dignity of an office. oh, rot. 86 pp 169–70, underlined Z and marked Z
||One condition of psychic events is language. Perhaps Hume’s “ideas” in flux during introspection|| were a succession of words silently uttered. Primary to these events there was, of course, a substratum of organic psycho-physical actions. But what made the latter identifiable objects, events with a perceptible character, was their concretion in discourse. If identification means naming by a sound, it is speech, naming by an essence, it is perception. 87 p 170, marked
[…] soliloquy is the product and reflex of converse with others; social communication not an effect of soliloquy. If we had not talked with others and they with us, we should never talk to and with ourselves. x ? [At top:]
^
^
x True of old words, of course: but not of their use ^ ^ because words are spontaneous & apply to any occasion.
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88 p 172
[Dewey’s] religious Passion for ambiguity & equivocation. 89 p 173
||Failure in the modern mind to see that the world of inner experience requires language extended by society, hence solipsism and egotism in modern thought.|| [At top:]
lf the modern mind is like this, what an odious and sickening thing it is, a sort of merciless idiotic irony—not the mind of a race living under a blue sky, but of some neuresthenic [sic] squirrel caged in a telephone exchange or in a mad-house. 90 p 174, underlined
||Language as release of energies.|| Natural events become messages to be enjoyed and administered, precisely as are song, fiction, oratory, the giving of advice and instruction. Thus events come to possess characters; they are demarcated and noted. N.B. Had they no characters? He means, false characters are imputed to them: they become themes for myth or rhetoric. 91 p 182
Things by behaving nicely towards one another prove that they are moral things. 92 p 182, underlined and marked Z
What a physical event immediately is, i.e. in itself and what it can do ^ ^ But when an event or its relationship are distinct and incommensurable. has meaning, its potential consequences become its integral and funded feature. i.e. in that capacity it is essentially that function. When the mercury in the thermometer sinks to zero, that relation to great cold is the essence of that fact. The thermometer is essentially a thermometer, not glass or mercury. 93 p 204, underlined
The saying of Matthew Arnold that poetry is a criticism of life […]. [Santayana corrects Dewey’s slip with:] literature 94 p 205
Because of its characteristic agency and finality [through language], communication and its congenial objects are objects ultimately worthy of awe, admiration, and loyal appreciation.
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How about the companionship of nature, or of a dog or horse? How about a mother & child? 95 p 205, marked
When the instrumental and final functions of communication live together in experience, there exists an intelligence which is the method and reward of the common life, and a society worthy to command affection, admiration, and loyalty. N.B. Dewey’s enthusiasm for America 96 p 208, top
[Chapter Six: “Nature, Mind and the Subject.”]
“Situation” is not now the central word, but “event”. This is better, in as much as it is a more concentrated field that is designated, but it is the same sort of field, the same level of being: namely a sort of natural landscape & action scene ^ ^ hypostatised. 97 p 210, top
infusion, fusion, & confusion 98 p 217, top
Ask: Granting “objectivism,” does Dewey describe the movement of affairs correctly? Answer, No: because he forgets the concentration of all moral & intellectual movements in the Psyche, thro’ which all the threads pass in & out. 99 p 217
||Dewey notes differences in political theory between classic and modern explanations.|| His chief defect is historical impressionism: the detail of facts is represented by a string of vague epithets expressing various specious totalities or contrasts, but no real threads are traced, no actual steps noticed in their local personal locus: so that the individual “psychic” character of them is ^ this goes^the ignoring of specious units, i.e. obscured. With of experience as it really is experienced, not talked about. 100 p 219, underlined and marked Z
But the whole history of science, art and morals proves that the “ mind ” that appears in individuals is not “ as such ” individual ^“^ mind^ ”^ . ^^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ Quote
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N.B. he means an individual doctrine or view. In new ^ ^ persons old ideas reappear indefinitely. 101 p 220
I begin to be able to follow this language. This is all right, as it is meant. It means that new ideas, through their organs in individuals or their works, initiate changes, changes which they had prophesied more or less pertinently, being |premonitions | of just these new habits. |growing pains | 102 p 221, top
People whose thinking is the strain of not being able to think = subjectivists acc. to Dewey. Cf. Le Penseur of Rodin. 103 p 226, top
Thought not seated in animals but diffused over nature like varnish over a picture. 104 p 234, top
[Throughout the volume, Santayana objects to Dewey’s use, or improper use, of the term “essence”: here he provides a constructive distinction.]
Essences hypostatised = events, and thoughts unclaimed but supposed to be extant, like unseen colours. The realm of truth is this realm of unclaimed thoughts. 105 p 236, underlined and marked Z
Capacity to distinguish between the sun and moon of science and these same things as they figure in myth and cult depends upon capacity to distinguish different attitudes and dispositions of the subject; the heroes of legend and poetry are discriminated from historic characters when memory, imagination and idealizing emotion are taken into the reckoning. Note that this is the distinction made, not the difference. 106 p 238, underlined
||Knowledge of experienced objects is incomplete without inclusion of the organic conditions involved.|| Knowledge of the latter may account for a happening in the abstract but not for the concrete or experienced happening. Natural fact. appearance 107 p 238, marked Z
The trouble lies in the inadequacy of our present psychological knowledge. And it is probably this deficiency, which renders such psychological knowledge as we possess unavailable for technological control, which,
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joined to spontaneous interest in “inner” life, has set off psychological subject-matter as a separate world of existence, […]. No: this is why the physiological basis has been ignored & covered with terms of discourse. But discourse will always remain a separate realm. N.B. behaviourism is the inevitable outcome of this. 108 p 241
The objection to dualism is not just that it is a dualism, but that it forces upon us antithetical, non-convertible principles of formulation and interpretation. Why is this wrong? 109 p 242, marked
Only when obstacles are treated as challenges to remaking of personal desire and thought, so that the latter integrate with the movement of nature and by participation direct its consequences, are opposition and duality rightly understood. This integration can only be of the physical energies of man: his spirit may be sympathetic or enslaved to those ambitions, but cannot be integrated with them otherwise than morally, because it is moral in essence. 110 pp 242–43
The human individual in his opacity of bias is in so far doomed to a blind solitariness. He hugs himself in his isolation and fights against disclosure, the give and take of communication, […]. It may lead to restless insatiable throwing of the self into every opportunity of external business and dissipation, in order to escape from it. Cf. “Society & Solitude”.1 1
R. W. Emerson’s essay in Society and Solitude (1870).
111 p 248
[Chapter Seven: “Nature, Life and Body-Mind.”]
A series of cultural experiences exhibits a series of diverging conceptions of the relation of mind to nature in general and to the organic body in particular. This is a Phaenomenologie des Geistes—with the Geist thoroughly submerged in events & the “subjective” factors of experience.1 1
The reference, of course, is to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (1807).
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112 pp 250–51
||Dewey cites Aristotelean entelechy and Mediaeval lack of concern over the problem of mind and body. But when the moral and religious|| associations of spirit, soul, and body persisted in full vigor, while the classic metaphysics of the potential and actual fell into disrepute, the full burden of the question […] was concentrated in the particular problem of the relation of the body and the soul. All a question of Zeitgeist and not of truth. 113 p 252, marked
||The conceptions of mind-body in Hobbes, Descartes, Bergson; occasionalism, parallelism, pan-psychic idealism, epi-phenomenalism|| […] have primarily nothing to do with mind-body; they have to do with underlying metaphysical issues:—the denial of quality in general to natural events; the ignoring in particular of temporal quality and the dogma of the superior reality of “causes.” N.B. Sources of non-Deweyism. 114 p 257
Comfort or discomfort, fatigue or exhilaration, implicitly sum up a history, and thereby unwittingly provide a means whereby, (when other conditions become present) the past can be unravelled and made explicit. “Feelings” in their behaviourist substance. 115 p 258, marked
||Animals, complex and active, have feelings but do not know it.|| Activity is psycho-physical, but not “mental,” that is, not aware of meanings. Cf. Strong.1 1 Charles Augustus Strong did not publish Essays on the Natural Origin of the Mind until 1930, but Santayana had discussed Strong’s theories with him repeatedly during the two friendly enemies’ long association.
116 p 258, underlined
Without language, the qualities of organic action that are the substance ^ only potenof feelings are pains, pleasures, odors, colors, noises, tones, ^ tially proleptically. All this psychological language is “proleptical”. 117 p 259, marked
The notion that sensory affections discriminate and identify themselves, apart from discourse, as being colors and sounds, etc., and thus ipso facto constitute certain elementary modes of knowledge, even though it be only knowledge of their own existence, is inherently so absurd that it would never have occurred to any one to entertain it, were it not for certain pre-
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conceptions about mind and knowledge. Sentiency in itself is anoetic; it exists as any immediate quality exists, but nevertheless it is an indispensable means of any noetic function. Perception is behaviour: and intuition is speech. Strong. 118 p 261, marked
The distinction between physical, psycho-physical, and mental is thus one of levels of increasing complexity and intimacy of interaction among natural events. Pure behaviourism reasserted. 119 pp 262–63, marked
Control of the occurrence of the complex depends upon its analysis into the more elementary; the dependence of life, sentiency and mind upon “matter” is thus practical or instrumental. But matter does “control” the whole business. 120 p 267, top
Important comment Quote [In right margin:]
Behaviourism re-instated. But in this account the element in the field of experience has disappeared: it is fetched again from that source, and said to be “acquired by the field conceived behaviouristically. [sic] “Feelings” = qualities revealed by feeling, their specious ^ essences, not their “own spiritual actualities. [sic] ^ 121 pp 274–75, marked Z
||Is childhood mere preparation for adulthood? Or is adulthood a proof of mechanical influences to which the child was subjected?|| […] the notion of growth makes it easy, I think, to detect the fallacy residing in both views: namely, the breaking up of a continuity of historical change into two separate parts, together with the necessity which follows from the breaking-in-two for some device by which to bring them together again. Final try, or presupposition, of the realm of truth, in which there are pictures & no problems or “events”. 122 p 275, underlined
The reality is the growth-process itself; childhood and adulthood are phases of a continuity, […]. The real existence is the history in its entirety, the history as just what it is. The operations of splitting it up into two parts and then having to unite them again by appeal to causative power are equally arbitrary and gratuitous.
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N.B. Historismus & “Events” are incompatible, because an “Event” has increment, not compatible with “position” in history. 123 p 279, underlined and marked
||Lower organisms lack distance receptors; higher forms have them.|| What is done in response to things nearby is so tied to what is done in response to what is far away, that a higher organism acts with reference to a spread-out environment as a single situation. N.B. Definition of “situation”: it is prior, in substance, to its unity as “situation” for an observer or actor, who is the empirical centre of experience. 124 p 284, top
To create nature out of scientific images and terms is to rescind animal faith and therefore the whole object & honesty modesty of science: it is scientific scholasticism. It is metaphysics. 125 p 288, underlined and marked
The ownership of meanings or mind thus vests in nature; meanings are meanings of. To identify mind with essence is superstition on p. 262. 126 p 293
[…] it may be asserted that “soul” when freed from all traces of traditional materialistic animism denotes the qualities of psycho-physical activities as far as these are organized into unity. Some bodies have souls preeminently as some conspicuously have fragrance, color, and solidity. “Confessions of a Behaviourist Lover”. The soulful lady opens liquid eyes, She strains, she clings, she rapturously sighs, But if she says she feels or thinks, She lies. 127 p 295, marked
To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. Really? 128 p 302, top
[Chapter Eight: “Existence, Ideas and Consciousness.”]
Worship of the melting-pot.
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129 p 302, marked
||Civilized psycho-physical man, living in artificial conditions, is threatened by|| habits of learned ignorance or systematized ignorings of concrete relationships; organized fanaticisms; dogmatic traditions which socially are harshly intolerant and which intellectually are institutionalized paranoic systems; idealizations which instead of being immediate enjoyments of meanings, cut man off from nature and his fellows. Severe blow to the Church! This is what “consciousness” must be in any case—normal madness.1 1
Cf. Santayana’s essay “Normal Madness” in Dialogues in Limbo (1926).
130 p 303, underlined and doubly marked
Mind denotes the whole system of meanings as they are embodied in the workings of organic life; consciousness in a being with language denotes awareness or perception of meanings; it is the perception of actual events, whether past, contemporary or future, in their meanings, the having of actual ideas. The greater part of mind is only implicit in any conscious act or state; the field of mind—of operative meanings—is enormously wider than that of consciousness. Mind is contextual and persistent; consciousness is focal and transitive. Mind is, so to speak if you only spoke so ^ always! structural, substantial; […]. ^ Yes. Very good. 131 p 303, underlined and marked
Mind is a constant luminosity; consciousness intermittent, a series of flashes of varying intensities. This spoils it all: unless he means stuff for light. 132 p 304, marked
Immediately, every perceptual awareness may be termed indifferently emotion, sensation, thought, desire: not that it is immediately any one of these things, or all of them combined, […]. Interesting assertion. Intuition has for its common object pure Being, save as this is qualified by discrimination or intent. 133 p 312
The immediately precarious, the point of greatest immediate need, defines the apex of consciousness, its intense or focal mode. And this is the point of re-direction, of re-adaptation, re-organization. Hence the aptness of James’s comparison of the course of consciousness to a stream, in spite of its intermittent character—a fact empirically recognized in his intimation of its rhythmic waxings and wanings—; of his insistence that it is only ^ ^
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an object, not a concrete consciousness, which is had twice, or which remains the same; […]. Literary psychology. 134 p 314, top
Forgets entelechies
This point must be mentioned.
[As indeed it was in Santayana’s review of the book.] 135 p 320, top
Meanings of events = appearances of substances 136 p 320
Ghosts, centaurs, tribal gods, Helen of Troy and Ophelia of Denmark are as much the meanings of events as are flesh and blood, horses, Florence Nightingale and Madam Curie. Darling you are the prettiest meaning of the softest event in the world! 137 p 328–29, top
Dewey has a way of shifting the sense of a figurative or technical term by following out some synonym of it in circular parlance. So recognition is criticised for not squaring with “acknowledgement”, & “acquaintance” for not squaring with “familiarity”. 138 p 329, marked Z
To be acquainted with anything is to have the kind of expectancy of its consequences which constitutes an immediate readiness to act, an adequate preparatory adjustment to whatever the thing in question may do. This is perverse. 139 p 340
Intuition in literary psychology is deputed to yield actual fact. But nothing given exists. Dewey is not an empiricist, but an experimentalist with a transcendental logic or outlook. 140 p 342, underlined
[…] the objects of revery-consciousness are just as much cases of perceived meanings or ideas of events as are those of sensory perceptual consciousness. elsewhere or in the brain only: of course dreams are not intuitions without intent. They are full of Angst.
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141 p 349, top
Dewey denies the possibility of a God. 142 p 349
The anomaly apparent in the occurrence of consciousness is evidence of an anomalous phase in nature itself. Consciousness is a disease, says Unamuno.1 1
A rare reference to one of Santayana’s most noteworthy contemporaries, Miguel de Unamuno. 143 pp 352–53, underlined
[Final paragraph of Chapter Eight:]
“This,” whatever this may be, always implies a system of meanings focussed at a point of stress, uncertainty, and need of regulation. It sums up history, and at the same time opens a new page; […]. It is a fruition of what has happened and a transitive agency of what is to happen. […] Every “this” is transitive, momentarily becoming a “that.” […] The union of past and future with the present manifest in every awareness of meanings is a mystery only when consciousness is gratuiti/ously [Santayana crosses out the extra ‘i’] divided from nature, and when nature is denied temporal and historic quality. When consciousness is connected with nature, the mystery becomes a luminous revelation of the operative interpenetration in nature of the efficient and the fulfilling. Translation: An object of arrests attention when it touches ^ some interest of the psyche, by ^its own movement or by hers or by the conjunction of both. The essences displayed to sense or to imagination, and used to denote or describe that object is a are sign s of its past and future functions ^ psyche, ^ ^rather ^ in respect to the than of its proper momentary being. Were there no psyches no essences would ^ appear and were there no vicissitudes in the support ^ ^ ^ they receive from objects, no objects would ap be perceived . and no essences would appear. Intuition, though ^^ the fruition of a vital harmony, varies with the scope & perfection of this harmony: and in animal faith becomes it is an index to fortune and in animal faith becomes ^ ^ for it. ^ ^ a sign 144 p 354, marked
[Chapter Nine: “Experience, Nature and Art.”]
||To the ancient Greeks, experience was not sensa, but was|| considered to be a genuine expression of cosmic forces, not an exclusive attribute or possession of animal or of human nature.
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Experience resulted from cosmic or local forces, and revealed them: but no one could gather experience who did not have memory and intelligence. 145 p 362, marked
||Meaningless routine is not useful but harmful.|| How bold! 146 p 370
That appetite as such is blind, is notorious; it may push us into a comfortable result instead of into disaster; but we are pushed just the same. E.g. Copulating for the sake of having children & ultimately increasing the population of the New Jerusalem. 147 p 382
||Dewey discusses the phenomenon of novelty as engineering or in the fine arts.|| No capacity to think of understanding. The ideas preceding a conclusion have to be synthesised automatically: ergo, says D., the truth of the conclusion is true of the creature of this synthesis: i.e. of itself. 148 p 388, marked
In short, the history of human experience is a history of the development of arts. The history of science in its distinct emergence from religious, ceremonial and poetic arts is the record of a differentiation of arts, not a record of separation from art. Black eye for Hegel. 149 p 389, underlined
Either art is a continuation, by means of intelligent selection and arrangement, of natural tendencies of natural events; or art is a peculiar addition to nature springing from something dwelling exclusively within the breast of man, […]. This is what springs from the human breast. 150 p 392, doubly marked
||A discussion of instrumental and fine art. Dewey concludes that relations between the two are|| the opposite of that intended by seclusive estheticians; namely, that fine art consciously undertaken as such is peculiarly instrumental in quality. It is a device in experimentation carried on for the sake of education. The motive is not that.
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151 p 397, underlined
[Chapter Ten: “Existence, Value and Criticism.”]
It is self-contradictory to suppose that when a fulfillment possesses immediate value, its means of attainment do not. The person to whom the cessation of a tooth-ache has value, by that very fact finds value in going to a dentist, or in whatever else is means of fulfillment. has this intrinsic charm? Says the lady-patient: How providential was that aching tooth! This handsome dentist has renewed my youth! 152 p 399, top
Do you admit that value is a fact of preference, not a detached fact? 153 p 403, top
Dewey’s dislocation of meanings proceeds from both ends: subjective terms are used objectively, objective terms with a subjective status; abstract or relative things become concrete objects; concrete objects become relative. 154 p 406, marked X
[…] since reflection is the instrumentality of securing freer and more enduring goods, reflection is a unique intrinsic good. [At top:]
Opinions reputed true enter the mind sub specie boni because men are concerned to discover the truth. Not all truth, however. 155 p 410
As to truth, then, philosophy has no pre-eminent status; it is a recipient, not a donor. No inner or reflective life, only reports. 156 p 412
Nothing but the best, the richest and fullest experience possible, is good enough for American man. ^ ^ 157 p 415, top
Extreme laxity in identifications. 158 p 421, underlined
While […] philosophy has its source not in any special impulse or staked-off section of experience, but in the entire human predicament, this human situation falls wholly within nature.
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Oh, no: it all rests on nature—on a small part of nature—but it looks beyond, & eludes nature tangentially just as nature eludes it longitudinally. 159 p 421, marked
The standing antitheses of philosophic thought, purpose and mechanism, subject and object, necessity and freedom, mind and body, individual and general, are all of them attempts to formulate the fact that nature induces and partially sustains meanings and goods, and at critical junctures withdraws assistance and flouts its own creatures. Now experience has become tragic it is fortune. 160 p 430
As inquiries which aim at knowledge start from pre-existent beliefs, so esthetic and moral criticism start from antecedent natural goods of contemplative enjoyment and social intercourse. In designing a wall-paper you begin by considering what people want. 161 p 435, underlined
This is the meaning of “reason” which is alleged to envisage reality sub specie eternatatis.1 Spelled as it is well as it is understood. ^ ^ 1 Sub specie aeternitatis; in the aspect of eternity.
162 p 436
These eternal objects abstracted from the course of events, although labeled Reality, in opposition to Appearance, are in truth but the idlest and most evanescent of appearances, born of personal craving and shaped by private fantasy. Fie on Platonic Ideas! John Dewey
The Quest for Certainty (The Gifford Lectures, 1929.) London: 1930. Columbia. 250 marginalia.
[A great many of the marginalia here repeat, often word-for-word, the marginalia in Experience and Nature.] 1 p 33, underlined
The idea that the stable and expanding institution of all things ( that ^ ^real make life worth while ) throughout all human relationships is the ^^
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object of all intelligent conduct is depressed from view by the current conception of morals as a special kind of action […]. When is life worth while? 2 p 40
||Purely intellectual matter is hard to conceive; thus the oriental potentate who would not go to a horse-race in the theory that he already knew that one horse can run faster than another.|| But also in the story nothing depended from it; no curiosity was aroused; no effort was put forth to satisfy the uncertainty. Games and races show that an indifferent issue may become interesting, & so not indifferent emotionally, even if still indifferent practically. Betting adds the practical interest by contagion. The precipitation of thought is passionate in itself. 3 p 47, underlined
[…] dogmas which have appealed not in vain to philosophy for support, have naturally bred, in the face of the changed character of science, confusion, irresolution and numbness of will. It is the fault of Christianity, if now Christians are confused. 4 p 71, underlined
Why has modern philosophy contributed so little to bring about an integration between what we know about the world and the intelligent direction of what we do? You forget Voltaire & Rousseau, Locke & Nietzsche.1 1
This is Santayana’s only good word for Rousseau.
5 p 77, underlined
[…] if it can be shown that overtly executed operations of interaction are requisite to obtain the knowledge called scientific, the chief fortress of the classic philosophical tradition crumbles […]. ? Spiritual and poetic feeling is not primarily interested in facts.? 6 p 79, top
Industrialism good Capitalism, or boss-rule, bad (the drive comes from the latter, O Dewey!) 7 p 97, marked
Greek and mediaeval science formed an art of accepting things as they are enjoyed and suffered. Modern experimental science is an art of control.
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Mustn’t you still accept both the principles of control & the results of action? 8 p 98, underlined
There is nothing which a scientific mind would more regret than reaching a condition in which there were no more problems. That state would be the death of science, not its perfected life. “Science” is a sport or mania. 9 p 175
[Santayana scornfully summarizes:]
All thinking is projecting—making projects. 10 p 195–96, marked
||The notion of relativity in science undermines|| the metaphysics of existence as something fixed and therefore capable of literally exact mathematical description and prediction […]. Knowing is, for philosophical theory, a case of specially directed activity instead of something isolated from practice. The quest for certainty by means of exact possession in mind of immutable reality is exchanged for search for security by means of active control of the changing course of events. Intelligence in operation, another name for method, becomes the thing most worth winning. [From “quest for certainty” to end of quotation:]
The realm of matter alone is concerned here: yet D. is essentially a social mystic: but perhaps his society is behaviouristic. 11 p 202, underlined
The shock to the traditional notion that knowledge is perfect in the degree in which it grasps or beholds without change some thing previously complete in itself is tremendous. This is a word put in by D. invidiously: he doesn’t want to face the timelessness of the synthesis required by history. 12 p 211
||In its origins|| “science” was set apart; its findings were supposed to have a privileged relation to the real. A.D. 1880? 13 p 215
Emotions are conditioned by the indeterminateness of present situations with respect to their issue […]. They involve concern, solicitude, for what the present situation may become. Emotion in the presence of a corpse is solicitude for what it may become? Or for what I may become?
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14 p 262, marked
The Aristotelean-mediaeval conviction that highest bliss is found in contemplative possession of ultimate Being presents an ideal attractive to some types of mind; it sets forth a refined sort of enjoyment. It is a doctrine congenial to minds that despair of the effort involved in creation of a better world of daily experience. It is, apart from theological attachments, a doctrine sure to recur when social conditions are so troubled as to make actual endeavour seem hopeless. [At “It is a doctrine”:]
yes 15 p 263, underlined and marked
The nature in detail of the revolution that would be wrought by carrying into the region of values the principle now embodied in scientific practice cannot be told […]. But it would surely effect a transfer of attention and energy from the subjective to the objective. Men would think of themselves as agents not as ends; ends would be found in experienced enjoyment possession of the fruits of a transforming activity. ^ Pres. Hoover: ^ Cf. roads by the 1000 miles, requiring 1000’s of autos—requiring 1000’s of men ! 16 p 277, underlined and marked
||As a result of the shift|| from knowing which makes a difference to the knower but none in the world, to knowing which is a directed change within the world, is the complete abandonment of what we may term the intellectualist fallacy. By this is meant something which may also be termed the ubiquity of knowledge as a measure of reality. The real “intellectualist fallacy”. 17 p 277, underlined
||Earlier, man was part of the world, subject to its vicissitudes, sometimes to its fortune.|| Being unable to cope with the world in which he lived, he sought some way to come to terms with the universe as a whole. Think of the conceit implied in this, and the terrible illusion. 18 pp 288–89, underlined
||Religious proofs depend upon the notion of antecedent existence of what is excellent and worthy. If it were not for that, religion would not conflict with science.|| Whatever is discovered about actual existence would modify the content of human beliefs about ends, purposes and goods. But it would and could not touch the fact that we are capable of directing our affection and loyalty to the possibilities resident in the actualities discovered.
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Is the object of affection a possibility? A lady-love is the possibility of f_____g. 19 p 290, underlined
The philosophy which holds that the realm of essence subsists as an independent realm of Being also emphasizes that this is a realm of possibilities; it offers this realm as the true object of religious devotion. not I. 20 p 296, underlined
||In the philosophy Dewey wants,|| its critical mind would be directed against the domination exercised by prejudice, narrow interest, routine custom and the authority which issues from institutions apart from the human ends they serve. Narrow ends are not human? The Philosophy of John Dewey
Edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp Evanston and Chicago: 1939. Texas. Fifty-nine marginalia
[Most of the marginalia duplicate Santayana’s remarks in the preceding volumes by Dewey.] 1 p 165
[Hans Reichenbach, “Dewey’s Theory of Science.”]
All Dewey’s reality is appearance. This both justifies his philosophy and nullifies it. 2 p 212, marked Z
[Arthur E. Murphy, “Epistemology and Metaphysics.”]
[…] the preliminary operation in which data are manipulated for use as evidence and the consequent operation in which the results of knowledge are used for the benefit of man’s estate, but not the central and primary operation which is the finding out, on the basis of evidence, of those reliably ascertainable conclusions which can be used in a subsequent practical reconstruction because, on their own account, they constitute knowledge of the ‘situation’ to which they refer. Gott im Himmel what a style! 3 p 217, underlined
[Murphy.]
To note […] that contingency is a pervasive trait of natural events, and to bring this fact into connection with concrete situations of life, is to provide a metaphysical basis for value judgments. Superstition of responsibility, as if virtue depended for its value on its being groundless.
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4 p 277
[Gordon W. Allport, “Individual and Social Psychology.”]
Emotional disturbance, even though it is the original incentive to thought, is at the same time the chief cause of unwarranted belief and conviction. “Nothing is so easy to fool as impulse and no one is deceived so readily as a person under strong emotion.” Anti-James pragmatism 5 p 365, marked Z
[G. R. Geiger, “Social and Political Philosophy.”]
||The experimental method may require violent measures in society, a question that involves the problem that liberalism, reflective and provisional, is likely to inhibit action.|| This is, to be sure, an overly familiar, if not a banal, complaint these days, as trite as the story about the donkey who couldn’t decide between his two bales of hay. How style sinks in the U.S. when it attempts to be simple and democratic! 6 p 527–28
[ John Dewey, “Experience, Knowledge and Value.” The response to his critics in Schilpp’s volume.]
||Dewey rejects Bertrand Russell’s view that love of truth is negated in the United States by pragmatism and commercialism.|| And I still believe that Mr. Russell’s confirmed habit of connecting the pragmatist theory of knowing with obnoxious aspects of American industrialism […] is much as if I were to link his philosophy to the interests of English landed aristocracy […]. Does Dewey think poor Bertie a landed aristocrat?1 1 Santayana’s remark takes on depth if we recall that unknown to Russell, Santayana was secretly subsidizing Russell heavily at this time to free him for philosophy.
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
Is Immortality Desirable?
Boston and New York: 1909. Georgetown. Twenty-four marginalia. 1 p 14, marked
Whatever may be the promise of life, it is, as we know it, to those who look at it fairly and straight, very terrible, unjust, and cruel. 2 pp 31–32, marked Z
The whole strength of the case for immortality, as a thing to be desired, lies in the fact that no one in this life attains his ideal. [Most of the remaining marginalia consist of “marked Z.” Santayana was not at all impressed by the argument.]
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Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
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Appearances: Being Notes of Travel
London and Toronto: 1914. Property of the Sastre family, Madrid. Six marginalia. 1 p 61, marked
There he was, complete American; and, I fear I must add, boring as only Americans can bore. 2 p 113, marked
[“A ‘No’ Dance.”]
I have lost to a great extent that power of prolonging an emotion which seems to be the secret of Eastern art. Newton Dillaway
Prophet of America: Emerson and the Problems of To-day Boston: 1936. Waterloo. Forty-nine marginalia.
[Marginalia to page 143. The book runs to 413 pages, total.] 1p5
||On the reconciliation of differences among various States of the union.|| Pacifism apparently identified with the good. 2p7
||Pessimists despair of all humanity, but Emerson saw in each generation men so ravished by a mystical vision that they would abandon themselves to it.|| Such men will provide the Light by which humanity will pull itself a little farther out of the mire of egotism humanity . ^ ^ The author doesn’t understand Emerson. 3 p 121, marked
Mozoomdar claimed that Emerson was a ‘geographical mistake,’ that he should have been born in India. Emerson’s Orientalism has been made too much of, in my opinion, and the truth is that nothing was closer to his heart than the welfare of his own country. The spiritual element has no nationality or date. Emerson is positively un-American in having it, except, that American Unitarianism acted as a vacuum in which, as in the wilderness, spirit could grow. 4 p 139
There must have been something loose in E. when his admirers are fools.
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5 p 141, underlined
If individual rights, individual conscience, and individual religion had not emerged from the unmade masses in the form of men like Jesus, Buddha, Socrates, we would perhaps still be wearing skins and throwing spears. Note the purpose of Jesus, Emerson, & Co. Norman Douglas
South Wind New York: 1929. Waterloo. No marginalia.
C[urt] J[ohn] Ducasse
Nature, Mind, and Death LaSalle, Illinois: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia.
C. J. Ducasse
“On the Attributes of Material Things”
Reprinted from The Journal of Philosophy 31 (1 February 1934): 57–72. Texas. Fourteen marginalia. 1 p 57, marked
[…] a Material Thing is nothing more nor less than a set of properties […] possessed by a region of space between certain times, or, if we prefer, a region of space possessing between certain times a set of properties. The ambiguity recurs between pictorial and physical space: so with time. That a thing the properties of a part of physical space at a certain physical time is tautological: substitute sentimental time and pictorial space and the definition becomes an error. 2 p 68
[…] “I have a sensation of green,” means nothing whatever other than “My feeling at this moment is of the sort called ‘green’.” Yes: but “green” is the “content” of that feeling, not the predicate of it. 3 p 68
||Concerning the waltzing of a waltz.|| Can you waltz these movements again? Can you repeat them? Yes and no. There is still an ambiguity until essence is distinguished from instance.
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Owen Francis Dudley
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Will Men Be Like Gods?
London and New York: 1924. Georgetown. Two marginalia. [I don’t believe the marginalia is Santayana’s.]
Daphne du Maurier
Hungry Hill New York: 1943. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Robert Dunn
Horizon Fever New York: 1936. Georgetown. Four marginalia.
1 p 56, marked Z
And toward such a blight the man’s tone condescended—no trait in the run of mushers. It should not be integral with this realm. Yet it rated heed if one’s quest would be entire. How much of it was true, Rupert wondered with incredulity, how many tragedies were bunkum? Do people understand this language? Ralph Cheever Dunning
Rococo: a poem Paris: 1926. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Will[iam] [ James] Durant The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers New York: 1926. Waterloo. Forty-nine marginalia. 1 p 226
||Congreve had no pedigree and asked none of others.|| […] when Congreve spoke of his own plays as trifles, and desired to be considered rather a gentleman of leisure than an author, Voltaire said to him sharply, “If you had had the misfortune to be only a gentleman like any other, I should never have come to see you.” Here is the pedigree of U.S.A. 2 p 230, marked
It was now that [Voltaire] began to write those delightful romances—Zadig, Candide, Micromégas, L’Ingénu, Le Monde comme il va, etc.—which give the Voltairean spirit in purer form than anything else in his ninety-nine volumes. They are not novels, but humoresque-picaresque novelettes; the
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heroes are not persons but ideas, the villains are superstitions, and the events are thoughts. Some are mere fragments, like L’Ingénu, which is Rousseau before Jean Jacques. Romances. 3 p 433
[Herbert Spencer] began to realize that religious beliefs and political move-
ments are built upon needs and impulses beyond the reach of intellectual attack; and he reconciled himself to seeing the world roll on without heeding the heavy books he hurled in its direction. [Santayana marks a large check mark.] 4 p 534, marked
[Durant quotes from Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith (“Preface,” vi–vii).]
“I do not ask anyone to think in my terms if he prefers others. Let him clean better, if he can, the windows of his soul, that the variety and beauty of the prospect may spread more brightly before him.” 5 p 577, marked
[The final sentence, concerning the United States:]
When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance. Will[iam] [ James] Durant
The Story of Philosophy
New York: 1926. [A second copy.] Waterloo. Four marginalia. 1 p 532, underlined
[Concerning Santayana:]
He was not quite content with the country of his choice; his soul, softened with much learning, and sensitive as a poet’s soul must be (for he was a poet first, and philosopher afterward), suffered from the noisy haste of American city-life; instinctively he shrank back to Boston, as if to be as near to Europe as he could; […]. [At “choice”:] ? [At “back”:] ? 2 p 533, underlined
[On The Life of Reason:]
Here was the soul of a Spanish grandee grafted upon the stock of a gentle Emerson; a refined mixture of Mediterranean aristocracy with New England individualism; […]. [At “grafted”:] ?
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Jacques Duron
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La Pensée de George Santayana: Santayana en Amérique Paris: 1950. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[Santayana wrote concerning Duron: “I thoroughly dislike him […] but he has me for the subject of his Doctor’s thèse, which is an honour, and he went to the trouble and expense of coming to Glion to see me […] he has not replied to my last letter. Perhaps he is mortally offended and we may never hear from him again. Hurrah!” ( John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography, 341.)
Louis Dyer
Studies of the Gods in Greece London: 1891. Georgetown. No marginalia.
[Inscribed, “George Santayana Cambridge 1891.”]
Max [Forrester] Eastman
The Enjoyment of Poetry with Anthology for Enjoyment of Poetry New York: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Charles Edward Eaton
The Shadow of the Swimmer New York: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Arthur Stanley Eddington
The Nature of the Physical World
Cambridge, England: (1928) 1929. Georgetown. 225 marginalia. 1 p xiii, marked
[Introduction. Santayana objects to Eddington’s use of “influences” in fields of force, but approves “measures.”]
Influences on what? On one another? On your feelings? In either case, influence implies change, and this implies a definite condition: so that your true units are not influences. This is better & different. Your measures & your categories are all mere terms, not substances. But they describe substance. 2 p xv, marked
It is true that the whole scientific inquiry starts from the familiar world and in the end it must return to the familiar world; but the part of the journey over which the physicist has charge is in foreign territory.
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Yes: but you forget that your science like causation has the same posited object for its continual theme. Otherwise it might be “science” but would not be knowledge of anything in the field of action. 3 p xvii, underlined
The frank realisation that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances. What rot! The Indians have always known it. 4 p xvii, underlined
It is difficult to school ourselves to treat the physical world as purely symbolic. Confusion (which is likely to be pervasive) of the physical world with physical theories about the world. 5 p 1, underlined
[“Relativity.”]
||It is not the arrangement of space and time of Einstein that most interests us, but|| […] the dissolution of all that we regard as most solid into tiny specks floating in void. And Lucretius? Has nobody heard of him? 6 p 32
We cannot find our velocity through the aether; we cannot say whether the aether now in this room is flowing out through the north wall or the south wall. The question would have a meaning for a material ocean, but there is no reason to expect it to have a meaning for the non-material ocean of aether. This shows what E. understands by “matter”: its parts have to have a permanent individuality. But how can the essence of one part of matter differ from that of another, in so far as both are material? [ The common essence is relativity to external things: congestion of essences.] 7 p 47, marked
||Of instants world-wide.|| A Daniel (I mean another Daniel) come to judgement.1 1
More than likely a reference to his confidant, Daniel Cory.
8 p 60, underlined
[…] mass arises from change of reckoning […]. Further evidence that this is all phenomenalism, and concerns only systems of notation.
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9 p 74, underlined
||Concerning probability and indeterminateness, and|| chance against ||an event.|| On what “laws of nature” is this probability grounded? Isn’t any form or law infinitely improbable a priori? 10 p 77, marked Z
We admit that the world contains both chance and design, or at any rate chance and the antithesis of chance. I am afraid this is unintelligible to me. 11 p 83, marked
Space is boundless by re-entrant form not by great extension. That which is is a shell floating in the infinitude of that which is not. We say with Hamlet, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space”. Quite so. 12 p 83, marked Z
But the difficulty of an infinite past is appalling. It is inconceivable that we are the heirs of an infinite time of preparation; it is not less inconceivable that there was once a moment with no moment preceding it. E. is as bad as Spencer with his “inconceivables”. All these alternatives are perfectly conceivable. And what is this nonsense about “preparation”? 13 p 99
[About “Our Dual Recognition of Time”:]
I can’t seize this notion that the direction of change is determined by the result of change, viz. less differentiation. And when change brings greater differentiation, as when buttercups and daisies appear in the grass? Does time then go backwards? 14 p 117, underlined
[On gravitation:]
The ancients believed that the earth was flat. Some: the old Xenophanes, for instance, who was an enemy of the gods and of athletics: but not so the saintly Pythagoreans, nor Plato, nor Aristotle. Dante, too knew perfectly well that the earth was a sphere, but thought it much smaller than it is.
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15 p 120, marked
Einstein’s law of gravitation asserts that the ten principal coefficients of curvature are zero in empty space. If there were no curvature, […] there would be no gravitation. Bodies would move uniformly in straight lines. If curvature were unrestricted, i.e. if all the coefficients had unpredictable values, gravitation would operate arbitrarily and without law. [From “unrestricted”:]
Hint of the meaning: space-time is “curved” when things moving deviate unaccountably from a straight path and an even rate. Is this it? [To determine the “curve” a straight space-time must be imagined beneath.] 16 p 190, underlined
Different views may be held as to how the prize-drawing is conducted on the sweepstake theory. Some hold that the lucky part of the wave-front is already marked before the atom is reached. In addition to the propagation of uniform waves the propagation of a photon or “ray of luck” is involved. This seems to me out of keeping with the general trend of the modern quantum theory; and although most authorities now take this view, which is said to be indicated definitely by certain experiments, I do not place much reliance on the stability of this opinion. “Science” is the art of guessing on the “trend” of “modern opinion”. 17 p 210, underlined
[On “The New Quantum Theory”:]
If we are to discern controlling laws of Nature not dictated by the mind it would seem necessary to escape as far as possible from the cut-and-dried framework into which the mind is so ready to force everything that it experiences. How English! He is on the point of saying that we must not impose our vocabularies on nature, and he halts at “laws”! The Pope is an impostor, but the Bible is revealed truth! 18 p 210, underlined
||Eddington describes Dirac’s mathematical explanation of quantum theory. Dirac seeks|| […] the governing laws of exact science in a non-arithmetical calculus. Here the “laws” are in their place: but science and nature seem to be identified. Quelle erreur!
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19 p 229
It is only through a quantum action that the outside world can interact with ourselves and knowledge of it can reach our minds. […] An addition to knowledge is won at the expense of an addition to ignorance. It is hard to empty the well of Truth with a leaky bucket. This is true, and as old as the hills. Knowledge is relative to the organs of knowledge: therefore never adequate to any physical object. 20 p 252, underlined
The whole subject matter of exact science consists of pointer readings and similar indications. All the terms of calculation. Bad diction is one of the chief elements in recent views: they would melt into commonplace if the authors knew how to express themselves. This is particularly true of American writers, and notably of o Dewey & C . 21 p 282, marked
However much the ramifications of the cycles may be extended by further scientific discovery, they cannot from their very nature trench on the background in which they have their being—their actuality. It is in this background, that our own mental consciousness lies; and here, if anywhere, we may find a Power greater than but akin to consciousness. It is not possible for the controlling laws of the spiritual substratum, which in so far as it is known to us in consciousness is essentially non-metrical, to be analogous to the differential and other mathematical equations of physics which are meaningless unless they are fed with metrical quantities. So that the crudest anthropomorphic image of a spiritual deity can scarcely be so wide of the truth as one conceived in terms of metrical equations. Exactly wrong. Spinoza understood that one aspect of ultimate reality or God is that it is subject to measure. Its other aspects are not more substantial but if anything less so, since the measurable is the sure. 22 p 283, underlined
The only subject presented to me for study is the content of my consciousness. Dreadful and fallacious word. The Germans invented it: Inhalt.
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23 p 303
||A new epistemological reading of a predetermined or predestined material universe (in theological parlance).|| 99 to hell, 1 to heaven every time. But this is because God predetermines it so, for his greater glory, in each particular case. 24 p 306, underlined
[…] an indeterminacy of behaviour which is part of the character of the atom. [Santayana paraphrases Eddington:]
It is very likely that no law determines the exact changes in matter: matter itself determines them spontaneously, yet presumably always in the same way under the same circumstances. Perhaps, however, exactly the same total circumstances never recur, so that matter never quite does the same thing twice. 25 p 320
||On “Science and Mysticism,” Eddington writes that he would not consider scientific and mathematical appreciation of natural phenomena to be lower than mystical writings, equal indeed to the sublimity of a sonnet of Rupert Brooke.|| This is a cue: Eddington has a very commonplace mind, subject to all the middle-class fashionable clichés. 26 p 334, marked Z
We are bound to claim for human nature that, either of itself or as inspired by a power beyond, it is capable of making legitimate judgments of significance. Otherwise we cannot even reach a physical world. What complete helplessness! Here you take back all your argument. The question really regards the object of animal faith, not your absurd “physical world”, which is mere “science”. 27 p 340
In history religious mysticism has often been associated with extravagances that cannot be approved in Great Britain . ^ ^ 28 p 341, underlined
As scientists we realise that colour is merely a question of the wave-lengths of aethereal vibrations […]. We have not yet reached the practice of the Laputans, who, “if they would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman,
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or any other animal, they describe it by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometrical terms”. ? You forget cubism. 29 p 341, marked Z
The materialist who is convinced that all phenomena arise from electrons and quanta and the like controlled by mathematical formulae, must presumably hold the belief that his wife is a rather elaborate differential equation; but he is probably tactful enough not to obtrude this opinion in domestic life. N.B. The true materialist would have no wife and would laugh at formulae. 30 p 342 top
This page, and the whole book, would seem to be written to make “science” seem ridiculous. The reason is, not that the science is not good (see Ch. 8) but that the object of all natural science—the field of action—has been lost to sight. 31 p 353, underlined
The religious reader may well be content that I have not offered him a God revealed by the quantum theory […]. But you have offered him free-will revealed by Heisenberg, ie Bohr, Born & C . Irwin Edman
Philosopher’s Quest New York: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Jonathan Edwards
Representative Selections Edited by C. H. Faust and Thomas H. Johnson New York: 1935. Waterloo. 271 marginalia.
1 p xii, top, marked
[Introduction:]
Yet New England theocracy was advanced far beyond mere animism, and it was well aware that it could thrive at its best only when the laity as well as the clergy were educated and enlightened. Education requisite [ for aritificial religion]. 2 p xxxii, top
[On Edwards’s A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections:]
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“Affections” important because they lead to action. Foretaste of pragmatism. But see below 3 p xxxii, marked
||Edwards’s argument that there can be no genuine religion without the affections, which are the basis of action.|| And since love is the chief of the affections, “the essence of all true religion lies in holy love.” But is the value of love that it leads to action? 4 p xlvii, top
The will = the affections of the soul. (If soul = psyche this is perfect.) 5 p xlvii, doubly marked
It was Edwards’s eagerness to preclude the possibility of [freedom as an] answer to the argument for necessity that led him to declare over and over again that “the affections of the soul are not properly distinguished from the will.” Good boy. 6 p lxxxv, top
||God’s benevolence, and His great claim on our affection.|| God loves all Being. 7 p lxxxv, marked
[Edwards] thought it proper that the “Being who has the most of Being, or has the greatest share of existence, other things being equal, so far as such a Being is exhibited to our faculties or set in our view, will have the greatest share of the propensity and benevolent affection of the heart.” Numerical ethics. Touch of Americanism.
Why does God hate sin, then? Is sin destructive of Being? Cf. Rabelais 8 p lxxxvii
Hobbes, [Edwards] said, declares that men are in fact “fiercer than Bears, Wolves, and Serpents.” and less devoted than dogs (except to all persons). 9 p lxxxix, marked
[Edwards] rejected the love between men and women, the affection between parents and children, and pity—of which Cumberland, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson had made much—as evidence of natural benevolence.
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“Natural” benevolence is sentimental and partisan. Cf. communism, humanitarianism, etc. These are animal passions. Spirit is impartial. 10 pp xc–xcii
It is because men love themselves, that they love those persons that are their own, and this love is often nastiness of temper at home, and ^ only sensitiveness abroad to one’s own chattels 1 or that they are ^ nearly related to […]. 1
Here Santayana sounds an autobiographical note.
11 p 34, underlined
[“Notes on the Mind.” The perfection of entity.]
And Entity is the greatest and only good. “Entity” the good! This notion is hardly “aesthetic” since it is not selective amongst essences, unless the most complex be called the best. 12 p 35, top
Revised definition of Good Love {of Being: {of any being? 13 p 36, top
Pantheistic antinomian suggestion to worship all being. 14 p 37, marked
There are such contrarieties and jars in Being, as must necessarily produce jarring and horror in perceiving Being. Dissent implied in being, and involving, on the part of Being, hatred of such dissent from itself within itself. God hated his own sin & damns himself for it eternally. 15 p 38, marked
[Edwards’s “Resolutions.”]
5. Resolved, never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way I possibly can. N.B. 16 p 39
10. Resolved, When I feel pain, to think of the pains of Martyrdom, and of Hell. (Not those of Christ.) ^
^
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17 p 44
[Santayana paraphrases:]
This religion all self-conscious and moralistic. No direct love or enthusiasm. Watching oneself being good. 18 p 51, marked
Tuesday, Sept. 2. By a sparingness in diet, and eating as much as may be, what is light and easy of digestion, I shall doubtless be able to think more clearly, and shall gain time; 1. By lengthening out my life; 2. Shall need less time for digestion, after meals; 3. Shall be able to study more closely, without injury to my health; 4. Shall need less time for sleep; 5. Shall more seldom be troubled with the head-ache. How like Strong! 19 p 56
||Edwards describes the mysticism of Sarah Pierrepont.||1 Sarah was a little girl When I was a young lad And it melts my heart to think How sweetly she was mad. 1
Written when she was age thirteen; he married her four years later.
20 p 71, underlined
I have a much greater sense of my universal, exceeding dependence on God’s grace and strength, and mere good pleasure, of late, than I used formerly to have; and have experienced more of an abhorrence of my own righteousness. “Abhorrence of one’s own righteousness”—since this is sheer illusion: that one is “righteous”, being a divine act, just as if one were wicked. 21 p 71, underlined
||His discovery in a moment of religious ecstasy:|| I could not but say to myself, “This is my chosen light, my chosen doctrine;” and of Christ, “This is my chosen Prophet.” What an odd thing to say. 22 p 95, marked
And we are not only without any true excellency to merit, but are full of, and wholly defiled with, that which is infinitely odious. Artificial debasement, artificial exaltation: the whole imaginary and irrelevant. Perhaps the ancient Jews really were captive & delivered: but Americans?
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23 p 112, marked
[Concerning “The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners”:]
Every crime or fault deserves a greater or less punishment, in proportion as the crime itself is greater or less. […] the terribleness of the degree of punishment […] is no argument against the justice of it. Prerational morality 24 p 123
[“The Excellency of Christ.”]
Let the consideration of this wonderful meeting of diverse excellencies in Christ induce you to accept him, and close with him as your Saviour. Good business proposition. 25 p 129, underlined
[“The Christian Pilgrim. Why the Christian’s life is a journey or a pilgrimage?”]
The future world was designed to be our settled and everlasting abode. Here America comes to its own again. 26 p 129, underlined
The present state is short and transitory; but our state in the other world, is everlasting. And as we are there at first, so we must be without change. N.B. not so American after all. [ Grotesque that one part of time should determine the value of all time ] . 27 p 184, top
[“Funeral Sermon for David Brainerd.”]
I am a saint, without a taint Hurray, hurray! You know you ain’t! 28 p 185
[At the conclusion of the funeral sermon:]
Senile and foreign. 29 p 215
||God has given affections to men and made them the bases of men’s actions.|| Literary psychology with a vengeance. As if you said: the turning of the wheel steers the ship!—Yes, if someone turns the wheel, and the wheel is connected by chains with the rudder.1 So with affections governing conduct. 1 Throughout his writing, Santayana frequently uses images of ships and the sea.
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30 p 245
[Santayana’s summary:]
The spiritual life is rational. 31 p 280
[“Freedom of the Will.”]
Liberty, whatever name we call that by, is a person’s being hindered or unable to conduct as he will, or being necessitated to do otherwise. If this which I have mentioned be the meaning of the word Liberty […], then it will follow, that in propriety of speech, neither Liberty, nor its contrary, can properly be ascribed to any being or thing, but that which has such a faculty, power or property, as is called will. For that which is possessed of no such thing as will, cannot have any power or opportunity of doing according to its will, nor be necessitated to act contrary to its will, nor be restrained from acting agreeably to it. And therefore to talk of Liberty, or the contrary, as belonging to the very will itself, is not to speak good sense; […]. Verbal entities. Will = the consciousness of willing? Or the direction of conduct? 32 p 280, marked
And he that has the Liberty of doing according to his will, is the agent or doer who is possessed of the will; and not the will which he is possessed of. We say with propriety, that a bird let loose has power and Liberty to fly; but not that the bird’s power of flying has a power and Liberty of flying. To be free is the property of an agent, who is possessed of powers and faculties, as much as to be cunning, valiant, bountiful, or zealous. But these qualities are the properties of men or persons and not the properties of properties. “Will” not that which is free, but the result.1 1 See Dominations and Powers, Chapter 8, for Santayana on freedom of the will.
33 p 283, marked
||Edwards notes the|| great impropriety of will determining itself. But I shall suppose that the Arminians, when they speak of the Will’s determining itself, do by the Will mean the soul willing. The good sense of E. in these matters is in the American line, but not the matters themselves. The confused sentimentality of Wm. James is more American when speculation is in order.
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34 p 288, top
||Edwards on the place of causation in his doctrine of freedom of will.|| If “cause” includes “occasion”, evidently all new events must have a cause, since they impinge upon an existing state of things. The question is what sort of continuity there may be. 35 p 289, top
God = Being = Intuitive Data 36 p 292, marked X
The peculiar nature of that thing called volition, can do nothing, can have no influence, while it is not. And afterwards it is too late for its influence; for then the thing has made sure of existence already, without its help. [At top:]
This argument hints at the fallacy in all final causation: the idea guiding it must first arise unguided. 37 p 305, top
J. E. not only a reckless rationalist, but a fantastic dogmatist in Pauline theology. [“The Doctrine of Original Sin.”]
As it has been demonstrated, that the futurity of all future events is established by previous necessity, either natural or moral; so it is manifest that the Sovereign Creator and Disposer of the world has ordered this necessity, by ordering his own conduct, either in designedly acting or forebearing to act. Facts determined by reason! 38 p 306
||Edwards’s critics are bigots, he declares.|| American criticism criticised 39 p 319, top
Pure fanaticism coldly expressed as if it [original sin] were a matter of logic in its foundation. T[homas] S[tearns] Eliot
After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy London: 1934. Texas. Nineteen marginalia
[A few other marginalia are in Cory’s hand.]
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1 p 24
Tradition cannot mean standing still. Of course, no writer ever admits to himself that he has no originality; but the fact that a writer can be satisfied to use the exact idiom of a predecessor is very suspicious; you cannot write satire in the line of Pope or the stanza of Byron. The second kind of contemporary writing aims at an exaggerated novelty, a novelty usually of a trifling kind, which conceals from the uncritical reader a fundamental commonplaceness. If you examine the works of any great innovator in chronological order, you may expect to find that the author has been driven on, step by step, in his innovations, by an inner necessity, and that the novelty of form has rather been forced upon him by his material than deliberately sought. Tradition is handed down. That which is handed down is a form, which the pupil inherits. This form, in so far as it is traditional, does not change. Eliot here is talking without thinking. 2 p 46, marked
It is […] only carrying Mr. [Ivor] Richards’s complaint a little further to add that Mr. Yeats’s “supernatural world” was the wrong supernatural world. It was not a world of spiritual significance, not a world of real Good and Evil, of holiness or sin, but a highly sophisticated lower mythology summoned, like a physician, to supply the fading pulse of poetry with some transient stimulant […]. The Puritan peeping through the Anglo-Catholic. 3 p 54, underlined
[…] when morals cease to be a matter of tradition and orthodoxy—that is, of the habits of the community formulated, corrected, and elevated by the continuous thought and direction of the Church—and when each man is to elaborate his own, then personality becomes a thing of alarming importance. A mask for Satan. 4 p 55, underlined
[…] it is a cardinal point of faith in a romantic age, to believe that there is something admirable in violent emotion for its own sake, […]. But it is by no means self-evident that human beings are most real when most violently excited; […]. i.e. nearest to their hidden psyche and to salvation.
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5 p 58, marked
I have already touched upon the deplorable religious upbringing which gave Lawrence his lust for intellectual independence: like most people who do not know what orthodoxy is, he hated it. 6 p 59, marked
[…] Lawrence started life wholly free from any restriction of tradition or institution, […] he had no guidance except the Inner Light, the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to wandering humanity. N.B. The nemesis of autonomy in faith and morals. Pace, Kant! 7 p 63, marked
[…] the personality which fascinates us in the work of philosophy or art, tends naturally to be the unregenerate personality, partly self-deceived and partly irresponsible, and because of its freedom, terribly limited by prejudice and self-conceit, capable of much good or great mischief according to the natural goodness or impurity of the man: and we are all, naturally, impure. I think a man’s goodness, when he is anarchical, may have a very bad influence. E.G. Wm. James. 8 p 67
||In an appendix, Eliot quotes Herbert Read, the English writer and critic:|| “[…] all poetry, in which I wish to include all lyrical impulses whatever, is the product of the personality, and therefore inhibited in a character, […].” Express yourself en masse, in the raw, and you do not aspire to any purity or perfection. That would not be poetical. 9 p 68
||A quotation from John Macmurray on the philosophy of Communism: Marxist theories|| “[…] involve the belief that all theory must seek verification in action and adapt itself to the possibility of experiment. They make a clean sweep of speculative thought on the ground that the validity of no belief whatever is capable of demonstration by argument.” Deweyism: spirit is lubricating oil. T. S. Eliot
Four Quartets London: 1944. Waterloo. Ten marginalia.
1p7
[The following two comments refer to the first fourteen lines of “Burnt Norton I.”]
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Time present and time past Are both present in time future, […] Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. The flowers of time are external for the spirit. The fruits of time urgently needed or lost forever by each psyche. 2 p 12, marked
[“Burnt Norton V.”]
Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. 3 p 13, marked
Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; […]. To live in the moment is not to live in eternity; but the theme of a momentary intuition belongs to the eternal world. 4 p 15
[“East Coker.”]
In my beginning is my end. Cf. p. 7. 5 p 18
And every moment is a new and shocking Valuation of all we have been. 1939–’45 6 p 22, underlined
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. False distinction of merit from virtue. 7 p 22, marked
Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter.
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T. S. Eliot
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The Cocktail Party: A Comedy New York: 1950. Waterloo. One marginale.
[Santayana begins an unpublished, critical note on Eliot with the statement, “The thought of T. S. Eliot is subterranean without being profound” (George Santayana: A Biography, 416).]
English Institute Essays—1948
Estria
Edited by D. A. Robertson Jr. New York: 1949. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Cuadernos de poesia que edita el Colegio Español de Roma [1951?]. Waterloo. No marginalia.
A[lfred] C[yril] Ewing
Idealism: A Critical Survey London: 1934. Texas. 198 marginalia.
[Fly-leaf, in Santayana’s printing:]
Sub diversis speciebus, Signis tantum et non rebus, latent res eximiae.1 S. Thomas Aquinas. 1
Behind diverse appearances / In innumerable indications but not in objects [as such] / Lie rare things. 1 p 4, underlined and marked
[Introduction.]
If we took as our definition of idealism the view that nothing can exist apart from experience we should exclude Kant, but we do not if we take as our definition the view that no physical thing can, understanding ‘physical thing’ to cover objects like stones, chairs, tables, etc., for, whatever we mean by these words, we certainly do not, as Kant recognised, mean by them unknown things-in-themselves. not a radical understanding of animal perception. We mean, at bottom, something we can eat or that can eat us. 2 p 13, underlined and marked
Berkeley may be charged with having confused two different usages of the word ‘conceive’. We may be said to conceive thoughts, and in that case what we conceive is in our mind if anything can be said to be so; […]. N.B.
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3 p 42
Paradoxical though it may seem, the past may indeed change its properties in the sense that it may acquire new relations to events subsequent to itself, but a sharp distinction must be drawn between these and all its other characteristics, which cannot be changed even in the minutest degree by subsequent events. Neither the past fact can be changed nor the truth about it. The fact is dead: the truth is eternal and always included all relations of that fact to the future. 4 p 59
[Epistemological idealism summarized:]
The cognitive process is on one side idealistic, on the other realistic; it is idealistic in so far as it always involves thinking facts as they would be for a mind, as if they existed for a mind, realistic in so far as, where successful, it is always a finding of a reality independent of the cognition of it. The mental medium is only synthesis: truth is distinguishable from fact by being synthetic and comprehensive, as if addressed to thought. But the facts are known, as far as possible, not as they are to mind, but as they are in themselves. The mental medium is discounted. 5 p 65, marked Z
[“Kantian Idealism.”]
Certainly if Kant be interpreted as meaning to ask—Does reality conform to the principles which we see to be self-evident?—he is asking the absurd question whether we know what we know. To see that a principle is self-evident is just to see that it is necessarily true of reality. That we cannot give two contradictory descriptions of nature does not compel nature to reproduce any of our descriptions. Action will show us which is the most fitting. 6 p 68
[Kant] was driven to the conclusion that neither the truths of mathematics
nor the a priori principles necessary for natural science could be established by pure thought without reference to experience. Note the crying need of essences. 7 p 71, underlined
||Kant speaks of reaching geometric conclusions through inference guided by intuition. Ewing queries premisses intuited|| sensibly. All intuition is intellectual: i.e. it defines an essence which has necessary relations to other essences.
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8 p 79
||Kant continued to treat physical objects|| only as working conceptions and never admitted that objects in space could exist independently of us. Kant’s criticism was malicious, not scientific. 9 p 89, underlined
The red patch that I see now may not exist apart from my experiencing it, but it is still real and really spatial when experienced by me. Specious space, time colour, etc are essences. They appear in a psychological experience. It is true that this is believed to run in a real time. Ewing seems to turn images into idols. 10 p 111
The term, thing-in-itself, is perhaps unfortunate as it suggests that a real thing must have a nature of its own which has no connection whatever with other things, but this is an objection rather to the phraseology than to the substance of Kant’s contention. This was due to the monads of Leibniz having no windows and no extension. 11 p 115, underlined
It is […] quite certain that Kant believed in God, freedom and immortality. Perhaps Kant, personally, believed or half-believed in his “postulates”; but that was his weak side. His strength and originality lay in the “herroic pessimism” of the Als Ob.1 1 Als Ob (“As if”). Santayana refers to Hans Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des als ob (1922), in which he wrote copious marginalia. Selected marginalia from this work is included in Book Two. 12 p 149
What is given to us in experience is not terms by themselves (as British ^ thinkers prior to Bradley seem often to have supposed), […]. ^ 13 p 162, underlined
To say that such and such an action is due, e.g. to desire for power as a motive, is more than to say that such actions generally are preceded by desire for power […]. It is to say that in this particular case it does not merely follow on but is determined by the desire in question. Moral reasons are never causes: the previous (perhaps unique) state of the will explains the sequel dramatically but the causes must be physical otherwise every action would be a miracle.
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14 pp 196–97, underlined and marked
[“The Coherence Theory.”]
It is not the acts of judging or thinking which are held to be true, nor is it the words. The judgment, no indeed the spirit judging, is held to be true, if it asserts the truth regarding a fact. 15 p 199, underlined
‘Knowledge’ is ambiguous, for it may mean both what is known and the knowing of it, and, while in the former sense it would include all the reality known, in the latter sense it does not include and is not even partially identical with what is known. No: it means only the fund of truth possessed by the mind. 16 p 209
||Ewing quotes Bradley on mathematical truth and utter error.|| I think this is right in respect to mathematics, where correctness is absolute but truth hypothetical. 17 p 217, underlined
||On the difficulty of really understanding that 2 plus 2 equals four.|| It is one of the most difficult questions ever considered by philosophers. It is a conventionally necessary judgment, based on the definition of terms. Why or how far it holds true of nature is another question. 18 p 266
[“Idealism and the Theory of Perception.”]
||Whether we can know material objects directly, or through the sensa, by inference.|| The most that could be granted to the representationist would be that we did not know by acquaintance anything physical but only our sensa, but this would not necessarily preclude us from knowing physical facts otherwise than by acquaintance […]. This phrase was used by James and others for material contact. Not for intuition. 19 p 336, underlined
We must regard the causes of our sensa as in time, and further as in the same time as our sensa, otherwise they could not be regarded as their causes in any sense useful or significant for science; […]. Are sensa perceptions of sensa?
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20 p 362
[…] we cannot go behind or against the evidence of immediate experience. It is irrelevant how the immediate experience comes about: it is a fact now […]. Every thought is an experience. Can’t we go behind anything imagined? 21 p 439, underlined
[…] some kinds of value imply the existence of evil; […]. These values are, to this extent, malignant. The greatest passions are contrary to one another: the greatest goods are incompatible. This is itself a tragic fact, which might please a romantic poet. But where is the justification of such a cruel taste, along such a chaotic world? Carlo Falconi
Jean Paul Sartre Modena: 1949. Waterloo. Seven marginalia.
1 p 35, marked
Thus it may be said that in Sartre, the artist has chosen Husserl, and the man, with his hypochondria and his tendency to pessimism, has refuted Jaspers by way of Heidegger. 2 p 83, underlined
Sartre, who uses the terms “l’odio, il disgusto di esistere […].”1 It is rather fear that rivets spirit to ourselves. If we were not afraid phenomena would be a ballet, music without words. 1
The hatred, the disgust of existence.
3 p 88
||A quotation of the final sentence of Sartre’s novel, La Nausée: || Ma non ere possibile che non esistesse.1 i.e. abolire la propria esistenza in quel momento.2 1
But it was impossible that one should not exist. To abolish one’s own existence at that moment.
2
Léon-Paul Fargue
Portraits de famille: souvenirs Paris: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia
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Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Science of Knowledge Translated by A. E. Kroeger Philadelphia: 1868. Georgetown. 101 marginalia.
[The great majority of the marginalia, written at the top of the page, are paraphrase, therefore study or lecture notes. In some instances Santayana queries the translation of a word or phrase. References to the Life of Reason (Fichte, p. 47; p. 150) approximately date Santayana’s reading.] 1 p 44, marked
Curious as it may sound at the present state of philosophy, the science of logic is no philosophical science at all, but a peculiar, separate science; a fact, however, which is not to disparage the dignity of that science. unconscious irony. 2 p 47, top
Philosophy, though wide, is natural and present in all sci^ Cf. L. of R. ^ ence: logic is a product of art. 3 p 50, top
N.B. The human mind has a structure previous to our knowledge of that structure. [ This is an inconsistency if not taken mythically. ] It has also a natural goal. 4 p 74
[Spinoza] does not deny the unity of empirical consciousness, but he utterly
denies its pure consciousness. […] In his view Ego (that is, that which he calls his Ego, or which I call my Ego) is not absolutely because it is, but because something else is. [At top:] Fantastic interpretation of Spinoza. 5 p 105, marked Z
(Reason is in itself only practical, and becomes theoretical only in applying its laws to a limiting Non-Ego.) In other words, this seeming subordination in our system of the practical to the theoretical part results from this: That the thinkability of the practical principle is grounded in the thinkability of the theoretical principle. And in reflection we only have to do with thinkability. excellent [But meant, this time, for approval.] 6 p 108
The Ego […] posits negation in itself, in so far as it posits reality in the Non-Ego, and vice versa; it therefore posits itself as determining itself in so far as it is determined, and as determined in so far as it determines itself, […].
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There is needless confusion here. The Ego that posits the non-ego cannot thereby diminish its own quantity: what is diminished is the quantity of the alternative object—the self-consciousness and the particular will. 7 p 112, top
The non-Ego has reality, not as such, but as the locus of the reality (activity) subtracted from the ego: it is real in as much as it is effective for experience. 8 p 118, top
That I am is due to my own potentiality: that I am such, is a datum: yet only by being something in particular could I be anything at all. My spontaneity and limitation are therefore mutually necessary. 9 p 121
||Fichte explains how reason interposes|| its absolute assertion—which the philosopher does not create, but simply show up. There shall be no Non-Ego! The Ego shall be absolutely self-determined! [At top:] There shall be no Non-Ego! Hurray! 10 p 122, top
The non-Ego is darkness visible. 11 p 135, top
If the Ego is to be absolute its passivity must be an incident of its own activity. The ego will then be free to experience, but (if it wills to experience) bound to experience data. 12 p 167
The Ego posits itself; this is the absolute totality of the reality of the Ego. essence (Wesen?) [Santayana’s guess at Fichte’s German text, rather than “reality.”] 13 pp 170–71, marked
The links of a relation, singly considered, are accidences; their totality, substance. Substance is nothing fixed, but a mere change. If a substance is to be determined, or, in other words, if something determined is to be thought as substance, the change, it is true, must proceed from one of the links, which is in so far fixed as the change is to be determined. But it is not absolutely fixed, for I might as well proceed from its opposite link, and then the former link would be accidental, etc. In short, the accidences, synthetically united, give the substance; and the substance is nothing but the
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totality of accidences. A permanent substrate must not be entertained. Every accidence is its own substrate, and the substrate of its opposite accidences. The positing Ego, by the most marvelous of its powers, (productive imagination,) holds the vanishing accidence firmly, until it has compared it with the accidence whereby it is pushed aside. This power is it which, from perennial opposites, forms a unity which enters between moments (contradictions) that would mutually cancel each other, and thus maintains both; this power is it which alone makes life and consciousness […] possible; […]. Good passage on the idea of substance and the function of the transcendental self. 14 p 187, top
The real world = the world conceived by us. 15 p 196, top
The ego is the seat of spontaneous and of constrained activities: to explain and discriminate the latter, it must conceive an independent power in the non-ego. [ Myth of an objective will.] 16 p 199
The Ego contemplates a Non-Ego. In the contemplation the Ego posits itself as absolutely independent of the Non-Ego; contemplates it because it does so, without outward force. It posits by its own activity, and with the consciousness of its activity, each of the characteristics (qualities) of the Non-Ego. The object of knowledge is no power over the mind, no cause of knowledge. 17 p 203, top
Subject of Action is a contemplation unconscious of itself. ^ pure act.] [^Cf. Aristotle’s 18 p 224, top
||On the relation between the ego and perception.|| [Santayana unusually places a mark opposite his own comment:]
Thing and image are connected as spontaneous and reflective perception: therefore the first is known by the second. 19 p 235, top
Absolute spontaneity, or the presence of experience, is the nexus of all objects and laws. The nature of things, to which all particulars are referred, is itself referable to nothing.
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20 p 253
[…] the ideality of time. [At top:] Non existence of the past as such. Necessity of it for and in consciousness and knowledge. 21 p 291, underlined and marked Z
The conception of an impulse involves, 1st. That it should be grounded in the inner essence of that whereunto it is ascribed, hence, that it should be produced by the causality of that essence upon itself by its self-positing; 2d. That it should be for that very reason something fixed and enduring; 3d. That it should seek to have causality outside of itself, but should have none in so far as it is merely impulse. N.B. the latent naturalism of this. [Literary critics have noted the affinity between many romantic positions and naturalism, but to my knowledge, Santayana is the first and perhaps the only philosopher to make the connection, as he does in his brief note.] 22 p 305, top
Reality is only a matter of belief because it is the product in us of an emotion. 23 p 307
[…] yearning is an important determination. Only through it is the Ego impelled in itself to go out of itself; only through it does an external world reveal itself in the Ego. Sehnsucht1 the source the world. 1
Yearning.
24 p 308, top
Sehnsucht is primary & infinite. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt weiss was ich leide.1 1 From “Mignon’s Songs,” II, in Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, / Weiss, was ich leide! / Allein und abgetrennt / Von aller Freude, / Seh’ ich ans Firmament / Nach jener Seite. (Only one who yearns knows what I suffer, alone and cut off from all joy, I see the firmament, wherever I look.)
25 p 309, underlined
Again, there is in the Ego a yearning desirous of positing reality. But reality manifests itself for the Ego only through feeling, hence the yearning yearns for a feeling. [At top:]
“The yearning yearns for a feeling” How Echdeutsch!1 1
Really German!
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Arthur Davison Ficke
Tumultuous Shore, and Other Poems New York: 1942. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Henry Fielding
The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling
Two volumes. London: 1934. Waterloo. Fifty-eight marginalia and three drawings. 1 p 17, marked
[Volume I.] [Book I, chapter II, on Squire Allworthy’s marriage:]
[…] he had not the least doubt of meeting her again, in a place where he should never part with her more;—sentiments for which his sense was arraigned by one part of his neighbours, his religion by a second, and his sincerity by a third. And all three partly right. 2 p 17
||Fielding announces to the reader that he will often digress.|| This would hardly be appreciated at a first reading. And the art of the preceding paragraph is rather occult—very good, but a little forced. 3 p 21
The love of preaching permeates British fiction. It would be so much more telling if the humanity were exhibited without comment or innuendo. 4 p 23
[Chapter IV.]
Beyond this, the country gradually rose into a ridge of wild mountains, the tops of which were above the clouds. In Somerset? 5 p 88
[Book II, chapter VII.]
Hence, too, must flow those tears which a widow sometimes so plentifully sheds over the ashes of a husband with whom she led a life of constant disquiet and turbulency, and whom now she can never hope to torment any more. Are people as spiteful as that now?
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6 p 88, marked
In fact, it is possible for a third person to be very intimate, nay, even to live long in the same house, with a married couple who have any tolerable discretion and not even guess at the sour sentiments which they bear to each other; […]. Me at Telegraph House.1 1 Santayana’s friend John Francis Stanley, second earl Russell, lived at Telegraph House early in his unfortunate marriage.
7 p 88–89, doubly marked
[The passage in 6 p 88 continues:]
[…] for though the whole day may be sometimes too short for hatred, as well as for love; yet the many hours which they naturally spend together, apart from all observers, furnish people of tolerable moderation with such ample opportunity for the enjoyment of either passion, that, if they love, they can support being a few hours in company without toying, or, if they hate, without spitting in each other’s faces. 8 p 94
[Chapter IX.]
These two doctors, whom, to avoid any malicious applications, we shall distinguish by the names of Dr. Y. and Dr. Z., […]. Why not Dr. Wye & Dr. Zedd? (The latter a jew) 9 p 101
[Book III, chapter II.]
“Noscitur a socio”; […]. “You may know him by the company he keeps.” Dime con quien vas y te diré quien eres.1 1
Santayana provides the Spanish to the Latin and English proverb.
10 p 106
[Chapter III. Concerning the tutor, Mr. Square:]
He was deeply read in the ancients, and a professed master of all the works of Plato and Aristotle. Upon which great models he had principally formed himself; sometimes according with the opinion of the one, and sometimes with that of the other. In morals he was a professed Platonist, and in religion he inclined to be an Aristotelian. Paederast? Atheist? 11 p 123
[Chapter VII. On Tom Jones’s affair with the low-born Molly Seagrim:]
Let this, my young readers, be your constant maxim, that no man can be good enough to enab1e him to neglect the rules of prudence; nor will
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virtue herself look beautiful, unless in England she be bedecked with ^ decorum. ^ the outward ornaments of decency and 12 p 137
[Book IV, chapter II: Fielding’s “sublime” descriptions of Sophia Western, illustrated by Santayana:]
[…] for lo! adorned with all the charms in which nature can array her, bedecked with beauty, youth, sprightliness, innocence, modesty, and tenderness, breathing sweetness from her rosy lips, and darting brightness from her sparkling eyes, the lovely Sophia comes. Reader, perhaps thou hast seen the statue of the Venus de Medicis. 13 pp 138–39
Her cheeks were of the oval kind; in her right she had a dimple, which the least smile discovered. Her chin had certainly its share in forming the beauty of her face; but it was difficult to say it was either large or small, though, perhaps, it was rather of the former kind. Her complexion had rather more of the lily than of the rose; but when exercise or modesty increased her natural colour, no vermilion could equal it. […] Her neck was long, and finely turned: and here, if I was not afraid of offending her delicacy, I might justly say the highest beauties of the famous Venus de Medicis were outdone. Here was whiteness which no lilies, ivory, nor alabaster could match. 14 pp 154–55
[Chapter VI. Santayana interprets Fielding’s long essay on Tom Jones’s character:]
The “Moral Sense” of Shaftesbury & Adam Smith. It is really, in good cases, warmth of sympathy with the virtues of the time. Cf. “Honour.” 15 pp 162–63
[Chapter VIII.]
||Molly Seagrim’s epic battle in the graveyard against the rough village women.|| Capital Parody 16 p 197
[Book V, chapter I.]
||On beauty perceived in its reverse.|| But for the Harpies Helen were not fair And bald Thersites gave Achilles hair.
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17 p 199
||Fielding discourses on the dullness of the preceding matter.|| My dullness is the soul of all my art, And I sing only between f-t and f-t. [A rare example of the scatological in the marginalia.] 18 p 206, marked
[Chapter III.]
[…] for friendship makes us warmly espouse the interest of others; but it is very cold to the gratification of their passions. 19 p 257
[Book VI, chapter I, “Of love.”]
[…] I desire of the philosophers to grant, that there is in some (I believe in many) human breasts, a kind and benevolent disposition, which is gratified by contributing to the happiness of others. That in this gratification alone, as in friendship, in parental and filial affection, as, indeed, in general philanthropy, there is a great and exquisite delight. Cf. the contention of Oliver’s “thesis”.1 [At “parental and filial affection”:]
And the love of one’s children? Or of dogs? Or of future generations? 1 A reference to Oliver Alden, the central figure of Santayana’s novel, The Last Puritan.
20 p 268
[Book VI, end of chapter III:]
A man may have as much wisdom in the possession of an affluent fortune, as any beggar in the streets; or may enjoy a handsome wife, or a hearty friend, and still remain as wise as any sour popish recluse, who buries all his social faculties, and starves his belly, while he well lashes his back. Cf. Luther. Not corruption but asceticism & devoutness were what Protestants hated most. The corruption could have been better reformed without heresy. 21 p 70, marked
[Volume II.] [Book XI, chapter IV.]
I never advise old women: for if they take it into their heads to go to the devil, it is no more possible, than worth while, to keep them from him. 22 p 149
[Book XII, chapter X.]
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||Tom Jones to Mr. Dowling, concerning Squire Allworthy’s fortune:|| “What is the poor pride arising from a magnificent house, a numerous equipage, a splendid table, and from all the other advantages or appearances of fortune, compared to the warm, solid content, the swelling satisfaction, the thrilling transports, and the exulting triumphs, which a good mind enjoys in the contemplation of a generous, virtuous, noble, benevolent action?” The hypocrisy of “virtue”. Rich liberals feel, if they do not talk, like that. 23 p 389
[Book XVII, chapter V.]
[…] our eye is seldom, I am afraid, turned upward to those who are manifestly greater, better, wiser, or happier, than ourselves, without some degree of malignity; […]. This is truer of a dissolute age than of a normal one. Fifty Best Poems of America New York: n.d. [193–?]. Columbia. No marginalia. [The final poem in the collection is Santayana’s “A wall, a wall around my garden rear,” which line he was persuaded to change to “A wall, a wall to hem the azure sphere.” See William G. Holzberger, The Complete Poems of George Santayana (Lewisburg and London: Bucknell University Press, 1979), 573.]
Phineas Fletcher
Venus & Anchises (Brittain’s Ida) and other Poems London: 1926. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Henry Wilder Foote
Thomas Jefferson: Champion of Religious Freedom: Advocate of Christian Morals Boston: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[Inscribed to Santayana, Dec. 1949.]
Philipp Frank
Einstein: His Life and Times Translated by George Rosen New York: 1947. Waterloo. Twelve marginalia.
[Markings on pages 3 and 5 are not Santayana’s.]
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1 p 35
[Concerning Newton:]
God must be able to distinguish differences in a space that is perfectly homogeneous. 2 p 46, underlined
[On science at the end of the nineteenth century:]
One tendency propagated a return to the organismic science of the Middle Ages, and from it developed the authoritarian socialism that became the germ-cell of later fascism in all its varieties. Hegel and Nietzsche were not medieval. 3 p 63
[On relativity of time:]
This is true also of the dogma that nothing can travel faster than light. i.e. if you were running away from it, that wave which started at the same time with you would never reach you; but you might see others front, sidelong, or earlier waves. 4 p 119, marked
||There was great enthusiasm for war at its outbreak in Germany in 1914, and the feeling that|| the individual could now merge with the greater whole—the German Empire—and stop living for himself, a feeling that for many people meant a great sense of relief. This was also the secret of the later rush. 5 p 130
According to Einstein’s theory, the presence of material bodies produces certain curvatures in the practicable paths through space, […]. ^ of the mass The interaction ^of gravity is like the intervention of earth impeding motion in a straight line in three dimensions. The great circle is a straight path in 2 dimensions. 6 p 244, marked
||In 1931, Einstein praised American clergymen for their pacifism. Asked by young Belgians if they should stand aside in case of war with Germany, he answered in accordance with the possible circumstances.|| He did not allow himself to be confused by the vain idea of standing forth as one who sticks to his principles under all circumstances. […] Einstein was aware that the purpose of principles in both public and private life is only to encourage actions that produce results which one would approve. Degenerate children of Kant, Beware!
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7 p 245
The Pacifist abhors all wars, yet sometimes thinks it right to fight. For principles The ground is sound. 8 p 259, underlined
[On attempts to apply Einstein’s theories in politics and war; Frank quotes Maximov:]
“[…] in place of the idealistic presentation of the theory of relativity favored by bourgeois society we must develop a dialectical presentation of the theory. […].” Critical. Einstein is perfectly materialistic for moral purposes. His sentiments are not inspired by realistic biology. They are pure accidents. 9 p 260, doubly marked
In stressing dialectical materialism in the sense of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, “materialism” means that science has to do with objective facts that are independent of human consciousness; but these facts do not need to be merely motions of material particles. James George Frazer Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History: Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias’ Description of Greece London: 1919. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Sigmund Freud
Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams ] Leipzig and Vienna: [1900], 1914 (4th edition). Georgetown. Thirty-four marginalia.
1p1
[Santayana paraphrases and interprets Freud’s first paragraph.]
I.e. the relevance of dreams, not their ground is the subject of this book. Dreams might serve to explain waking life, better than waking life to explain dreams, if we were serious psychologists. 2 p 3, marked
Upon awakening, we experience the strangeness of dreams. 3 p 8fn
That in dreams, one often speaks a foreign language readily and fluently.
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Or one feels that one does so, inhibitions and perplexities being overriden. The foreign language, however, if often quite one’s own. 4 p 32, marked
Subjective explanations are provisional—symbolical. 5 p 33
I have analyzed dreams of patients that occurred twenty-five and more years ago, and I can recall my own dreams of thirty-seven years ago, their freshness unimpeded by memory. How do you know that the memory is accurate? 6 p 50, marked
||Freud quotes Volkelt on the sexual nature of dreams that contradict the waking morals of the dreamer.|| There is no contradiction here. Morality for many is superficial and unnatural. 7 p 59, marked Z
[Freud speculates on the bodily aspect of dreams.]
What about normal thought? Isn’t it “bodily” too? 8 p 109
[Freud elaborates on the functions of the psychic censor.]
All this seems forced and obscure. Sigmund Freud
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Translated by C. J. M. Hubback London and Vienna: 1922. Georgetown. Eighty-one marginalia. 1 p 1, underlined
In the psycho-analytical theory of the mind we take it for granted that the course of mental processes is automatically regulated by ‘the pleasure-principle’: […]. Equilibrium of impulses in act, or vital harmony. Pleasure ^ ^ is only a sign of this at certain junctures. The pursuit of equilibrium or harmony is inevitable, being involved in the definition of them: cf. the summation of forces. 2 p 5, underlined
[…] ‘reality-principle’, […]. respect for conditions
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3p5
Another and no less regular source of ‘pain’ proceeds from the conflicts and dissociations in the psychic apparatus during the development of the ego towards a more highly co-ordinated organisation. i.e. equilibrium is disturbed by local growths or accidental stoppages. 4 p 6, underlined
||Repressed sexual impulses may be|| experienced by the ego as ‘pain’. trouble, disturbance, uneasiness. 5p6
The details of the process by which repression changes a possibility of pleasure into a source of ‘pain’ are not yet fully understood, or are not yet capable of clear presentation, but it is certain that all neurotic ‘pain’ is of this kind, is pleasure which cannot be experienced as such. i.e. is an inhibited impulse. 6 p 17
[Santayana translates Freud’s term, “the unconscious.”]
Not always forgotten experience. Often unexpressed impulse. 7 p 17
||Former efforts by psychoanalysts to interpret the content of the unconscious failed to result in actual therapy.|| […] the next aim was to compel the patient to confirm the reconstruction through his own memory. In this endeavour the chief emphasis was on the resistances of the patient; the art now lay in unveiling these as soon as possible, in calling the patient’s attention to them, and by human influence—here came in suggestion acting as ‘transference’—teaching him to abandon the resistances. Sometimes to remember, more often to impute the suggested myth to his own past. 8 p 18
The relation established between memory and reproduction is different for every case. As a rule the physician cannot spare the patient this phase of the cure; he must let him live through a certain fragment of his forgotten life, and has to see to it that some measure of ascendency remains, in the light of which the apparent reality is always recognised as a reflection of a forgotten past. Curious instance of thaumaturgy. Faith is to be produced, by compelling the patient to believe that the things suggested ^ ^ to him by the prophet are or were his own experiences!
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9 p 20
There is no doubt that the resistance of the conscious and preconscious ego subserves the pleasure-principle; it is trying to avoid the ‘pain’ that would be aroused by the release of the repressed material, […]. It is shy. 10 p 20
Loss and failure in the sphere of the affections left behind on the ego-feeling marks of injury comparable to a narcissistic scar, […]. Wounded affections like wounded vanity. “There is regret, almost remorse, For things long past.”1 1
“There is regret, almost remorse, / For Time long past.” (Shelley, “Time Long Past”). 11 p 21
||On the roots of the inferiority complex in childhood.|| The bonds of tenderness linking the child more especially to the parent of the opposite sex succumbed to disappointment, to the vain expectation of satisfaction, and to the jealousy aroused by the birth of a new child, unmistakable proof as it is of the faithlessness of the loved parent; the child’s attempt, undertaken with tragic seriousness, to produce another such child himself met with humiliating failure; […]. If Freud were a gentleman and had a more concrete style, he might paint the life of children admirably.1 1 Apparently a comment on Freud as a Jew, and further evidence of Santayana’s anti-semitism.
12 p 22, doubly marked
That which psycho-analysis reveals in the transference phenomena with neurotics can also be observed in the life of normal persons. It here gives the impression of a pursuing fate, a daemonic trait in their destiny, and psycho-analysis has from the outset regarded such a life history as in a large measure self-imposed and determined by infantile influences. The compulsion which thereby finds expression is in no way different from the repetition-compulsion of neurotics, even though such persons have never shown signs of a neurotic conflict resulting in symptoms. Thus one knows people with whom every human relationship ends in the same way: benefactors whose protégés, however different they may otherwise have been, invariably after a time desert them in ill-will, […]. [At “Thus one knows […] in the same way”:]
Make this clearer in the novel.1 1
Of obvious importance to criticism of The Last Puritan.
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13 p 25, marked
||The compulsion to repetition|| seems to us more primitive, more elementary, more instinctive than the pleasure-principle which is displaced by it. Of course: because repetition is a mechanical necessity in matter. 14 p 28, underlined
||On the difficulty of relating the unconscious to consciousness.|| We should, so to speak, have gained nothing and altered nothing by our supposition which relegates to a special system the process of becoming conscious. It is perhaps not a system or organ, but a phase (like temperature or harmony) of any system or organ: so that the organ of consciousness is a mode of the organism in general. 15 p 28
If one reflects how little we know from other sources about the origin of consciousness the pronouncement that consciousness arises in the place of the memory-trace must be conceded at least the importance of a statement which is to some extent definite. I.e. consciousness arises at the cessation of a perfect repetition, on the dissolution of a working mechanism Cf. Montague’s theory of “potential” energy in act. 16 p 32
The Kantian proposition that time and space are necessary modes of thought may be submitted to discussion to-day in the light of certain knowledge reached through psycho-analysis. We have found by experience that unconscious mental processes are in themselves ‘timeless’. “dateless” 17 p 32
That is to say to begin with: they are not arranged chronologically, time alters nothing in them, nor can the idea of time be applied to them. They are modes repeated at any time. 18 p 32
These are negative characteristics, which can be made plain only by instituting a comparison with conscious psychic processes. Our abstract conception of time seems rather to be derived wholly from the mode of functioning of the system W-Bw.,1 and to correspond with a self-perception of it. In this mode of functioning of the system another form of protection against stimulation probably comes into play.
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i.e. forms of being become transitory or intermittent, to relieve the intolerable waste of always being actually ^ what one is virtually. The best story cannot^ be told repeated without some intervals. ^1 ^ Wahrnehmung (perception); Bewusstsein (consciousness).
19 p 41, underlined
||The study of dreams shows that the excitations deriving from instincts conform not to the type of the inhibited but to the free-moving nerve processes. The study of dreams also shows that the unconscious systems are fundamentally different from those of the preconscious. The|| unconscious ‘charges’ themes 20 p 42
[continued from above:]
may easily be completely transferred, displaced or condensed, while if this happened with preconscious material only defective results would be obtained. This is the reason for the well-known peculiarities of the manifest dream, after the preconscious residues of the day before have undergone elaboration according to the laws of the unconscious. i.e. The poetic rendering of things is prior to the literal. If I knew a thing positively, I could not make a myth about it. 21 p 44
||Repetition is itself a basis for pleasure.|| Cf. the love of life—likeness in art. 22 p 44
||The patient undergoing analysis feels compelled in transference events of his infantile life, disregarding in all respects the pleasure-principle. The patient|| thus makes it clear to us that the repressed memory-traces of his primitive experience are not present in a ‘bound’ form, are indeed, in a sense, not capable of the secondary process. “Bound” = controlled by the upper centres that form the balance-wheel of a sane mind and keep it almost empty. 23 p 44–45
In what way is the instinctive connected with the compulsion to repetition? At this point the idea is forced upon us that we have stumbled on the trace of a general and hitherto not clearly recognised—or at least not expressly emphasised—characteristic of instinct, perhaps of all organic life. According to this, an instinct would be a tendency innate in living organic matter impelling it towards the reinstatement of an earlier condition, one which it had
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to abandon under the influence of external disturbing forces—a kind of organic elasticity, or […] the manifestation of inertia in organic life. Instinct is a habit of matter. The span of the repetition is variable—that is all. It may be suspended throughout the life of an individual, to reappear in his child. 24 p 45, underlined
When certain fish undertake arduous journeys at spawning-time, in order to deposit the spawn in certain definite waters far removed from their usual habitats, according to the interpretation of many biologists they are only seeking the earlier homes of their kind, which in course of time they have exchanged for others. As Indian officials send their children to school in England. Like Mohammedans going to Mecca. They thus recover the magical and corporate force of their particular religion which otherwise might be in danger of evaporating into pantheism, epicureanism, or mysticism. 25 p 47, marked
This final goal of all organic striving […] would be counter to the conservative nature of instinct if the goal of life were a state never hitherto reached. It must rather be an ancient starting point, which the living being left long ago, and to which it harks back again by all the circuitous paths of development. If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic, we can only say ‘The goal of all life is death’, and, casting back, ‘The inanimate was there before the animate.’ Yes, of course. “But at noon this pleasure is premature” Life is a course laid upon one, to be run as quickly and smoothly as possible. 26 p 48, marked
||Freud discourses on evolution, and the alteration by external circumstances that permitted survival over instant death.|| These circuitous ways to death, faithfully retained by the conservative instincts, would be neither more nor less than the phenomena of life as we now know it. Ein Umweg ins Nichts.1 1
A roundabout way to nothing.
27 p 48, marked
The theoretic significance of the instincts of self-preservation, power and self-assertion, shrinks to nothing […]; they are part-instincts designed to secure the path to death peculiar to the organism and to
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ward off possibilities of return to the inorganic other than the immanent ones, but the enigmatic struggle of the organism to maintain itself in spite of all the world, a struggle that cannot be brought into connection with anything else, disappears. Nobody would really wish to be, if he looked far enough ahead. Tomorrow we are all committed to: we have appointments and are wound up to execute them: but we are wound up also to sleep at intervals and to die at the end. 28 p 49, underlined and marked
Some […], the reproductive cells, probably retain the original structure of the living substance and, after a given time, detach themselves from the parent organism, charged as they are with all the inherited and newly acquired instinctive dispositions. How can the original structure contain all subsequent variations? 29 p 51, underlined
[…] one group of instincts presses forward to reach the final goal of life as quickly as possible, the other flies back at a certain point on the way only to traverse the same stretch once more from a given spot and thus to prolong the duration of the journey. Although sexuality and the distinction of the sexes certainly did not exist at the dawn of life, nevertheless it remains possible that the instincts which are later described as sexual were active from the very beginning […]. [At “one group of instincts”:]
i.e. to execute its piece, to have its say, and be done. This is the art of expression and the love of virtue. The other is like stammering or “drooling”. 30 p 51, underlined
Are there really, apart from the sexual instincts, no other instincts than those which have as their object the reinstatement of an earlier condition, none that strive towards a condition never yet attained? I am not aware of any satisfactory example in the organic world running counter to the characteristic I have suggested. The existence of a general impulse towards higher development in the plant and animal world can certainly not be established, though some such line of development is as a fact unquestionable. N.B. Bergson de te fabula, [ Bergson Einstein Freud—what a “bunch”! ]
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31 p 52, underlined
Many of us will also find it hard to abandon our belief that in man himself there dwells an impulse towards perfection, which has brought him to his present heights of intellectual prowess and ethical sublimation, […]. ? What can a German mean by Vollkommenheit? More details? 32 p 53, underlined
What occurs in the development of a neurotic phobia, which is really nothing but an attempt at flight from the satisfaction of an instinct, appeasement 33 p 53, underlined
[continued from above:]
gives us the prototype for the origin of this ostensible ‘impulse towards perfection’ which, however, we cannot possibly ascribe to all human beings. i.e. to perpetual imperfection. Perfection of course is to have lived perfectly. 34 p 53
The dynamic conditions are, it is true, quite generally present, but the economic relations seem only in rare cases to favour the phenomenon. i.e. people all go off on a tangent, but it brings them no good. 35 p 61
||On the death of micro-organisms:|| Thus, left to itself, the infusorium dies a natural death from the imperfect disposal of its own metabolic products: perhaps all higher animals die ultimately from the same inability. Death is a poisoning by constipation. Come bién y caga fuerte y no temas a la muerte1 1
Eat heartily and fiercely shit / and have no fear of death.
36 pp 65–66, marked
||On the extension in psychoanalysis of the concept of sexuality from the mere idea of propagation, together with the conception of the ego beyond repression and censoring, to|| the study of the libido-development of the child in its earliest phases [when] it became clear that the ego is the true and original reservoir of the libido […]. The ego took its place as one of the sexual objects and was immediately recognised as the choicest among them. But then this is sensuality not sexuality.
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37 p 71, marked
The experiment which substitutes for conjugation among protozoa the effect of chemical or even of mechanical stimuli admits of our giving a reply with certainty [to the question of why conjugation between two slightly different cells leads to renewal of life in them]: it comes about by the introduction of new stimulus-masses. This is in close agreement with the hypothesis that the life-process of an individual leads, from internal causes, to the equalising of chemical tensions: i.e. to death, while union with an individually different living substance increases these tensions—so to speak, introduces new vital differentia, which then have to be again lived out. For this difference between the two there must naturally be one or more optima. Our recognition that the ruling tendency of psychic life, perhaps of nerve life altogether, is the struggle for reduction, keeping at a constant level, or removal of the inner stimulus tension (the Nirvana-principle, as Barbara Low terms it)—a struggle which comes to expression in the pleasure-principle—is indeed one of our strongest motives for believing in the existence of death-instincts. Karma. A new burden or charge is assumed by the physical and moral commitment of love. On the other hand there is a catharsis, when old love is satisfied at last and death welcome. 38 p 73, underlined
||The objection against the linking of sexuality and the death instinct is that|| it pre-supposes the existence of life-instincts as already operative in the simplest forms of life, for otherwise conjugation, which works against the expiration of life and makes the task of dying harder, would not have been retained and elaborated, […]. N.B. 39 p 78, underlined and marked
The shortcomings of our description would probably disappear if for the psychological terms we could substitute physiological or chemical ones. These too only constitute a metaphorical language, but one familiar to us for a much longer time and perhaps also simpler. Symbolic, hardly metaphorical, which implies a double symbolism, literary as well as sensuous. 40 p 81, underlined
Let us distinguish function and tendency more sharply than we have hitherto done. The pleasure-principle is then a tendency which subserves a certain function—namely, that of rendering the psychic apparatus as a
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whole free from any excitation, or to keep the amount of excitation constant or as low as possible. The principle of peace or . [At “free from any excitation”:]
Not, then, pleasure-seeking. 41 p 81
We all know by experience that the greatest pleasure it is possible for us to attain, that of the sexual act, is bound up with the temporary quenching of a greatly heightened state of excitation. The ‘binding’ of instinct-excitation, however, would be a preparatory function, which would direct the excitation towards its ultimate adjustment in the pleasure of discharge. Do you mean that the pleasure is relief from craving? I think the pleasure of being excited is much greater than that of being assuaged. 42 p 83, marked
The pleasure-principle seems directly to subserve the death-instincts; it keeps guard, of course, also over the external stimuli, which are regarded as dangers by both kinds of instincts, but in particular over the inner increases in stimulation which have for their aim the complication of the task of living. Sigmund Freud
L’Avenir d’une illusion Translated by Marie Bonaparte Paris: [1927–28] 1932. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Robert Frost
A Masque of Reason New York: 1945. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller
A History of Philosophy
New York: 1938. Waterloo. No marginalia.
René Fülöp-Miller
The Mind and Face of Bolshevism
London and New York: 1927. Georgetown. No significant marginalia.
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Raymond Furon
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La Perse Paris: 1938. Waterloo. Three Marginalia.
Richard von Garbe
Die Sâmkhya-philosophie
Eine Darstellung des indischen Rationalismus nach den Quellen Leipzig: 1894. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Fina García Marruz
Las miradas perdidas Havana: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia
Frank Gavin
Some Aspects of Contemporary Greek Orthodox Thought London and Milwaukee: [1923], 1936. Waterloo. Six marginalia.
1 p 185, marked
We speak of the activities and operations ( ) of the Incarnate as theandric, since in Him were two wills and operations proceeding from the two natures, yet the Bearer of the two natures was the one Person, who was the One who willed and acted. This may be applied to spirit, one hypostasis, but enduring or enacting the passions of the flesh no less than the thoughts of the intellect. As passions (not motions) they are all in the spirit, yet contrary to the spirit. 2 p 186, underlined
[Gavin quotes Androutsos:]
“So we are to understand St. Luke 2, 52. . . .not as a manifestation of the undeveloped wisdom of Christ, but as an actual increase of empirical knowledge. . . .How the human knowledge (of Christ) functions in its own sphere within the circle of omniscience. . . .is incomprehensible to man.” Not wholly. In us there is often an isolated memory or will, in the midst of a more constant interest & knowledge. We may be in contact with much that we do not possess actually. 3 p 190fn, marked Z
[A quotation from Antoniades:]
“To sin as a man was a possibility which might have taken place in Christ Jesus without being precluded by His divine nature. […] yet He did not fall
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but remained sinless, not because He was not able to sin, but because He was able not to sin.” This is a symptom of radical corruption in some of the Greek theologians. Metaphysical modernism. James Gibson
Locke’s Theory of Knowledge and Its Historical Relations Cambridge, England: 1917. Columbia. 130 marginalia.
[Marginalia are Santayana’s. Various notes by Daniel Cory, on the order of: “Locke was very poor at introspection: he was a tight little smug bastard, & pushed his feelings down out of sight in favour of IDEAS.” (p 2)] 1p3
[Chapter I, “The Problem of Knowledge and the ‘New Way of Ideas.’”]
[…] when we have knowledge, we have something which excludes the possibility not only of doubt but of error. Yet indubitably known truth. So that “knowledge” will have to be simply intuition of essence or “consciousness” of “data”. 2p3
[…] the knowledge which Locke undertakes to investigate is regarded by him as somehow referring to and holding good of a reality which is independent of the knowing mind and of the ideas by which it is known. Besides being certain and instructive, our knowledge must be ‘real.’ Yet Locke impossibly requires it to be transitive. 3 p 6, top
The demand for “knowledge” in religion cuts both ways: it encourages false demonstrations: and it discourages faith in traditional or recondite doctrines: Deism. 4p7
Need of a few sound easy truths. Protestant smugness. If we must have a philosophy, for God’s sake let it be simple and brief. And don’t let anything be revealed that is not obvious to plain reason. 5 p 11, marked
Indeed, he [Locke] often continues to write as if conceptions which he has completely undermined must still possess unquestionable validity, and furnish a key to an adequate interpretation of the real. Cf. “Power” on which Whitehead expatiates.
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6 p 12, marked
If words are signs of ideas, ideas are themselves, Locke holds, signs of things, or of the reality with which the mind in its thinking is concerned. The naturalistic presupposition: Ideas = essences which one part of nature attributes to another part: the faculty of doing so being sensibility or intelligence. 7 p 28, underlined
Locke had himself inherited the current scheme of thought, for which the categories of substance and quality expressed in an exhaustive manner the ultimate nature of reality, and he never thought of questioning either its general validity or its applicability to the subject of experience. Accordingly, he still continues to think of the soul as a substance, possessing a nature of its own independent of experience; […]. Hardly if it be the cogitation of Descartes, which is experience itself. 8 p 33
[Chapter II, “The Polemic against Innate Principles.”]
The question of the activity of mind, in any more abstract or speculative sense, does not enter into his [Locke’s] purview throughout the discussion, and its consideration would not have been regarded by him as relevant to his purpose, or as a necessary preliminary to the constructive part of his work. Locke in this respect anticipates Kant’s mental workshop. Ideas are spectres that meet and breed other spectres. 9 p 34
[Santayana paraphrases:]
Even if there were innate ideas they might be—they ought to be—false. 10 p 36
||The appeal to general consent to validate innate ideas described.|| Yes: rebellion against convention and authority was a leading motive. Personal Protestantism. 11 p 37
[Locke quoted:]
‘The floating of other men’s opinions in our brains makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true. What in them was science is in us but opiniatry […].’ Cf. the doctors in Molière.
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12 p 48
[Chapter III, “The Origin and Formation of Ideas.”]
||On the division of complex thought step by step into its components, clearly and simply stated.|| Is something of this sort in Strong’s mind when he labours to reduce ideas to summated feelings? 13 p 57, underlined
All mental functions are for him functions of thought, and ‘thinking consists in being conscious that one thinks.’ Hence ‘the operations of our minds will not let us be without at least some obscure notions of them.’ You hear the din in the work-shop. 14 p 58, marked
The identification of mental activity with volition is, indeed, only a particular application of the view that all mental processes involve self-consciousness. I cannot be active without recognising the active process as having its source in myself, or as voluntarily determined. This is quite true of spiritual activity or rather alacrity. 15 p 62, marked
||We would not be justified in believing that a complex idea, like a simple one, has an existing counterpart in the real world.|| Very important in fortifying the notion that thought is apt to be too elaborate, while nature is simple. A sort of Unitarianism in science. 16 p 68, underlined and doubly marked
It is only in its significance, Locke maintains, that an idea is capable of generality; as an existent it retains its particularity, though that which it represents is universal. This distinction, between the particular existence and the universal signification of our general ideas, is repeatedly emphasised by Locke, although it has often been ignored by his critics, from Berkeley onwards. The question of the manner of the formation of our general ideas is, accordingly, for him, the question as to how ideas, which are and must remain particular in their existence, come to be invested with this universality of representation. Not distinguishing essence from intuition, he has to say that the same entity which exists is universal “in significance.” But the signification if felt, is the very datum: that which ^ is ^the intuition of this meaning. exists
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17 p 68, underlined
[From Locke:]
||Whether met in milk, chalk, or snow, the mind considers the appearance only|| ‘and, having given it the name “whiteness,” it by that sound signifies the same quality wheresoever to be imagined or met with.’ So that “whiteness” is not an abstraction but is imagined & met with on each occasion absolutely & afresh & entire. 18 p 70, underlined
Universality consists in a relation, the apprehension of which, like the cognition of all other relations, must have its source in a comparing activity of the mind. For the formation of a general idea it is not enough that the mind should single out a certain content, as the object of its consideration. Generality which is dependent on the plurality of instances, as essential universality is not. 19 p 89
[Chapter IV, “The Contents of our Ideas of Modes.”]
As if all data of sense were not original to the senses, and not to their objects: so that dreamt or invented ideas are just as much rooted in matter (as flowers are rooted) as are ideas arising under some external stimulus. 20 p 128
[Chapter VI, “The General Nature of Knowledge.”]
For real knowledge it is not only necessary that we should perceive an agreement or disagreement among our ideas, but that we should have a guarantee that the ideas in question ‘agree with the reality of things.’ We must, therefore, enquire in what sense this further agreement is to be understood, and the nature of the guarantees by which it can be assured. Only so much of essence is “known” as is embodied in existence: or true. But it is then the assumption of truth in intuition that renders intuitive “knowledge”: so that knowledge is faith. 21 p 130
Symbolic knowledge: all sensation is valid as a symbol of its occasion. 22 p 143
[Chapter VII, “The Kinds and Limits of Knowledge.”]
Intuition now not knowledge.
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23 p 144, underlined
[From Locke:]
‘All our affirmations, then, are only in concrete, which is the affirming, not one abstract idea to be another, but one abstract idea to be joined to another.’ in some particular thing—humanity in this man with ^ Gibson praises this because “concrete” suggests Hegel to whiteness. him. ^ 24 p 145
“Implication” is due to the comparison which the mind makes: it is grounded, of course, on the essences found to be thus allied. But each in itself, is eternally isolated. Essential relations between colours do not make one colour imply another. Nor do lines imply triangles. 25 p 157, top
There is no harm in a revelation, provided it be simple and short, and contain nothing that would might not recommend itself to a plain goodhonest man by the light of nature. 26 p 167, underlined
Indeed, the distinction between the four kinds of knowledge may be regarded, from one point of view, as a progressive correction of the abstraction of ideas from reality. Essence. 27 p 168, underlined
The abstract opposition between the idea and real existence is stated by Locke in its most acute form. This epithet marks the writer for a Hegelian. 28 pp 170–71, marked Z
||Gibson notes no distinction in Locke between abstract ideas, and intuitive knowledge of self. But,|| as a judgment asserting existence, it possesses features which are quite unlike those of the abstract judgments of science. In their case the immediacy of the perception signifies that it is independent of the ‘intervention of any other ideas’; in the special case we are concerned with, we have an apprehension of real existence which is immediate in the sense that the real existent is itself directly known, and does not stand in need of any idea, as a tertium quid, to connect it with the knowing mind. [From “does not stand ”:]
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No: the mathematician does not know his intuition as a spiritual act: but I, in thinking of his intuition of the triangle, see analytically that in intuition existence is involved, since it is the presence of the essence triangle at a particular moment to a particular man. This whole realm of spirit, however, has to be posited by memory or dramatic faith. 29 p 173, underlined
[Locke:]
‘I ask anyone,’ he writes, ‘whether he is not invincibly conscious to himself of a different perception, when he looks on the sun by day, and thinks on it by night; when he actually tastes wormwood, or smells a rose, or only thinks on that savour or odour.’ N.B. Not dreams i.e. there is a difference in animal faith, besides the difference in vivality [sic]. 30 p 180, top
Angels, in a state of bliss, Needn’t think as hard as this. Adam and Eve, before the Fall Didn’t have to think at all. 31 p 180, marked Z
Although an essential instrument of our knowledge, the general idea is ‘something imperfect, which cannot exist.’ And this imperfection is inherent in its abstract nature, in virtue of which it only gives us a partial and mutilated representation of concrete reality. “Knowledge” is a poor thing after all: it concerns mere essence. 32 p 196
[Chapter VIII, “Locke and Scholasticism.”]
It is souls, apparently, that Gibson wishes should not be substances. Perhaps he is a socialist. 33 p 199
The conception of essence, like that of substance, finds a shelter in the unknown. The romantic passion is to reduce nature to experience, & ^ experience to^literature. 34 p 214
[Chapter IX, “Locke and Descartes.”]
Locke is more strict about pure intuition (sometimes) than Descartes, who thought it constrained existence.
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35 p 217, underlined
‘Thought,’ too, […] meant for Descartes, thought which was conscious [ of itself. ] The difficulties in which Descartes and his followers ^ ^ ^^ inevitably became entangled, when they attempted to explain the ? famil^ ^infant, iar experience of sleep, or the hypothetical soul-life of the unborn in accordance with this a priori position, offered an easy target for Locke’s criticism and ridicule. Idealists of the German type wish to introduce “thought” which is not conscious at all: but to be conscious of oneself in particular is not essential to consciousness. 36 p 223, underlined and marked
While refusing to follow Descartes in regarding thought as the essence of mind, he [Locke] admits the necessity of referring it as an activity to a substance beyond experience. This is just what Descartes refused to do, both in respect to mind and to matter. 37 pp 225–26, marked
It is, he [Locke] remarks, ‘in respect of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that God can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking, than that he should superadd to it another substance with the faculty of thinking.’ Evidently Locke believed that the agent in thought was the body: “mind” would than be merely a name for the thoughts of that body: so that Descartes’ definition of the soul would be right. 38 p 228, underlined and marked
While, then, the Cogito ergo sum placed in a strong light the reality of the mental life, the metaphysical interpretation of self-consciousness prevented this from being made the subject of serious study. That is, it was not favourable to psychologism, in which mind is regarded as independent of body. 39 p 230, underlined and marked
[…] instead of innate ideas forming a special class of ideas, innateness is a characteristic which belongs to all ideas as such. All the pigments of sensation are native to the psyche, not drawn from the external stimulus to sense: but as the psyche is herself an organism of matter, some of its products will be analogous to the life (not to the passive quality) of external bodies.
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40 p 237
[Chapter X, “Locke and Contemporary English Philosophy.”]
||On Locke’s relationship to the Cambridge Platonists.|| There is, then, no justification for the supposition that he first approached philosophy from a purely empirical point of view, and that a different and opposite direction was subsequently given to his thought from an external source. Yet it is plausible, on internal evidence. Locke is a pert empiricist sobered & brow-beaten by learned friends. Cf. Wm James. 41 p 249, underlined
[…] Locke shows that he as yet fails to realise the ideal priority of space to body, which Hobbes, however imperfectly, had sought to account for. Note the assumption, on Gibson’s part, that all philosophy is a single evolution of thought through necessary stages. 42 p 263
There is a general ignoring of the origin of Scholastic classification in Socratic moral philosophy. The perfections of things are their true essences: function, not composition, is the important point for human understanding. 43 p 275, underlined
[Chapter XI, “Locke and Leibniz.”]
The attempt to investigate the nature of knowledge as a preliminary to the construction of a theory of reality was entirely foreign to the conceptions of the continental thinker. A “knowledge” which may be investigated without a notion of what knowledge is or ought to be is rather experience or appearance than “knowledge.” Therefore to begin with it is to begin by assuming idealism. 44 p 282
||Gibson writes that Leibniz claimed actual existence for the innate, but that it must belong to sub-consciousness before it is consciously apprehended.|| Nothing can be innate in consciousness: the question is what senses or categories are innate in the psyche. 45 p 294, top
The pigments of experience } Commonsense The model position. The composition. The lady nature might already have painted herself with the very pigments with which the artist was about to portray her.
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46 p 307
Leibniz never appreciated the significance of the attempt to treat knowledge from the standpoint of an immanent criticism, which, however imperfectly carried out, constituted the true importance of the [Locke’s] Essay. Leibniz did not incline to literary psychology. 47 pp 310–11, underlined and marked
[Chapter XIII, “Locke and Kant.”]
||Kant knew Locke’s work only slightly; Locke’s Essay and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason|| are both expressions of complex and unstable [ thought ] positions, which do not admit of enunciation in a small ^ ^ ^ number of ^ simple propositions. 48 p 314, marked
[…] criticism must take its start from the recognition that knowledge essentially involves a relation of the mind to a reality, which has a nature and an existence independent of our cognition of it, but is nevertheless continuous with our experience. One part of “experience” may know another part. Cf. Croce: all knowledge is “historiography.” 49 p 325–26, underlined
As soon […] as it is recognised that the single idea is essentially incomplete, and requires for its comprehension a reference to the whole to which it belongs, it becomes evident that any method of dealing with ideas must possess throughout a logical character. Experience being no longer regarded as a composition of particular ideas, but being seen to contain in itself systematic principles of structure, the most ‘historical’ and ‘plain’ account of its contents must seek to render these principles objects of explicit thought, by a new species of logical reflection. The literary description of the world as it appears from some point of view: literary (even if analytical) because it treats ideas as experiencess, not as signs. 50 p 334, underlined
What is needed to correct Locke is not merely an insistence on the indispensability of the universal for knowledge, but a full recognition of its ‘secret’ presence in the content of immediate experience. English professors talk like the early Protestants, zealous to lay down the true gospel.
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André Gide
1:275
Amyntas Paris: [1906], 1927. Waterloo. Three marginalia.
1 p 143, marked
||In Algeria Gide smokes kief and describes his sense of well-being.|| Ce bien-être était fait, non point de satisfaction des désirs, mais d’évanouissement du désir et de renoncement à tout.1 1
This feeling resulted not from a satisfaction of desire, but from the vanishing of desire and complete renunciation.
André Gide
Si le grain ne meurt Two volumes. 1924. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[Markings in volume 1 are not by Santayana; no markings in volume 2.]
André Gide
Journal des faux-monnayeurs Paris: [1927], 1929. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
André Gide
Le Voyage d’Urien Paris: 1929 (6th edition). Waterloo. No marginalia.
[Some markings, but not by Santayana.]
Vincenzo Gioberti
Cours de philosophie, 1841–1842 Milan: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[Final half uncut.]
Jean Giraudoux
Les Cinq tentations de La Fontaine Paris: 1938. Waterloo. Three marginalia.
1 p 67
[With slight reference to context:]
Moth of Parnassus, as those bees whose ways Good Plato likens to the arts we praise, My soul is light and ever on the winds I go from flower to flower, from thing to thing . . What were true life?… To drink the sweetness with a tranquil mind While work and leisure in their seasons find.
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To pay just homage to the powers above And for the sake of self to quit light love To give up the impossible, and kill The hundred headed hydra of the will.1 1
Santayana translated the following: La Fontaine Papillon du Parnasse, et semblable aux abeilles, De qui le bon Platon raconte les merveilles, Je suis chose légère, et vole à tout sujet; Je vais de fleur en fleur et d’objet en objet. “Amiable Satirist” A poet-butterfly, and like those / buzzing bees / Whose thrifty arts the moral Plato please, / I’m light of wing; / in brevity discreet; / I sip flower after flower, and / dart from sweet to sweet. (Holzberger, Complete Poems of George Santayana, pp. 434–35.
Joseph Arthur (Comte de) Gobineau La Renaissance: scénes historiques Two volumes. Paris: [1874], 1929. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Gedichte Edited by Otto Pniower Berlin: [1905]. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
1 p xvii
[Introduction, Santayana paraphrases:]
no integrity only images & ideas. The Golden Goose
Victor Gollancz
[Literary journal] Columbus, Ohio: 1948. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Our Threatened Values London: 1946. Waterloo. Four marginalia, one drawing.
1 p 63, marked
||Georg Lukács is identified as|| “a representative theoretician, who was perhaps the sole brain behind Hungarian communism, [who] answered my
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question, as to whether lying and cheating of the members of the Party by their own leaders were admissible, by this statement: Communist ethics make it the highest duty to accept the necessity of acting wickedly. This, he said, was the greatest sacrifice which revolution asked from us.” 2 p 65
Dialectic develops intuitions concepts , sometimes logically ^ nothing ^ to do with the truth sometimes dramatically: it has of that intuition. So historiography may be dialectical: history never is. 3 p 67
[Drawing of Winston Churchill in right margin.]
J[ack] R[awlin] Goodman
A Self-Portrait New York: 1949. Waterloo. One marginale.
1 p 29, marked
Democracy may be blamed for its falling into disrepute. The egalitarianism which is the central theme of government by number leads directly into mass education, and mass education assumes that literacy can be taught apart from discrimination. Generations of cultural monsters are able to read both fact and fiction, but not to distinguish between them. Hirsch Loeb Gordon
The Maggid of Caro: The Mystic Life of the Eminent Codifier Joseph Caro as Revealed in His Secret Diary New York: 1949. Waterloo. Nine marginalia.
[Dedicated to Santayana, June 7, 1951.] 1 pp 314–15, marked
His [Caro’s: born 1488] was the life of an eternal student; he lived primarily for the Book and within the Book. His ambition was to understand the mysteries of the Book, raise its veil, and rule by the power of the Book and in its Name. Misdemeanor meant—detachment from the Book. Geoffrey Gorer
The Americans: A Study in National Character London: 1948. Waterloo. Six marginalia.
1 p 22
||Americans are not indignant at revelations of corruption among senators.|| Power corrupts money improves people.
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||America|| is masculine only in its grasping and demanding aspects. The American land itself—Columbia in an older iconography—is feminine; its possession has been on occasion wooing, on occasion seduction, and on occasion rape. Thomas Gray
Poems London: 1786. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Thomas Hill Green
Prolegomena to Ethics Edited by A. C. Bradley Oxford: 1890 (3rd edition). Georgetown. 267 marginalia.
[Signed, Avila 1895. Santayana’s careful, critical reading of Green’s book shows us a good deal about his pedagogy (e.g. the entry for 31 p 96); he used the summer of 1895 at Avila to prepare for his teaching at Harvard in the Fall. As the final marginale indicates, Green also suggested to him the “Idea of a little system of moral philosophy, The Life of Reason.”] 1 p 10
[“Introduction.”]
How singular that the doing of things because they ought to be done should require us to know anything but our own volitions and ideals—ineffectual in themselves, no doubt, but expressions of what is effectual in the dynamic aspect of existence. 2 p 11
As the first charm of accounting for what has previously seemed the mystery of our moral nature passes away, and the spirit of criticism returns, we cannot but enquire whether a being that was merely a result of natural forces could form a theory of those forces as explaining himself. That is, you grant that the naturalistic philosophy is only opposed by you on account of your prejudices. [Book I, “Metaphysics of Knowledge.”] [Chapter I, “The Spiritual Principle in Knowledge and in Nature.”] 3 p 15
Green here identifies the nature conceived as surrounding a given person with the world represented in that person’s mind: evidently two things. The present subject is of course always transcendental to the world it views; that is what
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makes nature a phenomenon. But the man as an object of knowledge is a part of that phenomenon. 4 p 20
[…] between the two senses of experience there is all the difference that exists between change and consciousness of change. […] Experience of the latter kind must be experience of matters of fact recognised as such. i.e. an unknown condition. The consciousness of change has a content, only change has a history. 5 p 21, underlined and marked
[…] consciousness of certain events cannot be anything that […] succeeds them. It must be equally present to all the events of which it is the consciousness. For this reason an intelligent experience, or experience as the source of knowledge, can neither be constituted by events of which it is the experience, nor be a product of them. Why? The author is here confusing the ideas and the object or cause. 6 p 21, marked
||The assumption of a primary series of events|| asserts a relation of cause and effect, in which the supposed cause lacks all the characteristics of a cause. It may be questioned whether we can admit anything as a cause which does not explain its supposed effect, or is not equivalent to the conditions into which the effect may be analysed. Oh, in this sense, what is a cause of what? 7 p 21, underlined and marked
Now a series of events of which there is no consciousness is certainly not a set of conditions into which consciousness can be analysed. And as little can it be an antecedent uniformly associated with consciousness in experience, for events of which there is no consciousness cannot be within experience at all. ! i.e. if I don’t know something you can’t know it. 8 pp 21–22, underlined
It seems necessary, then, to admit that experience, in the sense of a consciousness of events as a related series—and in no other sense can it help to account for the knowledge of an order of nature—cannot be explained by any natural history, properly so called. This phrase = “amount to”. The author’s philosophy allows nothing to account for anything which is not involved or contained in it. All relations would be for him intrinsic.
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9 p 29
[…] reflection upon the ‘perpetual flux’ of sensation suggests the view that it is not real in the same sense as its material conditions. This is a goal of thought. We think materialistically or we think theologically when we susbstitute an explanation or abstract scheme of experience for experience itself. 10 p 31
But a plurality of things cannot of themselves unite in one relation, nor can a single thing of itself bring itself into a multitude of relations. Cf. the Athanasian creed. 11 p 33, underlined
[…] with those who adhere to the opposition between the real and the work of the mind, and who at the same time cannot ignore the work of the mind in the constitution of relations, there arises a distinction between reality in some absolute sense—the reality of ‘things-in-themselves,’ […] and the ‘empirical’ reality of that which we distinguish from illusion, as standing in definite relations to the universe of our experience. By this Green means the transcendental mind, which is only the character of the universe abstracted from its details: not the human mind which is one of its parts. 12 pp 34–35, underlined and doubly marked
If there is such a thing as a connected experience of related objects, there must be […] in consciousness a unifying principle, which not only presents related objects to itself, but at once renders them objects and unites them in relation to each other […]; and which is single throughout the experience. i.e. before the experience is spread out! This confusion of a perpetual companion of events and their imaginative synthesis is noteworthy. If there were no historian their [sic] would be no history, in the literary sense, no synthesis of the events in the imagination. But does it follow that without the historian their [sic] could be no events and no experience? in other words, that the history cannot be a representation of anything actual beyond and before its own construction in the mind? 13 p 36, top
[Only vaguely related to Green’s immediate argument.]
The only great error in religion is the belief that it is true: ^ science ^ and popular suffers a little from the same illusion.
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Good science is practically valid: good religion is ide^ both are^ fictions of the mind. ^ ally significant: but ^ 14 p 37
||The antithesis between the known, apprehensible world, and the subject able to know it.|| The objective reality is a result, not a cause, of our thinking: but being a result, it is a valid result. We may by thinking reach the ideal of thought, i.e. the reality. In this reality the conditions of the process by which we came to know it must be somehow included. 15 p 37, underlined
[…] with the reduction of thought or spirit or self-consciousness to a result of nature, if such reduction were possible, we should be eliminating the only agent that we know as maintaining an identity with itself throughout a series of changes, or as a principle that can unite a manifold without cancelling its multiplicity. Here Green becomes groggy. 16 p 39, marked
||The whole aim of idealism|| is to articulate coherently the conviction of there being a world of abiding realities other than, and determining, the endless flow of our feelings. This explains the lack of criticism in the whole argument. Cf. Kant’s ethics. 17 p 40, underlined
||Green has followed Kant in enquiring into the meaning of an objective world,|| as distinguished from a world of unknowable ‘things-in-themselves’. We have followed him also, […] in maintaining that a single active self-conscious principle, by whatever name it be called, is necessary to constitute such a world, as the condition under which alone phenomena, i.e. appearances to consciousness, can be related to each other in a single universe. N.B. The equivocal phrase constitute means, according to the argument or the premises “know” according to the conclusion, “create”. The “self-conscious” could not be original, for it would have no content. You can’t begin by reflection. 18 p 42, top
Things-in-themselves are the excrement of experience.
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19 p 42, marked Z
Man weaves a web of his own and calls it a universe; but if the principle of this universe is neither ascertainable one with, nor in a known ^ of things-in-themselves, ^ manner dependent on, that there^is in truth no ^ observable universe at all, nor does there seem to be any reason why ^ there should ^not be any number of such independent creations. We have asserted the unity of the world of our experience only to transfer that world to a larger possible chaos. ^ Why not do ^just this and be honest? 20 p 49, marked Z
It becomes time to consider whether the characteristics of thought, even as exercised by us, are not rather to be sought in the unity of its object as presented to all men, and in the continuity of all experience in regard to that object, than in the incidents of an individual life which is but for a day, or in abilities of which any man can boast that he has more than his neighbour. That is: “Thought” means the order of any reality representable in thought. Thought means not thinking but thinkableness—not intelligence but intelligibility or intelligible existence. 21 p 54, top
Transcendentalism is the vapour of a religious decomposition. 22 p 54, underlined
||Green would define feeling as opposed to thought and in relation to thought, reflecting that the consciousness that constitutes reality can only be discussed in|| negative statements. That there is such a consciousness is implied in the existence of the world; […]. is suggested to our imagination—implied, at most, in our figurative words. 23 p 54, underlined and marked
If by nature we mean the object of possible experience, the connected order of knowable facts or phenomena— […] then nature implies something other than itself, as the condition of its being what it is. Of that something else we are entitled to say, positively, that it is a self-distinguishing consciousness; because the function which it must fulfil in order to render the relations of phenomena, and with them nature, possible, is one which, on however limited a scale, we ourselves exercise in the acquisition of experience, and exercise only by means of such a consciousness.
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N.B. It is a mythological pha[n]tom—a projection of ourselves behind our world. [Chapter II, “The Relation of Man, as Intelligence, to the Spiritual Principle in Nature.”] 24 p 72, underlined and marked
||The idea of unity and the state of the perceiving consciousness appear to be irreconcilable.|| It will be found, we believe, that this apparent state of the case can only be explained by supposing that in the growth of our experience, in the process of our learning to know the world, an animal organism, which has its history in time, gradually becomes the vehicle of an eternally complete consciousness. What we call our mental history is not a history of this consciousness, which in itself can have no history, but a history of the process by which the animal organism becomes its vehicle. ‘Our consciousness’ may mean either of two things; either a function of the animal organism, which is being made, gradually and with interruptions, a vehicle of the eternal consciousness; or that eternal consciousness itself, as making the animal organism its vehicle and subject to certain limitations in so doing, but retaining its essential characteristic as independent of time, as the determinant of becoming, which has not and does not itself become. !Here we reach the interesting part—the myth. But think of the contradictions: a changing consciousness is the process by which the body (something material, a figment of that same changing consciousness) becomes the vehicle (whatever that may be) of an eternally complete consciousness! It must be the vehicle of a part only: why not say, then, a copy of that part? 25 pp 72–73, underlined
||Consciousness, varying from moment to moment, consists in|| phenomena; in successive modifications of the animal organism, consciousness ^ media for the ^ which would not, it is true, be what they are if they were not realisation of an eternal consciousness, truth but which are not this con^ it is^ this latter consciousness, sciousness truth . On the other hand, ^ ^ ^ truth as so far realised in or communicated to us through modification of ^ the animal organism, that constitutes our acquired knowledge, or sci^ truth into^ which ence with the relations, characteristic of^ knowledge, ^ ^ once^ for all what time does not enter, which are not in becoming but are they are. How can consciousness be a modification of the body? Truth = frozen consciousness.
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26 p 74, marked
[…] we cannot suppose that those relations of facts or objects in consciousness, which constitute any piece of knowledge of which a man becomes master, first come into being when he attains that knowledge; […]. Why not? 27 pp 74–75
But the unchanging order is an order of relations; and, even if relations of any kind could be independent of consciousness, certainly those that form the content of knowledge are not so. This author has so little imagination that he doesn’t know there is such a thing. 28 p 78, underlined
||How a complex idea comes to realisation and may be learned.|| Whether he [the learner] is able to give such an account or no, depends on the development of his powers of reflection; and the idea is at work before it is reflected on. This is pure myth. Not an idea: a method of which the idea represents the goal. Cf. L of R. chapter on the inefficacy of ideas. e.g. in writing poetry. [Chapter III, “The Freedom of Man as Intelligence.”] 29 p 87, underlined
If there are reasons for holding that man, in respect of his animal nature, is descended from ‘mere’ animals—animals in whom the functions of life and sense were not organic to the eternal or distinctively human consciousness,—this does not affect our conclusion in regard to the consciousness of which, as he now is, man is the subject; […]. What? Is Green’s intention purer than the associations of his ideas and of his vocabulary? Let us hope so! 30 p 89, end of chapter
All this amounts, it seems, to nothing but saying that intelligence is different from non-intelligence, synthesis different from loose succession. [Book II, “The Will.”] [Chapter I, “The Freedom of the Will.”] 31 p 96, top
The subject of this page is the necessity of reason, representation, or reflection to institute moral action.
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32 p 96, underlined and marked
The motive in every imputable act for which the agent is conscious on reflection that he is answerable, is a desire for personal good in some form or other; and, however much the idea of what the personal good for the time is may be affected by the pressure of animal want, this want is no more a part or component of the desire than is the sensation of light or colour, which I receive in looking at this written line, a component part of my perception in reading it. Surprising! The content is not a component part of the natural function, but it [illegible] is of the total fact. N.B. Comment on this to the class. 33 p 99
The view which it is sought to convey may be made more plain by an instance. When Esau sells his birthright for a mess of pottage, […]. Hic incipit sermo.1 1
Here the sermon begins.
34 p 100
Since, however, it is not the hunger as a natural force, but his own conception of himself, as finding for the time his greatest good in the satisfaction of hunger, that determines the act, Esau recognises himself as the author of the act. He imputes it to himself, and it is morally imputable to him— […]. The hunger alone could not amount to a motive; there must be “sympathy with absent impulses represented in the mind”. But the other interests of Esau being in view, the hunger is the motive force of his new deviation from his normal habit—from his habitual clinging to his birthright. 35 p 102
||What do we mean when we speak of the human self? What by self, by man?|| We mean […] [ a certain reproduction of itself on the part of the ^ eternal self-conscious ^subject of the world—a reproduction of itself to which it makes the processes of animal life organic, and which is qualified and limited by the nature of those processes, but which is so far essentially a reproduction of the one supreme subject, implied in the existence of the world, that the product carries with it under all its limitations and qualifications the characteristic of being an object to itself. ] ^^ Use in L. of R. the initiation of an ideal movement which would culminate in the perfect comprehension and complete mastery of the world.
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36 p 109
||Green distinguishes between a strong desire and a strong character. The latter means|| that habitual concentration of a man’s faculties towards the fulfilment of certain purposes, good or bad, which commonly prevents the disturbance caused by strong desire from making its outward sign, from appearing in the man’s behaviour. And because a really firm character prevents even that incipient yielding to a desire which constitutes its persistency and strength. 37 p 111, marked
That moral action is a joint result of character and circumstances is not altogether an appropriate statement of it. It would be better to say that moral action is the expression of a man’s character, as it reacts upon and responds to given circumstances. We might thus prevent the impression which the ordinary statement, in default of due consideration, is apt to convey, the impression that a man’s character is something other than himself; that it is an alien force, which, together with the other force called circumstances, converges upon him, moving him in a direction which is the resultant of the two forces combined, and in which accordingly he cannot help being carried. Excellent [Chapter II, “Desire, Intellect, and Will.”] 38 p 135
A man (at Oxford) desires, let us suppose, to taste a bottle of fine wine, ^ of music, to see Athens, to do a service to a friend, to hear ^a certain piece […]. 39 p 151
A man, we will suppose, is acted on at once by an impulse to avenge an affront, by a bodily want, by a call of duty, […]. All this tedious repetition amounts to this: a part of a man is not the whole; an inefficacious inhibited tendency not an efficacious uninhibited one. To say that my wildest desire is not a part of me, not an expression of me, is utter rubbish. In vino veritas;1 our dreams are better manifestations of the “self” than our lives. 1
Wine reveals truth.
40 p 155
Characters: She cares for men as one would for animals sheep , and for women as one would for babies. His pref^ , erences^ are not matters of taste, but of opportunity for the
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action of his own benevolence. He has a great heart for the general, and a great insensibility to the particular. Love will never be with him a great passion, for it will never amount to the concentration of the universe in one object. The idol of many, he is himself incapable of idolatry. With the sympathy for human aspiration deeply possessing his heart, he is incapable of aspiring himself to anything definite nor does he distinguish in men the rational, distinguished and austere life, from the vulgarly efficient. Selective in his own satisfactions, he is indiscriminate in his coordination of them; he takes and he leaves, but he does not subordinate them to one another or to a highest good. There is idealism in his heart, but none in his intelligence. Sept. 1895.1 1
This has only the vaguest thematic reference to Green’s text; it might be a sketch for the character of Peter Alden, Oliver’s father, in The Last Puritan, which Santayana was probably beginning to write c. 1895.
[Book III, “The Moral Ideal and Moral Progress.”] 41 p 167, marked
The voluptuary must have his ideas of pleasures, unconnected with self-satisfaction, before he can seek self-satisfaction (where it is not to be found) in the realisation of those ideas; just as much as the saint must have ideas, not of pleasures but of services due to God and man, before he can seek self-satisfaction in their fulfilment. (where it is also not to be found.) Most men, however, at least in ^their ordinary conduct, are nei^ ther voluptuaries nor saints; and we are falling into a false antithesis if, having admitted (as is true) that the quest of self-satisfaction is the form of all moral activity, we allow no alternative (as Kant in effect seems to allow none) between the quest for self-satisfaction in the enjoyment of pleasure, and the quest for it in the fulfilment of a universal practical law. Ordinary motives fall neither under the one head nor the other. They are interests in the attainment of objects, without which it seems to the man in his actual state that he cannot satisfy himself, and in attaining which, because he has desired them, he will find a certain pleasure, but only because he has previously desired them, not because pleasures are the objects desired. The motor force of ideas is dependent on present their ^ mechanical (and often emotional) connections; it ^is not dependent on the eventual pleasure of their realisation, nor on the anticipation of that pleasure. Only we often mistake the felt attraction of an idea for an expected pleasure in it[s] realisation—which cannot come if the idea is that of death, or sleep, or the facing of some tragic interview, or the seeing of one’s own guilt.
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42 p 170, underlined
|| J. S. Mill differs from the Benthamites on differences of kind in pleasures, believing that such differences affect the value of pleasures. Mill believes that pleasures involving the higher faculties are superior to sensual ones, even though a greater component of discontent is involved.|| We naturally accept such an appeal because we cannot help thinking of the man whose preference Mill describes, as better in himself than one more ‘sensual,’ and of the ‘higher faculties’ as intrinsically of more value; in other words, because we regard the attainment of a certain type of character or some realisation of the possibilities of man, not pleasure, as the end by relation to which goodness or value is to be measured. Not his possibilities of “pleasure” but of “satisfaction”. The sot’s life is desirable qua happy: it is undesirable qua wretched. He is not satisfied. If he could be satisfied he ought to be a sot, and is a jolly good fellow for the time being. The existence of sots is no more an unmixed evil than that of saints is an unmixed good. Wouldn’t you, O Green, raise Falstaff a monument? 43 p 173
On Utilitarian principles we all made a great mistake when we set up any dignity (or any life) at all. And as to dignity, the coros1 have more than we. Possibly Greek (which could mean “sot”).
1
[Chapter I, “Moral Good.”] 44 p 178
We cannot think of an object as good, i.e. such as will satisfy desire, without thinking of it as in consequence such as will yield pleasure; but its pleasantness depends on its goodness, not its goodness upon the pleasure it conveys. […] while according to the Hedonistic view desire presupposes an imagination of pleasure. Hedonism in psychology is that: in ethics it is the doctrine that pleasure is the only thing that ought to be pursued, or rather, that nothing ought to be pursued that does not contribute to produce the maximum of pleasure. Pleasure is the good in act; the good pleasure in potentiality. But morality is really founded on pain, not on pleasure. 45 p 179, marked
The true good […] is an end in which the effort of a moral agent can really find rest. Good
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46 p 183, marked
||The life of the voluptuary is self-defeating. Animals are never voluptuaries.|| They are not objects to themselves, as men are, and therefore cannot set themselves, as the voluptuary does, to seek self-satisfaction in the enjoyment of all the pleasures that are to be had. It is one and the same principle of his nature—his divine origin, in the sense explained—which makes it possible for the voluptuary to seek self-satisfaction, and thus to live for pleasure, at all, […]. How like this is to that voluptuary of action, the “Streber”,1 who thinks to find the highest good in perpetual dissatisfactions! This is the irrationality of action, the other that of passion. 1
Striver.
47 p 184, marked
However meagrely the perfection, the vocation, the law may be conceived, the consciousness that there is such a thing [as moral perfection] so far as it directs the will, must at least keep the man to the path in which human progress has so far been made. It must keep him loyal in the spirit to established morality, industrious in some work of recognised utility. And this farther, dear G. implies your assertion of that highest ultimate good to which we alike aspire! 48 p 201, marked
The very existence of mankind presupposes the distinction between the sexes; […]. N.B. An example of the use of presupposes. History and logic are thus confused by the Hegelian phraseology. 49 p 205, top
The fallacy that pleasure is the only good is like the fallacy that money is the only wealth: perfect good would absorb pleasure and destroy it as a separated emotion just as absolute wealth would absorb money and make its function superfluous. [Chapter III, “Duty to Humanity.”] 50 p 218, underlined
||Our duty to recognise and to contribute to the common good.|| Conscience is uneasy at its violation, as it would not have been, according to all indications, in the case, let us say, of a Greek who used his slave as a chattel, though according to his lights the Greek might be as conscientious as any of us. This is an Englishman to a Greek!
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51 p 221, underlined
||On the workings of the brotherhood of man in the community.|| If we admire these capabilities less than the qualities of command, it is perhaps because we have not adjusted our admirations to what we must yet admit to be the divine plan of man’s development. Twenty years more experience of this “divine plan” changed all that. 52 p 227
||Green debates the Utilitarian view of equality.|| This is a good argument for aristocracy. It is the same whether it be of persons or pleasures. Not every person, not every pleasure can or should count for one, unless they are equally ideal. [Chapter IV, “Pleasure and Common Good.”] 53 p 238, underlined and marked
Could a contemplated succession of pleasures, […] offer this relatively permanent satisfaction? […] Could he be deluded by his own faculty of summing the stages of a succession into supposing that a series of pleasures, of which only one will be in enjoyment at each stage of the series, and none at all at the end, is the more lasting good of which he is in search, and for the sake of which he calls in question the value of the pleasure for the time most attractive in imagination? Strong1 1
In Santayana’s much later hand.
54 p 251
||The question of pleasure versus the common good.|| This whole question reduces itself to this: Reason demands its satisfaction as sense demands its pleasure: a systematic pursuit of pleasure is a subjection of reason to sense: a systematic pursuit of satisfaction is a subjection of pleasure to reason. Both are good and reason, recognising this, is the just guide. 55 p 262, underlined and marked
The conviction of a community of good for all men can never be really harmonised with our notions of what is good, so long as anything else than self-devotion to an ideal of mutual service is the end by reference to which those notions are formed. (service to what?) Vicious circle?
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56 p 280
||Green defines service as self-renunciation, whether in the cause of the state or the cause of the kingdom of Christ.|| Anyone would think from this that there was no modern life but the christian. [Chapter V, “Temperance and Self-Denial.”] 57 p 289
||Only with changes in law to allow equality before it|| and a more real possibility for women to make their own career in life, will the rule of chastity, which our consciences acknowledge, become generally enforced in practice through the more universal refusal of women to be parties to its violation. The horror of lust as an experience of the man is the real source of our more absolute chastity. In Christianity marriage is a license. 58 p 295
There is urgent need in all this to specify the ultimate gain of this greater human capacity. It is the nearer approach to perfect self-satisfaction. 59 pp 297–98, marked
But it would seem at least possible that, according to the plan of the world, the perfection of the human soul may involve the constant presence of a lower nature, consisting in certain tendencies, never indeed dominant, but in conflict with which alone the higher energies of man can emerge. heresy 60 p 308, underlined and marked Z
[Green sums up:]
[…] ||morality is based on the action in humanity of an idea of true good involving man’s fullest possibilities. But it acts in man|| only as a demand unconscious of the full nature of its object. The demand is indeed from the outset quite different from a desire for pleasure. It is at its lowest a demand for some well-being which shall be common to the indvidual desiring it with others; […]. It is a sense of pain—a dissatisfaction. Why not say this, O Green? As you put it it sounds like a disembodied aim; an aim not in our minds. “No sé lo que quiero, pero sé lo que no quiero.”1 That is its origin. 1
I don’t know what I want, but I know what I don’t want.
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61 p 311
||Green enunciates an ideal society, one in which life would be|| determined by one harmonious will—a will of all which is the will of each— […] i.e. a will having for its object the perfection which it alone can maintain. Here is base Hegelianism. Prussia is the type of heaven. [Book IV, “The Application of Moral Philosophy to the Guidance of Conduct.”] 62 p 320
If the aim of goodness is to be good, what determines the goodness? That is to define by the term to be defined. This determination you really find in human nature and reason, which makes definite demands, the satisfaction of which is your aim & would involve happiness. [Chapter II, “The Practical Value of a Theory of the Moral Ideal.”] 63 p 338, marked Z
||Another summary of the doctrine of the good and its purpose.|| This is a distinctly modern ideal; it is contemporary only, & that of the “Christian workers”. 64 p 339
The ancients asked, What is the good? You answer To be devoted to it! [Chapter III, “Hedonism.”] 65 p 379
The fact is we cannot know what is best for the future, since we do not know the future conditions. What we know is what experience has led us to expect. 66 p 393, underlined
||Green refers to|| a desire which the Hedonist must ignore. How can he ignore any desire? 67 end-page
Idea of a little system of moral philosophy, The Life of Reason. Part I. The origin and nature of Reason or of the moral sense II. The ideal object of Reason, or the highest good ^ of Reason, or the freedom of the will III. The^power IV. The rewards of Reason, or the sanctions of morals. V. The emancipation of Reason, or immortality.
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1896 Part I. §1 The predominance of man over other animals has always been attributed to his Reason. Other animals surpass him in strength, in the range and accuracy of their sensibility, in their length of life and in fixity of temper temper. It is not only in their bodies that some beasts excel us; they excel us no less in the constancy and perfection of what they have of soul. The ox (calm) The dog (God) Alyse Gregory
Wheels on Gravel London: 1938. Waterloo. Eight marginalia.
1 p 49, marked
There are friendships based solely on some particular interest shared in common, and there are friendships that must be sustained purely on evasion and inspired duplicity. 2 pp 51–52
||Friendship among women|| is based on a sad and supple understanding, an intelligent and witty understanding, courteous, convoluted, and composed. They know each other’s shame, and don’t mind. The men are “you’s”; the women are “we’s”. The men are physical forces with minds, the women are motives with bodies. 3 p 73, marked
[The writer quotes Nietzsche:]
“Life means for us constantly to transform into light and flame all that we are or meet with.” Flame exists by combustion, and a cold light can be but moonlight, and reflected. So cold thoughts are all thoughts at second hand. Bernhard Groethuysen
Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France Paris: 1927 (2nd edition). Waterloo. Ten marginalia.
1 p 163
C’est le bourgeois, le bourgeois, maître d’un monde nouveau, que Dieu et le démon semblent avoir également déserté, et qui n’ayant ni pécheurs
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ni saints, ne connaîtra plus ni les angoisses misères , ni les ^ ^ extases grandeurs de jadis.1 ^ ^ 1 It is the bourgeois, the bourgeois, master of a new world which both God and the devil appear to have abandoned, and who, having neither sinners nor saints, will never again know the anguish miseries nor the ecstasies greatness of the past. Here ^ ^ ^ ^ Santayana’s insertions recall Balzac’s novel, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1839).
René Guénon
Introduction générale à l’étude des doctrines Hindoues Paris: 1921. Waterloo. 112 marginalia.
1 p 41, marked
||Guénon on the lack of western historical method in the Orient; mss. are not dated according to their first appearance.|| This shows the professorial character of Wissenschaft:1 it is a technical Aufgabe2 not a thirst for truth. The distinction between science and metaphysics is that in metaphysics experimentation is impossible, for it is beyond physics. 1 2
Scholarship. Task.
2 p 41, doubly marked
We too, and for the same reason, are beyond experimentation. 3 p 111, marked
||Religion in the Occident relies on consolation.|| Truth, in itself, has nothing to do with consolation. If someone finds it to be such, so much the better for him, to be sure, but that consolation is not derived from doctrine; it comes from himself and from his individual disposition. 4 p 127, marked
||Metaphysics cannot have rapport with psychology, physics, nor physiology.|| 5 p 129, marked
||In all the domain of science, logic and mathematics offer the most plausible rapport with metaphysics.|| 6 p 131, doubly marked
||Nothing is more relative and contingent in all philosophy than morals.|| 7 p 131, doubly marked
||Among orientals, the point of view is specifically moral.|| i. e. superstitious.
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8 p 137, doubly marked
||Questions of momentary importance.|| Ne peut être vraiment métaphysique, nous le répétons encore, que ce qui est absolument stable, permanent, indépendant de toutes les contingences, et en particulier des contingences historiques; ce qui est métaphysique, c’est ce qui ne change pas, et c’est encore l’universalité de la métaphysique qui fait son unité essentielle, exclusive de la multiplicité des systèmes philosophiques comme de celle des dogmes religieux, et, par suite, sa profonde immutabilité. Quote 1 Cannot be genuinely metaphysical, we repeat again, for metaphysics is absolutely stable, permanent, independent of all contingency, and in particular, historical contingency. Metaphysics does not change, and it is again its universality that constitutes its essential unity, quite exclusive of the multiplicity of philosophical systems, as of religious dogmas, and it follows, its profound immutability.
9 p 144, marked
||The idea of the infinite can only be expressed by negation.|| Every direct affirmation is of necessity the affirmation of something, that is to say an affirmation particular and determined; but the negation of a determination or of a limitation is properly the negation of a negation, thus a true affirmation, since the negation of all determination is equivalent at base to absolute and total affirmation. ? [Chapter X, “La Réalisation métaphysique.”] 10 p 155
Intellectual intuition is even more immediate than sensory intuition, for it is beyond the distinction of subject and object that the latter permits to exist. It is at one and the same time the means of knowledge and knowledge itself, and in the process, subject and object are united and identified. Does this mean that the self disappears towards the object, so that the object is reputed to absorb it, when in reality the Being that for a moment was the object simply remains what it always was? In this case, what an abuse of the term “knowledge” to identify it with what is without knowers! 11 p 157
||Theory since Aristotle is only a method, and incomplete,|| alors qu’elle ne devrait normalement constituer qu’une préparation, […].1 Is this ought self-evident metaphysics? 1
Whereas normally it ought to be only a preparation, ....
12 p 177, marked
||Metaphysics excludes the hypothetical.||
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13 p 181
||In the Vedas, the four elements are amplified by a fifth, ether.|| Are the Vedas infallible in physics, as well as in “metaphysics”? 14 p 187
||Guénon challenges official orientalists for being their own authorities.|| C’est un peu votre cas.1 1
That’s rather your own case.
15 p 194
||The law of harmony may legitimately be translated as Dharma.|| This is not clear, because the principle of Dharma is not specified. How is it determined, if not by actual operation? 16 p 202
||Europeans are absurd in their indignation that a man may not rise from a lowly caste to a higher one, not realizing that he would have to cease to be the man that he is.|| If they are different in nature: but the question is whether they are, or how they become so. 17 p 210, marked Z
||The god Shiva is not a destroyer, as he is commonnly understood to be, but one who transforms.|| If he transforms, he destroys. 18 p 211, marked
||When transformation occurs, you pass beyond form.|| You pass into the reservoir or sea of forms. 19 p 211
||On the definition of “shaktis” and “shaktas.”|| Wives & children of pure Being. There is something decidedly unpleasant and ugly about all this. 20 p 236
||Attributes proceed from the same principle.|| This Neo-Platonic language is disturbing: it is rather the substance & essence that bring the single principle into the world: they choose and discriminate the parts of pure Being which they manifest.
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21 p 239
If one takes the word “atom” in its proper sense, that which is “indivisible”, as modern physicists no longer do, but which one must do here, one may say that an atom, before being without parts, must also be without extension. Now a sum of elements without extension will not form an extension; if the atoms are such that they must be by definition, it is then impossible that they may come to form a body. You would prove in this way that an umbrella can’t keep out the rain if made of threads that wouldn’t do so individually. Not that atoms are without extension but they count, in any case, as points occupied in space, and distinguishing its regions by their presence. 22 p 248, underlined
[…] we have noted the fundamental distinction that must be made between “Ishwara”, which is Being, and “Brahma”, which est au dela de l’Etre.1 Beyond :2 but if it is anything it can’t be beyond Being. No doubt pure Being does not exist, and it is not identical with any other essence. 1
Is beyond Being. Mind.
2
23 p 259, marked Z
In order for a thing to be a cause, it must actually exist, and that is why the true causal relationship cannot be conceived as a relationship of simultaneity. “Cause” is inherent ground not source. 24 p 259, marked Z
If we conceive of it as a relationship of succession, there would be an instant in which something that did not exist would produce something that does not exist any more, a supposition manifestly absurd. Argument, not observation. Eppur si muove!1 1
And yet it moves!
25 p 297, marked
||Astronomical phenomena are symbols of something of another order, having analogy to all degrees of being.|| “Analogy”—a literary & imaginative thing—at the root of the world! 26 p 317, marked
||On the westernization of the vêdânta: some western interpreters arrive at mere religiosity, a debased deism. Such conclusions are only individual and lack authority, ignoring completely the realization that is the sole end of the true vêdânta.||
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René Guénon
L’Homme et son devenir selon le Vêdânta Paris: 1925. Waterloo. 136 marginalia.
1 p 23, marked
[On symbolism in the Vêdânta:]
Mind is intrinsically secondary. 2 p 27
||Traditional education according to the Vêdânta is initiatic, the apprehension of sacred knowledge.|| i.e. it is not the communication of facts & formulae; but practice in understanding. 3 pp 27–28, marked
The name Upanishads means that they are destined to destroy ignorance by supplying the means to approach supreme Understanding; and while it is not a question of approaching that entity, since it is indeed incommunicable in its essence, so that no one may attain it other than in and by oneself. Of course: and only each time on each occasion, altho’ the truth discerned be the same. It is like perceiving the beautiful: which is indeed a part of the spiritual discipline of nature. 4 p 35
[On Guénon’s phrase, l’ordre métaphysique:]
Does he mean ideal? 5 p 36
[The distinction between Moi and Soi1:] [Of Soi:] Spirit? Being? 1
I and self.
6 pp 36–37
||Soi is defined as the principle by which each exists in his own domain, all the states of being; not only the manifest states that we describe, but the non-manifest states, embracing all the possibilities that are not susceptible to manifestation.|| The realm of essence is a mode of Being. 7 p 37, underlined
Le «Soi», considéré par rapport à un être comme nous venons de le faire, est proprement la personnalité; […].1 i.e. The substance within me. 1
The “Soi,” considered in relation to a being such as we are coming to define it, is correctly the personality.
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8 p 40, marked
||Guénon attacks the pseudo-metaphysicians of the West for either confusing the Universal with things that really pertain to the individual, or using the term “general” to describe an extension of the individual.|| This might serve as an ill-tempered defense of the realm of essence. A universal which is not a class or a collection must be an essence. 9 p 43, top
[Santayana summarizes:]
The non-manifest, the informal, the incorporeal are terms meaning the rest-not-this: the group has no unity save in opposition to the given: it is background-as-such. But it is indefinite richer [sic], in itself, than the term to which it is opposed. 10 p 55
[Santayana translates into his own language an opaque passage of Guénon:]
Spirit, which cannot appear and possesses none of the attributes of appearance nevertheless is the principle of appearance since nothing that appears appears save by appearing to the spirit. Intuition is the actuality of appearance. 11 p 58
||The terms Purusha, Prakriti indicate a polarization of Being.|| That Being s’d be regarded as polarised in spirit and matter shows that we are in the region of myth. Why s’d Being be so polarised, rather than radiated in infinite ways? 12 p 58–59, underlined
Manu […] ne doit aucunement être regardé comme un personnage ni comme un «mythe», mais bien comme un principe, qui est proprement l’Intelligence cosmique, image réfléchie de Brahma (et en réalité une avec Lui), s’exprimant comme le Législateur primordial et universel.1 The Logos cannot be identical with Being, which is only one essence: or if taken as Substance, not a realm of ideas at all, like the Logos. 1 Manu must by no means be regarded as an individual nor as a “myth”, but rather as a principle which is specifically the cosmic Intelligence, an image reflected by Brahma (and in reality one with Him), expressing himself as primordial and universal Legislator.
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13 pp 62–63, underlined
||The term Mûla-Prakriti is primordial nature,|| productive sans être ellemême production.1 There are glints of naturalism in all philosophies. 1
Productive without itself producing.
14 p 68, underlined
||The concept Sânkhya has nothing in common with the monads of Leibniz, in whom|| the “individual substance” is seen as quite complete, forming a sort of closed system, a conception incompatible with any notion truly metaphysical. i.e. ideal. Certainly the division of spirit into persons is the work of matter. The intuitions of “monads”, without bodies, would not hang together in persons, nor be distributable among persons. 15 p 69, top
N.B. The latent materialism of idealists is here confessed frankly. The good Indians are not idealists: they are honest men. 16 p 72, marked
[On the term, Prakriti, the totality of all possibilities of manifestation:]
Being is not only one essence, but all essences, the realm of essence: and if we take mere Being first, we may regard all other essences as potential in it. Being so conceived, simple but qualifiable, would be Prakriti. 17 p 73
||Atmâ is defined in the Upanishad as|| Ce par quoi tout est manifesté, et qui n’est soi-même manifesté par rien.1 Spirit. 1
That by which all is manifested, and which itself is manifested by nothing.
18 p 88
[On the terms tanmatras and bhutas:]
Is all this more than a cumbrous way of saying “essences which may be given by the senses?” 19 p 89, underlined
||For the law of Manu, as for Aristotle, pure intellect is transcendent and has for its specific object knowledge of universal principles; this knowledge, which is not discursive, is obtained directly and immediately by intellectual intuition, which, let us say to avoid any confusion, has nothing in common with the alleged
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“intuition”, sensitive and vital, which plays such a great role in theories, clearly anti-metaphysical, of certain contemporary philosophers. Grammar of thought hypostatised. Bergson smacked. 20 pp 92–93
||The term swapiti means “he sleeps,” but further, sleep indicates that|| «il est entré dans son propre («Soi»)».1 Here the feeling that spirit is a sort of tension in matter is well expressed; because in sleep the tension is unified, without being removed, as in death. Deep sleep is therefore “pure spirit”, spirit ready but unemployed. 1 He has entered into himself (Soi). For “Soi”, see the entries for pp. 36–37, above.
21 p 105, underlined
[…] toutes choses sont Brahma, mais aussi c’est cella seul qui est leur réalité profonde; […].1 As all parts of space are in space without dividing it. 1
All things are Brahma, but also it is that alone that is their profound reality.
22 p 141
[Santayana’s paraphrase:]
Dreaming is better than waking (because more inwardly controlled & expressive) and sleep is better than dreaming (for the same reason—dreams even, being external distractions). 23 p 142, marked
||The “Soi” is completely and exclusively genuine, but|| a conception such as Buddhism cannot possibly attain to that state, Buddhism which withdraws into the consideration of external and internal objects, knowledge of which constitutes respectively the state of waking and the state of dream, and which, failing to go beyond an ensemble of these two states, remains completely bound by the limitations of human individuality. The omission of substance in Buddhism is an imperfection: but it is harmless in a purely moral doctrine. You are not yourself clear on moral questions, since your “metaphysics” confuses facts with essences, & these with spiritual dignities. 24 pp 142–43, marked
||Certain modern philosophers set up an opposition between “real” and “ideal” that simply suits their preconceptions of hierarchy in the universe.||
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Excellent. But “real” often means “existent”: then “ideal” may be opposed to it both ontologically and morally. 25 p 148, underlined
La Béatitude est faite de toutes les possibilitiés d’Âtmâ, elle est, pourrait-on dire, la somme même de ces possibilites; […].1 But how can a sum, including all torment, for instance, be bliss? Âtmâ is merely the sum of non-realisations of cyphers, the great cypher OM. 1 The state of bliss is made of all the possibilities of Âtmâ. It is, one might say, the very sum of these possibilities.
26 p 149, marked
||Âtmâ is “au delà de”1 any phenomena whatsoever, and beyond any formal manifestation.|| Au delà is easily said: you may fervently prefer what is not existence. But what is it? Escape! 1
Beyond.
27 pp 150–51, marked
||More on the “Soi,” sleep, dream, and transfiguration, which is transformation from the conditions of individual existence, the realisation|| of the permanent and immutable possibility of which the body is only a transitory expression in its manifested mode. i.e. if substance did not lend itself to give them actuality, they would be mere essences. Disrespect for mere essences is the mystic and at the same time the fleshly passion. It is vulgar: and this author, for all his merits, has not a distinguished mind, and is not a poet, as the Indians were. 28 p 152
||Guénon asserts that in modern philosophy the term “subjective” and “objective” have exchanged meanings.|| For once your learning is at fault. 29 p 154, underlined
[…] Prâjna est le Seigneur (Îshwara) de tout […]; Il est omniscient (car tout Lui est présent dans la Connaissance intégrale), et Il connaît directement tout les effets dans la cause principielle totale, […].1 i.e. sub forma boni,2 not in their respective essences. This philosophy cheats at every turn. It is a blinding legerdemain of names & conceptions.
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1 Prâjna is the Lord God (Îshwara) of all; He is all-knowing (for His entirety is present in the integral Consciousness), and He knows at once all the effects in the total, principal cause. 2 Under the form of the good.
30 pp 166–67
[Santayana paraphrases:]
Subjectification, or recognition that all data are perceptions of the self, is the first step in enlightenment. The conviction that they are nothing else, i. e. are illusions like dreams, is the second step. 31 p 177, marked
||On the state of the individual after death: it is in a state resembling what it was before birth. Human individuality is not in question.|| e.g. all the truths & moral values of life. [With reference to the state of being beyond human individuality.] 32 p 177
||The subject is in a state of “durée.”1|| Like musical compositions, which are essences. The saved have always been saved. Cf. the instinct that regards the souls of the departed saints as in heaven now, before the Last Judgement. 1
Continuance.
33 p 187
Deliverance by degrees (kramamukti) […]. The Indian Purgatory. 34 p 189
||On the doctrine of leaving the self after death and assuming another form.|| This reversal of the natural order is also Platonic. This is the true order for inner attention. 35 p 191, underlined
Pre-existence is only virtual. Está haciendo culebrinas en el aire.1 1
It is making zig-zags in the air.
36 pp 196–97, underlined
||Beings are transformed, not destroyed, in successive states,|| dilaté au delà de toute limité1 […].
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jusqu’à la dernière limite de la dilatation!2 Dilated, but how thin Is the soul freed from sin! 1
Dilated beyond any limit. Unto the ultimate limit of dilation!
2
37 p 197
[End of chapter:]
How unaesthetic a race must be that thinks the loss of form is no destruction! 38 p 213
||The houris as equivalent to Apsards, or celestial nymphs.|| Are Houris only formless possibilities? What a disappointment for the Faithful! Perhaps he means “possibilities of informality.” 39 p 218, marked
Religious conceptions are subject to a transposition in which they become more profound, a sense related to the scriptures on which they are founded; they also may be transposed in such a way as to lose their specifically religious character. Certainly the great religious writers (when really religious and great) understood the spiritual life and used myth only as a vehicle for expressing it and distinguishing its phases. 40 p 223
There is no place for moral considerations in metaphysics. “Metaphysics” is then logic, the theory of Essence. 41 p 231, marked
Action and its results are equally transitory and momentary. Understanding, to the contrary, is permanent and definitive; it is the same as its result, which is not distinct from it. Because it takes us out of time. 42 p 236, underlined
||Deliverance, or union is to be seen as a state of perfection, above faith or belief.|| It matters little that such states be actually manifested, or that they may not exist, for it is only with respect to permanent and immutable possibilities that they should be seen metaphysically. Every form of existence “is” pure Being and might be the fulcrum for moving into pure Being by dropping the form which defines that state, and keeping only its substance—pure Being. For this substance is not active matter,
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but the specious matter of the essence conceived. “Metaphysics” is a play of intuitions, not a search for facts. 43 p 245, underlined
||Karma, freedom from action, is a consideration forced by|| the very conditions of existence of the individual human being. Vous n’êtes pas très malin.1 Action is the essence of existence: it is external changing relations that sustain the organism and the mind. The flux, with the passions which express it in the soul, is the Root of all Evil. 1
You are not very wicked.
44 p 252
[Santayana’s paraphrase and criticism:]
If the spirit is all it knows, how curious that, in order to become itself, it has to cease to know anything! 45 p 254, top
All souls look for Thee in vain & possess Thee unawares For the heart of them is thine & the form of them is theirs. René Guénon
Les États multiples de l’être Paris: 1932. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Martin Gumpert
The Anatomy of Happiness New York: 1951. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Augusto Guzzo
Il pensiero di B. Spinoza Florence: 1924. Waterloo. 208 marginalia.
1 p 39
[Only slightly relevant to the text:]
This shows better than the Ethics that a mythical background exists for substance in S. It is God conceived as logically and eulogistically complete. The substantiality of actual fact is excluded, I think, on the contrary that only particular irrational facts are substantial and certain. But of course they are not necessary. That is what S. “exacts”.
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2 p 51, underlined
Dalla perfezione dell’oggetto concepito;1 […]. Isn’t this intrinsic goodness of objects contrary to S’s doctrine of things being good because desired, not vice versa? 1
On the perfection of conceived [or imagined] objects.
3 p 57, underlined
[…] i beni finiti1 […]. Material: it is ideality not infinity that removes competition. Infinity removes distinction, & therefore form & value. 1
The finite goods.
4 p 77, underlined
[…] niente esiste senza che una causa specifica le faccia esistere,1 […]. formalis? 2 S. doesn’t seem to care whether he is talking logic or physics. 1
Nothing exists without a specific cause. Formal.
2
5 p 80
||The suggestion that existence and essence in terms of duration are similar or identical|| nulla di diverso.1 N.B. This suggests a new idea. “Existence” = essences is eternal “Temporal existence” is only a momentary enjoyment of existence so that it is largely non-existence. It is borrowing an essence and not being one. 1
Not of diversification.
6 p 83
[Santayana interprets the text:]
The totality is absolutely contingent, but every part of it is involved in that totality. Words, words, words. 7 p 90, underlined
||On the idea of perfect man,|| un ens rationis.1 The point is not that we form this ideal, but that we innately desire and tend to pursue it and therefore, call it good. 1
A rational being.
8 p 103
||Concerning man liberated from passions in God.|| O celeste prision, O ferri amati! In voi la libertà trova il amor mio.1 1
O heavenly prison, O beloved irons! / In you liberty discovers my love.
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9 p 114
This is a false dichotomy. God exists in the totality of his attributes & modes, not only in each mode separately. The totality of changes cannot change. The definition implied by Guzzo here, that Existence = distinction is not Spinoza’s. S. had the notion of intensive being. A fact & the whole mass of facts, exist because they assert themselves. Perhaps for this reason he could confuse essence with existence, since all essences assert themselves as possibles. 10 p 116, underlined
[…] se l’essenza è isolata dalle cose che ne dipendono, di che cosa mai essa è più essenza?1 Essences are not essentially essences of things; they are forms of being, each individuated by its own quality. Guzzo falls here into the notion that essences are abstractions. 1
If an essence is isolated from the thing on which it is contingent, of what object is it the essence? 11 p 121, marked Z
||Guzzo’s gloss on the processes of perfection in Spinoza’s Ethics.|| Perfection is relative. That which is a perfect instance of law of motions may be an imperfect stage towards a particular end. You might as well ask: Why if a seed is a perfect seed does it ever grow into a plant? And why should we call budding or opening a movement toward perfection in the flower? A bud is a perfect bud. Why does it want to grow different? 12 p 123, bottom
The worship of nature & necessity is a part of the relative animal ethics of man: it arises when a man, seeing his inevitable limitations, sympathises more with the inhuman order than with the human desire to escape from it, and feels immortal in accepting his own death. Spinoza no doubt had a way of speaking that is superstitious in regard to the “perfection” of everything: it is “perfect” in them to be imperfect when something else breaks them in two. 13 p 146
[To Guzzo’s phrase, “l’estrema fragilità,” Santayana adds:]
Of all human judgments & preferences, for even those that nature imposes, experience may repent of and disallow.
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14 p 152
||How the abstract awareness of certainty arises.|| Mit diesem trunken Leibe Sieht Helenen in jedem Weibe.1 1
With this drunken body / He sees Helens in every woman.
15 p 174, marked
||Guzzo comments on the increasing rigor of Spinoza’s thought.|| 16 p 176
S. held that all reality contains thought: thought accompanies every part of reality: not that reality is only thought. Does he say anywhere that thought knows all reality? That seems contrary to his general view. 17 p 177
[Santayana paraphrases Spinoza:]
The universe is its own measure of perfection. 18 p 184
||Spinoza and the Cartesian idea of extension.|| Confusion between extension & the measure of it. Descartes’ “extension” is an essence. It ought not to be capable of measure. 19 p 190, underlined
La “verità” è la certezza che noi abbiamo delle cose.1 Monstrous for S. Did he ever say that? 1
“Truth” is the certainty that we have about things.
20 p 190fn
||Guzzo identifies p. 190 as a vulgar use of the term “truth,” adding that truth identifies an apparent state, and “false” a state that is not apparent.|| This is another matter, & harmless. But the truth is the whole contents of time sub specie aeternitatis. 21 p 195
||God does not have an idea of Himself; He is that idea.|| The consciousness of himself. It is a possessive genetive [sic]. God has no knowledge. He is just matter living on; or rather sleeping on. [ To think is a process, an act. natura naturans1 is not] . 1
Dynamic nature, determining processes in the world.
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22 p 210, underlined
[…] dov’ è nella filosofia spinoziana il fondamento per giudicare maggiore la perfezione della virtù?1 nella natura umana.2 1
Where in Spinoza’s philosophy is the ground on which better to judge virtue? In human nature.
2
23 p 213, underlined
||On the nature of good or evil|| “ex operis qualitate.”1 Guzzo doesn’t understand this. It is not a quality of desert or merit, as if responsible first cause, but native quality, with its natural effects. Virtue is better than vice as two eyes are better than one or than none. 1
Deriving from good works.
24 p 242
||On the origin of limits.|| This belongs to the essence of matter, or of existence. The eternal can not exist. 25 p 243
Guzzo wants to deduce facts from concepts! 26 p 243
||If possible, Spinoza would show how the sensible world originates in the intelligible world.|| This is not S.’s problem at all. This substance is the name for something existent, not for an intelligible. 27 p 243, bottom
Mare’s nest. 28 p 246
[Santayana praises and paraphrases:]
This isn’t a bad account of the position of S. The One acts in the Many, not apart from them; and all are free in so far as they act according to their natures. 29 p 257
||On the movement of atoms according to Epicurus.|| Bad physics. The atoms moved in any direction, they crowded, they stuck. You mustn’t think of raining downwards. There was no up or down.
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30 p 265
||The question of body-mind.|| No reference to the objective & possessive genitives [?]. Does the apple’s mind become a part of my mind when I eat it? Or does an idea of the apple mixed with the idea of my stomach result? And in whose mind? 31 p 272
||Guzzo writes that Spinoza’s idea of God is as clear and right as Descartes’ cogito ergo sum.|| Force of belief is not clearness: it is helplessness. 32 p 276
||Guzzo finds danger in reproducing the thought of his author.|| Not in your case! 33 pp 277–79
||Guzzo’s personal interpretation of the three final books of Spinoza’s Ethics.|| [Cruelly:]
I should leave that out. 34 p 279
Have a drink and begin again here. 35 p 291
[On love and hatred in Spinoza:]
S’s necessity is not natural but dialectical: therefore not efficacious. Guzzo is just as sophistical as Spinoza here. A man is not a train of deductions. He has a thousand springs of action at once. To say whence comes a generous impulse towards an enemy you would have to know the whole psychic history of a man and of his ancestors. 36 p 293
Are you such a fool as not to see the physical necessity of reaching moral liberty in particular cases? There is no weakening of the natural causation in that. 37 p 295
Guzzo seems to assume that S. expects to see God in heaven! 38 p 318, top
Thought is a process in God. God’s not a harmony[?] besides ours.
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39 p 340
||On the tone of the Tractatus theologica-politicus.|| S. was also bred to talk piously & was prone to it: so that this accommodation was natural & pleasant to him. I too like to use religious language. 40 p 381
[Santayana glosses a text of Spinoza:]
Religion & civic conduct exchanged. This is a sarcastic scornful way of condemning religion, saying true religion is being a good citizen. 41 p 409, marked
The reign of God consists only in the dominion of justice and charity, namely that of true religion, from which it follows that God does not reign over men through the medium of their governors. Instance of a Spinozistic malicious tautology. A crude way of saying that duty depends on force majeure1 recognised by the man who feels bound. 1
Coercion.
42 p 411, underlined
[…] il diritto civile dipenderebbe dal diverso giudizo ed animo di ciascuno.1 But isn’t it wiser to let religion alone as unimportant? The criminal law serves to distinguish what must and must not be done. 1
Civil law depends on the various decision and the spirit of everyone.
43 p 413, marked
||If a government suppresses the freedom of thought and speech, it will rarely succeed and will gain the reputation for violence.|| Not the case Cf. Mahomet, Henry VIII, Constantine suppress a cult & a clergy, and you stifle a religion. And opportune propaganda will easily establish another. 44 p 429, marked Z
||Truth is not inert; it must result in action.|| “Truth” = passionate fiction. 45 p 432, top
Free thought harmless & the suppression of it useless & odious.
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46 p 432, bottom
This is an appeal ad hominem to the State conceived as interested only in maintaining the present principle. The government is not credited with any cultural or charitable interests. 47 p 437, top
||Concerning a passage in the Tractatus that wars and revolutions are monstrous errors.|| God is my shepherd, I’m a sheep— How mad to fight or to carouse!— Beside still waters running deep, I browse & sleep, I sleep and browse. 48 p 466, underlined
Quanto all’identificazione di Dio con la natura, lo Spinoza dichiarò di concepire Dio come causa immanente nel mondo, non come causa transitiva.1 Materia prima—which has no specific character—but may be identified with Being, energy in force. The substance of Spinoza, however is derived in two ways as that which exists in itself etc and as the absolutely infinite. or the R. of Essence. The latter cannot be a cause at all; so the cause of each thing must be itself, in so far as it has existence. 1 As to the identification of God with nature, Spinoza explained a conception of God as immanent cause in the world, not as transitive cause.
49 p 499
||Guzzo maintains that Spinoza eliminates good and evil from his system.|| Strange obsession! [On the part of Guzzo.]
Augusto Guzzo et alii
Concetto e programma della filosofia d’oggi Milan: 1941. Waterloo. Forty-two marginalia.
1p4
||The nature of a synthesis of knowledge.|| Synthesis up till now: this is the Hegelian absolute, with heathen chaos in the background, since each now has to be mocked and swallowed. 2 p 211, underlined
[Nicola Abbagnano, “L’uomo e la filosofia.”]
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||One must be, must philosophize.|| Because, if philosophy were the garden of Epicurus in which one could live apart from the fury of living and harsh sins, today we should find it unworthy of ourselves. Fascist ethics. The soldier may think it unworthy of him to think or to be just; but not unworthy of all other people. So he might think it unworthy of himself not to run after women, but not a defect in a priest or an old man. 3 p 212
||Philosophy involves|| il significato totale della vita.1 Is then your national history only a part of your field? 1
The complete significance of life.
4 p 214
[Santayana glosses the phrase:]
[…] una decisione autentica.1 The psyche has initiated a definite work: you are ready to do it. 1
An authentic decision.
[Annibale Pastore, “Sul compito critico della filosofia secondo la logica del potenziamento con vestigi d’intuitione logica in Aristotele.”2] 2 On the critical task of philosophy according to the logic of potentiality with vestiges of the logical intuition of Aristotle.
5 p 253, underlined
||Hegel held that the principle of contradiction did not apply|| dove manca ancora la determinazione1 […]. Contraries are essences, not facts. Until the fact becomes determinate it does not contradict the contrary of that determination: but it is not contrary to its own essence, indeterminate in that respect. 1
Where determination is still lacking.
6 p 260
||Concerning relativism.|| Relativity to what? To other ideas or to various psyches? 7 p 266, underlined
Ogni partito filosofico ha sempre un principio, una dottrina, un sistema.1 Anche la critica.2 1
Each philosophical group always has one principle, one doctrine, one system. Also the critic.
2
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8 p 274
[A general comment:]
Infinitistic idealism (like Banfi’s) is at heart a despairing surrender to material evolution. It does not snatch the fruits of life. 1
Antonio Banfi wrote “The Thought of George Santayana in the Crisis of Contemporary Philosophy,” in The Philosophy of George Santayana, edited by Paul A. Schilpp (La Salle, Illinois: 1951), pp. 477–94.
Augusto Guzzo
La filosofia e l’esperienza Rome: 1942. Waterloo. Eighty-five marginalia.
1 p 11, marked Z
||Galileo’s experiments led to comprehension of the necessity of physical laws, without limitation.|| When it finds the “objective” or essential law: not when it finds the application, which is contingent. 2 p 25, underlined
||Empiricists do not know the consequences of experiment|| necessariamente. naturalmente automaticamente 3 p 28
||Of scientific verification.|| The science is true if the law or hypothesis formulated always applies to the cases distinguished. 4 p 35, marked
||Moral conclusions are tentative.|| 5 p 37
The constancy of a law is a part of the form of events: it is as spontaneous as a dream. Confusion of perspectives (that compose “experience”) with processes (that compose nature). 6 p 38
Nature, then, is called to agree with science, but gads in her own way like a harlot. Things never quite succeed in being true!
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7 p 81
Do I value a cat when I recognise it for a cat? 8 p 84
Substance, then, in the concept in question, means nothing other than Value. Not substance then, but essence. 9 p 86
Do I never have a pleasure or pain without expecting it? You seem to confuse valuation with pursuit and both with apprehension. 10 p 91fn
[…] la prospettiva aristotelica, secondo la quale è «essenza» l’essenza immanente delle cose. In una prospettiva rigorosamente platonica—qual’è quella entro la quale filosofano «realisti» quali Russell e Santayana—«essenze» sono invece gli onta che diceva Platone, idee che non sono essenze delle cose, ma enti del tutto indipendenti ed eterogenei dal mono che esiste e «c’è».1 Yes and “substantial form”, is not essence pure but a “nature” embodied already in matter. 1 The Aristotelian view, according to which “essence” is the essence immanent in things. In a rigorously Platonic view, that of the “realists” Russell and Santayana, “essences” to the contrary are beings that Plato discussed, ideas that are not essence of things, but entities of everything independent and heterogeneous in the world that exist and “are.”
11 p 156, underlined
Statico come “oggetto”, appare dinamico come fondante.1 Cosa è fondare? 2 An essence is presupposed in any fact because otherwise that fact would have no character; but that essence is not a cause, antecedent, desire, or preconception of that fact. The “foundation” must be sought in the previous state & movement of the existent. 1
Static as “object,” is like activity in the unmoveable. A thing (or fact) is a foundation?
2
12 p 158, underlined
Quando ci si ferma a una constatazione, la filosofia si impaluda, le ricerca cessa.1 You may still search for other facts: or you may take new perspective views, observing relations before ignored.2 1
When one arrives at a statement, philosophy bogs down and research ceases. This is how Santayana himself proceeded.
2
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13 p 185
[Santayana’s comment:]
Excellent: the idea or given essence has a being apart from the accidental apprehension of that being, but not a substantial being nor an existence. 14 p 187
«Quello è mare», «questa è campagna»1 ||seem to be definitions, but the economic prejudice of science lends them a utilitarian value.|| Yes. The pragmatists are moralists in physics and physicists in morals. 1
That is the sea, this is the countryside.
15 p 217
||Guzzo writes of a pure impulse to form judgments.|| Hunger & a high wind are impulses to form judgments! Augusto Guzzo
La filosofia domani Milan: 1943. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Augusto Guzzo
L’io e la ragione Brescia: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
James Arthur Hadfield
Psychology and Morals: an Analysis of Character London: 1923. Georgetown. Twenty-eight marginalia.
1 pp 70–71, doubly marked
Further, the will is not the function of the whole individual; the will is the function of that part of us which is organized as the self, and of that alone. There are, therefore, excluded from the will those elements of the mind which are excluded from the self, namely, the repressed complexes and supressed instincts. 2 p 77, marked
If the will is the expression of the self, it would seem that the self can only choose in accordance with its own desires. […] The self cannot will to do what is contrary to its own nature.
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3 p 81, marked
When, again, in psychotherapy, emotional complexes are liberated, whether of sexual emotion, fear or ambition, the liberated instinctive emotions are brought under the dominion of the will and organized into a stronger self. 4 p 86, marked
But why have moralists always looked upon pleasure with suspicion? It is with good reason, for in its very nature the pleasure in the exclusive expression of one instinct commonly means the suppression of others, whereas for happiness we need to have the full expression of all the instincts. 5 p 90, marked
The supposed antagonism between goodness and happiness is largely due to a wrong conception of either goodness or happiness. Those who seek to be good and not happy succeed in being neither. 6 p 94, marked
The subjective experience of “feeling” can never be a right ideal, because as soon as we consciously seek it, it vanishes “like the snowflake in the river.” 7 p 94, marked
[…] the ideal must be objective. 8 p 105
Amongst our acquaintances there are men and women of great intellectual ability and artistic taste who, in their emotion life, are yet children. In intellect they are often beyond their fellows—I think of a university lecturer and a man whose name is famous in literature— […]. Lowes Dickinson? 9 p 131, marked
It is urged that we must repress our instincts or else we cannot get rid of them and they would get out of our control. We reply that, on the contrary, we cannot control our instincts as long as we repress them; […]. 10 p 134, marked
The repressed impulse needs expression. It is only because we do not give it right expression that it comes out in morbid ways. There is something abnormal about a mind that cannot look naturally upon the impulses.
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11 p 142, marked
But nature tends to “overdo” instincts like the maternal and the sexual, which are indispensable to her ends. 12 p 153, marked
Any kind of activity may serve as a sublimation. Pent up instinctive energy will be eased by any form of outlet; […]. William Hamilton
Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton Edited by O. W. Wight New York: 1858 (5th edition). Georgetown. 113 marginalia.
[Only one of the markings is unmistakably Santayana’s, and that inconsequential. Various hands, possibly Cory’s and students’, seem to have been at work. Signed, 1889.]
Robert d’ Harcourt
Goethe et l’art de vivre Paris: 1935. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Adolf von Harnack
Dogmengeschichte
Freiburg, Tuebingen: 1898 (3rd edition). Georgetown. Thirty-two marginalia. 1 p 11
[Section: The Gospel of Jesus Christ according to his own testimony.]
[ Protestants make Christ a convert to his own teaching.] 2 p 12, marked
The religion of the gospels rises [aufsteht] from belief in Jesus Christ; that is, in the light of him as a historical person, together with the belief that God reigns in heaven and on earth, and that God the judge is also God the father and the redeemer. How is this possible to a later generation? This “person” must be fabulous and ideal. 3 p 13
[On the tension between the Gospels, and Quietism, religious ecstasy, and meditation:]
Mysticism (because of the mythical idea of God) could join itself to fanaticism and create dramatic hopes. 4 p 15
“As you love me, so love my commandments.”
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To love = to renounce: the command = contemplation, after the crying evils are removed from the body. 5 p 19, marked
[Moses as the forerunner of Jesus Christ:]
The Jew was historically minded, the Greek dialectically. 6 p 62
The tradition of Greek philosophy offered to the educated a more or less rational way into the meaning of the Gospels, but to the laity, blind obedience to a dark secret system was indicated. !Glaube1 means apparently mindless and thoughtless trust in one knows not what. 1
Belief.
7 p 80
[Tertullian, and the outlook of the early church:]
This is too Protestant. There is need to add the ascetic and wonder-working character of the new impostures. It is doubless true that all early Christians thought themselves already saved and elect and practically impeccable. In this they did resemble Protestants. 8 p 86
||Harnack finds magic, mystery, and superstition side by side with moral teaching, freedom, and strength in early Catholicism, modelled by Rome.|| Why is it superstitious to accept from others what it would not be superstitious to invent for oneself? 9 p 88, underlined and doubly marked
Aber beflissen, das Christenthum den Gebildeten als die höchste und sicherste Philosophie darzulegen, haben sie die moralistische Denkweise, in die die Heidenchristen das Evangelium von Anfang an hineingezogen haben, als die christliche ausgebildet, damit zugleich das Christenthum rational gemacht und es auf eine Formel gebracht, die dem common sense [sic] aller ernst Denkenden und Vernünftigen des Zeitalters entsprach.1 N.B. Harnack’s original Christianity is an idiocy pure and simple. 1 But by intention from the outset, the apostles explained Christianity to the literate as the most exalted and reliable of philosophies. Educated in Christian tenets, they made Christianity rational and gave it a set form, one appropriate to the common sense of the reflective and informed persons of the period.
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10 p 158
!How can truth be a matter of disposition? It is disposition that can at best lead to truth. The author’s “truth” is mere satisfaction apart from reason and ulterior supports. Harvard College: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Class of ’86 Prepared by John McKinstry Merriam Boston: 1936. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Gerald Heard
Is God in History? An Inquiry into Human and Prehuman History in Terms of the Doctrine of Creation, Fall, and Redemption London: 1951. Waterloo. Eight marginalia.
1 p 91, underlined
||In crustacean parasites|| is evidence, plain and appalling, of a Fall in life, as early as this, an ingenious determination not to perceive but simply to exploit. colonial government Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Logic of Hegel (Wissenschaft der Logik)
Translated from the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences with Prolegomena by William Wallace Oxford: 1874. Georgetown. 130 marginalia. 1 p xl, underlined
[Prolegomena.]
If the spiritual unity of the world has been destroyed, mere assertion that we feel and believe that it still subsists will not do much good. What is he talking about? 2 pp xl–xli
Philosophy comes to sum up and estimate what science has accomplished: and therein is as it were the spirit of the world taking in the world of nature, where all things lie outside of one another, and which then is, as it were, reflected back into itself so as to constitute the mind, or spiritual world, where all parts tend to coalesce in unity. i.e. We are to form a myth about the basis of experience.
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3 p lxxx, marked
[An anecdote about the execution of a murderer:]
The sun shone, as the severed head was laid upon the scaffold. “How finely,” said the woman, “does God’s gracious sun lighten up Binder’s head!” This horrible equivocation illustrates Hegel’s way of eluding the actual values of things for a visionary satisfaction. 4 p xc
In the Hegelian sense, a presentation is abstract: because it solidifies, hardens, and isolates the term of thought, makes it a particular, and never rises above the single case to the general notion embodied in it. A mind full of images is superior to a mind full of terms, although both are full of abstractions. But an image is a vivid and apposite symbol of its similars, whereas a term is but the footprint of a dead image, the trace of some relational experience. 5 p cxvii
[I]n ancient philosophy, we shall see that it only expresses in a cruder and
less analytic form, as ancient thought often does, the same thing as so many moderns love to speak of as Relativity, and which is also implied in Aristotle’s conception of an End. This conceited way of speaking of the ancients is not wholly a misrepresentation. The good is not mystic in the least but relative to structure function and satisfaction. 6 p cxxxv
The truth of ‘is’ then turns out ‘become:’ nothing is: all things are coming to be and passing out of being. This illustrates the meaning of the word ‘truth’ in Hegel. It is partly synonymous with ‘concrete,’ partly with the ‘notion.’ This refusal to sympathise with what is meant, or to accept assert expression as expression of the poetic experience and spontaneous ebullition of particular souls, is the curse—one might almost say—the crime—of Hegel. It is his capital sin of uncharitableness inhumanity and charlatanism. He stickles at the word; he browbeats the ingenuous utterance, impudently wording what he confesses to be its meaning, until it is wearied out, made to contradict itself, and falsely explained to mean what it was uttered and conceived precisely to deny. So that for all his proficiency and satiric keenness of vision, he is never sweet, never noble,
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intelligent, never welcome spokesman of the [illegible] mind. His interpretation is always a disruption, and his fulfilment a denaturalisation of what he finds struggling into the light. He confuses destiny with vocation; and treats with scorn the ideal which the chaotic current of the world may not suffer to be realised. His religion is an insult to all the dead. 7 p cxxxvi
Somewhat-ness is always being for somewhat else: and for that very reason, ceasing to be the primary object, it becomes somewhat else itself; and the other term becomes the somewhat. It is a defect in education that people should not care for what can be loved rightly and permanently. It is natural to a barbarian to think happiness impossible—for it is to him. His doing is never making, his thinking is never knowing. 8 p 34, marked Z
[“Preliminary Notion.”]
And thus, special ends, though they have no right to be set first, are still fostered by the presence of the highest good. Religion, for instance, has an absolute value of its own; yet at the same time other ends flourish and succeed in its train. As Christ says: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.’ Particular ends can be attained only in the attainment of what absolutely is and exists in its own right. i.e. the idea! ^ ^ This is a passage which it is hard to interpret—it may be mockery it may be pure insensibility. 9 p 43, marked Z
Thus we speak of a true friend; by which we mean a friend whose manner of conduct accords with the notion of friendship. In the same way we speak of a true work of Art. Could anything be more silly? We mean of course one who truly deserves the name of friend, ok. 10 pp 43–44, underlined
God alone exhibits a real agreement of the notion and the reality. All finite things involve an untruth, they have a notion and an existence, but their existence does not meet the requirements of the notion. For this reason they must perish and then the incompatibility of their notion and their existence becomes manifest. It is in the Kind, that the individual animal has its notion: and the Kind escapes from this individual existence by death.
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[At ‘perish’:]
Mythical or superstitious terror. Since the term, which is static, is applied to a thing in flux which it imperfectly describes, the moment soon comes when the discrepancy becomes excessive, and we apply another name, or individuate the object around another centre. So my friend becomes a corpse. [At ‘Kind’:]
Is this the animals[’] ideal? 11 p 46
The harmonious existence of childhood is a gift from the hand of nature: the second harmony must spring from the labour and culture of the spirit. And so the words of Christ, ‘Except ye become as little children,’ &c., are very far from telling us that we must always remain children. Disingenuous 12 p 46, underlined
And it is in the human feeling of shame that we are to seek the spiritual and moral origin of dress, compared with which, the merely physical need is a secondary matter. Blunder 13 p 55, marked
[“First Attitude of Thought.”]
||Hegel contrasts the rigidity of Scholasticism with ancient Greek philosophy.|| […] the ancient philosophers were in a different position. They were men, who lived wholly in the perceptions of the senses, and who, after their rejection of mythology and its fancies, pre-supposed nothing more than the heaven above and the earth around. And thus, though environed by actual facts, thought is free and enjoys its own privacy: cleared of everything material, and thoroughly at home. This feeling that we are all our own is characteristic of free thought—of that voyage into the open sea, where nothing is below us or above us, and we stand in solitude with ourselves alone. Eloquent passage on free thought. 14 p 61, marked Z
It is no doubt to be remembered, that the result of independent thought harmonises with the import of the Christian religion:—for the Christian religion is a revelation of reason. Canting rogue!
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15 p 94, underlined
[“Second Attitude of Thought.”]
||To understand Kant’s Practical Reason, we must recall the ethics of his time.|| It may be generally described as a system of Eudaemonism, which, when asked what was man’s chief end, replied Happiness. And by happiness Eudaemonism understood the satisfaction of the selfish appetites, wishes and wants of the man: […]. i.e. natural. Hegel is here at his worst. His idea of morality is inhuman and irrelevant to every ideal. 16 p 97
||Kant must have been aware that knowledge came about through other means than his categories of quality, cause and effect, composition, and the rest.|| The principal of inward adaptation or design, supposing it to be maintained and developed in a scientific application, might have led to a different and a higher method of observation. Hegel seems to be thinking a general description that covers the form, history, effort, and issue of a life—the vain mirror of a universal vanity. 17 p 106–7, marked Z
[“Third Attitude of Thought.”]
[…] such are the barren distinctions of words, with which men fancy that they assert an important truth: even while the formulæ they maintain are identical with those which they impugn. The term faith brings with it the special advantage of reminding us of the faith of the Christian religion; it seems to include Christian faith, or perhaps even to coincide with it; and thus the Philosophy of Faith has a thoroughly pious and Christian look, on the strength of which it takes the liberty of uttering its arbitrary dicta with greater pretensions to authority. […] Christian faith is objective […] while its arms are open to receive the faith of the Christian, it equally includes a belief in the divinity of the Dalai-lama, the ox, or the monkey, thus, so far as it goes, narrowing Deity down to its simplest terms, to a Supreme Being. Splendid passage to apply to Hegel’s own followers. 18 p 117, marked Z
[“The Doctrine of Being.”]
But God can only be called a spirit when He is known to be at once the beginning and end, as well as the mean, in the process of mediation. God to be a spirit must go through Hegel’s logic. 19 p 139
||The Buddhists equate God with nought; man becomes God through annihilation.||
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Hegel’s contempt for the Buddhists is characteristic of his anti-moral bias. 20 p 145
“Becoming” here slides into “relation”: determinate being is being with specific predicates or qualities, not having necessarily arisen, but necessarily excluding their opposites. 21 p 151, marked Z
||Kant and Fichte failed to reach the stage at which the infinite ought was a positive rather than a negative in their ethics.|| This air of superiority (where Hegel is simply dead to the problem) is un trait de lumière.1 1
A trait of the enlightenment.
22 p 153
The fundamental notion of philosophy, the genuine infinite, depends upon ||the distinction between finite and infinite.|| The distinction is cleared up by the simple, and for that reason seemingly insignificant, but incontrovertible, reflections, contained in this section. Business done: “The infinite” is nonsense. The “true infinite” is the “whole cloth” or primary datum which thought cuts up to make its garments of. 23 p 158
||Hegel’s description of contemporary atomic theory as metaphysics.|| This paragraph is very weak, and therefore somewhat violent, as is Hegel’s manner when he is half-consciously in the wrong. 24 p 207
[“The Doctrine of Essence.”]
[…] we have all reason to rejoice that the things which environ us are appearances and not steadfast and independent existences; since in that case we should soon perish of hunger, both bodily and mental. A fully Platonic confusion of reality with permanence. 25 p 218
As a man is outwardly, that is to say in his actions (not of course in his merely bodily outwardness), so is he inwardly: and if his virtue, morality, &c. are only inwardly his, that is, if they exist only in his intentions and sentiments, and his outward acts are not identical with them, the one half of him is as hollow and empty as the other.
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Hegel is here satirising the schöne Seele1 and the sentimental mystics. 1
Beautiful souls (i.e., romantic cant.)
26 p 221
||Hegel recommends a pragmatic psychology.|| If the heroes of history had been actuated by subjective and formal interests alone, they would never have accomplished what they have. And if we have due regard to the unity between the inner and the outer, we must own that great men willed what they did, and did what they willed. A malicious psychology is often artificial; but an attribution of prophetic purposes and ex post facto motives to men, to make them seem the creators of their own destiny, would be pure myth. 27 p 223
The difference, when Aristotle makes final causes efficacious (being then worse than Plato) is as Hegel says: yet for the most part Aristotle’s ideas are essences or actual natures, Plato’s, ideals or natures as they ought to be. 28 p 225, underlined
Reasonable and practical men refuse to be imposed upon by the possible, for the simple ground that it is possible only. They stand fast upon what is actual (not meaning by that word merely whatever immediately is now and here). i.e. potent possibilities The fury of pantheism against the ideal is evident in this passage once more. 29 p 228, marked
In respect of Mind and its effects, just as in the case of Nature, we must guard against being misled by a well-meant endeavour after rational knowledge, which would fain exhibit the necessity of phenomena which are marked by a decided contingency, and try, as the phrase is, to construe them a priori. Thus in language, although it be, as it were, the body of thought, there is unquestionably considerable room for Chance; and the same is true of the special formations of law, of art, &c. The problem of science, and especially of philosophy, undoubtedly consists in eliciting the necessity concealed under the semblance of contingency. That however is far from meaning that the contingent belongs to our subjective conception alone, and must therefore be simply set aside, if we wish to get at the truth. All scientific researches which pursue this tendency exclusively, lay themselves fairly open to the charge of mere juggling with their subject, and an over-affectation of precision.
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Hegel has absolutely no idea of science, in which little things are explained before great. 30 p 229, marked Z
The Contingent, which is immediate actuality, is at the same time the possibility of somewhat else,—no longer however that abstract possibility, which we had at first, but the possibility in being. And a possibility in being is a Condition. By the Condition of a matter of fact we mean two things; first, a special existence or immediate thing, and secondly the vocation of this immediate to be put in abeyance and to subserve the actualising of something else.—Immediate actuality is never what it ought to be; it is a finite actuality with an inherent flaw, and its vocation is to be consumed. The something else, be it observed, is no better: to speak of vocation and what ought to be is therefore mere cant. 31 p 231, underlined and marked Z
||Blind necessity vs. fore-knowledge.|| If […] we consider the action of purpose or design, we have in the end of action a content which is already fore-known. In the Stoic fashion. Hegel is mocking the simple christians [sic] here. 32 p 231, marked
Necessity is blind only so long as it is not understood. There is nothing therefore more mistaken than the charge of blind fatalism made against the Philosophy of History, when it claims to understand the necessity of whatever has occurred. Transcendental manner of speaking. 33 p 231, marked
The philosophy of history rightly understood takes the rank of a Théodicée; and those, who fancy they honour Divine Providence by excluding necessity from it, are really degrading it by this strict line of demarcation to a blind and irrational caprice. Idolatry again. 34 p 232, underlined
||Necessity as destiny in ancient thought.|| But a close examination of the ancient feeling about destiny, will not by any means reveal any sense of bondage. Rather the reverse. This will clearly appear, if we remember, that the want of freedom springs from clinging tenaciously to an antithesis, and from looking at what is, and what happens, as contradictory to what ought to be and happen. In the ancient mind the feeling was more of the following kind: Because such a thing is, it is, and as it is, so ought it to be.
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is this true of the Greeks? What Hegel is thinking of is the feeling that what is must be and that we must adjust our happiness to it. 35 p 233, marked Z
||Hegel turns to the philosophy of religion.|| If men remembered […] that whatever happened to them was only an evolution of themselves, and that they only bore their own guilt, they would stand free, and in everything that came upon them would have the consciousness that they suffered no wrong. Cf. Antichthonus [sic] in “The Philosophers at Court.”1 1 Antichthonicus is one of the philosophers in this play by Santayana, dated Oxford, 1899. It was published posthumously in The Poet’s Testament: Poems and Two Plays (Scribner’s, 1953).
36 p 233, marked Z
It is their view of necessity, therefore, which is at the root of the content and discontent of men, and which in that way determines their destiny itself. Thorough falsehood. A man is not made happy by thinking himself the cause of his unhappiness. This w’d be true of peevishness; but how false it is of sorrow! 37 p 236, underlined
In the history of philosophy we meet with Substance as the principle of Spinoza’s system. First? 38 p 236, marked
||As a Jew, Spinoza brought an oriental view in which the finite world seemed opaque and transitory. That view is|| marked by the absence of the principle of the Western World, the principle of individuality, which first appeared under a philosophic shape, contemporaneously with Spinoza, in the Monadology of Leibnitz. ! 39 p 236, marked
||The allegation of atheism in Spinoza is false, for he recognized the principle of a true God.|| If that were a just charge, it would only prove that all the other systems, where speculation has not gone beyond a subordinate stage of the idea, that the Jews and Mohamedans who know God only as the Lord, and that even the many Christians for whom God is merely the most high, unknowable, and transcendental being, are as much atheists as Spinoza.
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This is a marvellous trait de lumierè. H. does not for a moment imagine that God could be the good! 40 p 244
[“The Doctrine of the Notion.”]
Thus the Notion is the truth of Being and the Essence, inasmuch as the showing or seeming of the reflection in its own self is at the same time an independent immediacy, and this Being of a different actuality is immediately only a seeming in itself. The consciousness of in the self is a vision of the non-ego: ^ ^ and the existence of the non-ego is a vision in the self. 41 p 252
The universal in its true and comprehensive meaning is one of those thoughts which demanded thousands of years before it entered into the consciousness of men. The thought did not gain its full recognition till the days of Christianity. ||Therefore slaves have vanished from Christian Europe. Christianity alone respects individual man.|| Hegel shows here very plainly, as elsewhere, that he does not understand the integrating power of “the better & the worse”, the principle of all real formations. Cf. Rep[ublic] VI. 42 p 259, marked
It is the predicate which first gives the subject, which till then was on its own account a bare conception or an empty name, its specific character and content. In judgments like, ‘God is the most real of all things,’ or ‘The Absolute is identical with itself,’ God and the Absolute are mere names, which receive their exposition in the predicate. As to what the subject may be in other respects, as a concrete thing, it does not concern the present judgment. Good 43 p 261, marked
The various kinds of judgment are no empirical aggregate. They are a systematic whole bearing the stamp of thought, and it was one of Kant’s great achievements that he first saw this. Strange how the habits of the human animal like to represent themselves as prototypes for all things.
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44 p 262, underlined
To pronounce a work of art to be beautiful, or an action to be good, requires […] a comparison of the objects with what they ought to be i.e. with their notion. no: Hegel means “with what they are and ought to seem”. Otherwise everything would not be beautiful and good really. 45 p 263, marked
||Truth and correctness are not synonymous.|| Truth […] lies in the coincidence of the object with itself, that is, with its notion. That a person is sick, or that some one has committed a theft, may certainly be correct. But the content is untrue. A sick body is not in harmony with the notion of body, and there is a want of congruity between theft and the notion of human conduct. Sophistry unveiled! 46 p 263, marked
In pronouncing an action to be good, we frame a notional judgment. Not if you know what goodness is, for goodness can never be the substance of an action. 47 p 264, marked Z
Crime may be quoted as an objective instance of the negatively-infinite judgment. The person committing a crime, such as theft, does not as in a question about civil rights, merely deny the particular right of another person to some one definite thing. He denies the right of that person in general, and therefore he is not merely forced to restore what he has stolen, but is punished in addition, because he has violated right as right, i.e. right in general. What rot! 48 p 264–65, marked
||That dispute is similar in its negative judgment to|| ‘This flower is not red:’ by which we merely deny the particular colour of the flower, but not its colour in general, which may be blue, yellow, or any other. Similarly death, as a negatively-infinite judgment, is distinguished from disease as simply-negative. In disease, merely this or that function of life is checked or negatived: in death, as we ordinarily say, body and soul part, i.e. subject and predicate are in no point coincident. !
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49 p 267
Hegel makes the primitive dream of the mind to be truer than its waking observations. 50 p 289, underlined and marked
As Fichte was one of the earliest among modern philosophers to remark, the theory which regards the Absolute or God as the Object and nothing more, expresses the point of view taken by superstition and slavish fear. No doubt God is the Object, and the fulness of Objectivity, confronted with which our particular or subjective opinions and desires have no truth and no validity. Superstition again. 51 p 289
But God in the Christian religion is also known as Love. In his Son, who is one with him, he has revealed himself to men as a man amongst men, and thereby redeemed them. This religious dogma is only another way of saying that the antithesis of subjective and objective is given to us as already overcome, […]. The notion that God so claims our transformation into harmony with him is based on the primitive sense of God as the human ideal. 52 p 289
||To regard an antithesis between subjectivity and objectivity to be abstract and permanent is a mistake.|| The assumption here is that there is a plan in nature and that this plan is the same as our own inner ideal. 53 p 295
The product of the chemical process […] is to release the two extremes from their state of tension, and to develope the Neutral object out of them. There is in all this mythology a sort of Schopenhauerian Will working in things—Everything is put in terms of striving. 54 p 297, marked Z
||The Aim and the End:|| To the End therefore even the object, which it pre-supposes, is only an ideal reality, potentially null and void. The End therefore is a contradiction of its identity with itself against the negation stated in it, i.e. its antithesis to objectivity. It is therefore the eliminative or destructive activity which negatives the antithesis and renders it identical with itself. This is the realisation of the Aim: in which, while it renders itself the antithesis of its subjectivity and objectifies itself, and has
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cancelled the distinction between the two, it has only closed with itself, and in short retained itself. Dialectic run wild: the end, if realised, destroys its basis, the unideal reality, because it destroys the want of ideality in it, etc 55 p 302
Reason is as cunning as it is powerful. […] God lets men direct their particular passions and interests as they please; but the result is the accomplishment of—not their plans, but His, and these differ decidedly from the end primarily sought by those whom He employs. One would have expected man to have this craft of reason: but no—the reason and craft are God’s! 56 p 304
The Idea is truth in itself and for itself,—the absolute unity of the notion and objectivity. […] The definition, which declares the Absolute to be the Idea, is itself absolute. That which the imagination sees is that in which the imagination rests. 57 p 306, underlined
Truth in the deeper sense consists in the identity between objectivity and the notion. It is in this deeper sense that truth is understood when we speak of a true state, or of a true work of art. !Correspondence to type is truth “deeper” than correspondence to fact, which latter Hegel calls formal truth, because it is relative to experience and verifiable. “Deep” truth is conformity to name and nominal essence. 58 p 321
Will is spontaneity of intellect, apparently. 59 p 321, marked
[“Volition.”]
The subjective idea as what is characterised in itself and for itself, and as a simple content which is equal to itself, is the Good. Monstrous definition 60 p 322, underlined
The Will knows the purposed end to be its own, and Intelligence apprehends the world as the notion actual. by whom?
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61 p 322–23, doubly marked
All unsatisfied endeavour ceases, when we learn that the final purpose of the world is accomplished no less than ever accomplishing itself. Mystical suicide of the moral nature; for the endeavour ceases before it is satisfied. 62 p 323, marked
Generally speaking, this is the belief and attitude of the man coward ; ^ ^ while the young imagine that the world is utterly sunk in wickedness, and that the first thing needful is to change it into something else. The religious mind, on the contrary, views the world as ruled by Divine Providence, and therefore correspondent with what it ought to be. 63 p 323
Thus the truth of the Good is stated or laid down as the unity of the theoretical and practical idea. Good has been in itself and for itself achieved. The objective world is thus in itself and for itself the Idea, as it at the same time eternally lays itself down as an Aim or End, and by action brings about its actuality. By the defeat of all aims the aim of all is accomplished! This is Hegel the charlatan. 64 p 323, top
Optimist’s brutality and sycophancy. Martin Heidegger Sein und Zeit [Being and Time ] Sonderdruck aus: Jahrbuch fuer Philologie und phaenomenologische Forschung, Band VIII. Edited by E. Husserl. Freiburg. Halle: 1931 (first half, 3rd edition). Columbia. 462 marginalia. [Marked to p. 261 only, in a volume of 438 pages. Quoted English is that of John Macquarrie’s and Edward Robinson’s translation, Being and Time, New York and Evanston: 1962. They translate the 7th German edition. In the following matter, the first page numeral refers to the German text that Santayana read; the numeral in parentheses is the page number of the English translation.] 1 p 5 (25)
We do not know what ‘Being’ means. But even if we ask, ‘What is “Being”?’, we keep within an understanding of the ‘is’, though we are unable to fix conceptually what that ‘is’ signifies. We do not even know the horizon in terms of which that meaning is to be grasped and fixed. But this vague average understanding of Being is still a Fact.
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The idea of Being is precontained in the question What does Being mean? (Not because you use the word “is”, which is needless and absent in many languages as a copula.) 2 p 6 (25–26)
In the question which we are to work out, what is asked about is Being—that which determines entities as entities,1 that on the basis of which [woraufhin] entities are already understood, however we may discuss them in detail. The Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity. The principle of existence? Or of essence? The first: since the principle couldn’t not be an essence. Pure being is not existent: but is it the principle of existence? That principle is matter: an internal principle to things not existent out of them but putting them in material relation. 1 Santayana underlined “was Seiendes als Seiendes bestimmt” in his German text.
3 p 7 (27)
This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term “Dasein”. Dasein is psychological? Yes: cf. p. 24. 4 p 9 (29), underlined
Sein ist jeweils das Sein eines Seienden.1 All existents are particular. All essences are individual. 1
Being is always the Being of an entity.
5 p 9 (29), marked Z
And although research may always lean towards this positive approach, its real progress comes not so much from collecting results and storing them away in ‘manuals’ as from inquiring into the ways in which each particular area is basically constituted [Grundverfassungen]—an inquiry to which we have been driven mostly by reacting against just such an increase in information. Fawning on the fashion of the day. No doubt the remoter objects or levels are those in which new categories can be tried. The fixed, for us, is the human scale or common sense. 6 p 10 (30–31), marked Z
||Basic philosophical concepts|| must run ahead of the positive sciences, […] what is philosophically primary is neither a theory of the conceptformation of historiology nor the theory of historiological knowledge,
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nor yet the theory of history as the Object of historiology; what is primary is rather the Interpretation of authentically historical entities as regards their historicality. Not what happens, except in the literary criticism or interpretation of the sciences. They don’t build on that grammar, but in spite of it and across it. 7 p 10 (30fn1)
In Heidegger’s special language, “Historie” = the “science of history,” translated as “historiology”; “Geschichte” = the history that actually occurs, translated as “history.” 8 p 12 (32)
Dasein = consciousness or specification of essence? Dasein = appropriated essence. Existenz = matter in flux with possibilities of change of essence. 9 p 14 (34)
Dasein = intellect, capacity for intuition of essence. Da-sein = manifestation, being present (to intuition). 10 p 14 (35)
But now it has been shown that the ontological analytic of Dasein in general is what makes up fundamental ontology, so that Dasein functions as that entity which in principle is to be interrogated beforehand as to its Being. The essence of Dasein must be examined first. (?) 11 p 15 (35)
If to Interpret the meaning of Being becomes our task, Dasein is not only the primary entity to be interrogated; it is also that entity which already comports itself, in its Being, towards what we are asking about when we ask this question. But in that case the question of Being is nothing other than the radicalization of an essential tendency-of-Being which belongs to Dasein itself—the pro-ontological understanding of Being. Yes: excellent; but you render the whole thing auto-biographical. 12 p 15 (36), marked
The kind of Being which belongs to Dasein is rather such that, in understanding its own Being, it has a tendency to do so in terms of that entity towards which it comports itself proximally and in a way which is essentially constant—in terms of the ‘world’. Transcendental apology for naturalism.
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13 p 16 (37)
The essence of the world is not so much reflected in mind as demanded to explain the existence of mind: and mind then reflects or imposes its conscious figments upon the world as perceived. 14 p 19 (40)
Thus the way in which Being and its modes and characteristics have their meaning determined primordially in terms of time, is what we shall call its “Temporal ” determinateness. Thus the fundamental ontological task of Interpreting Being as such includes working out the Temporality of Being. (?) temporal = existing in flux zeitlich = speciously or comprehensively temporal—temporal in essence (?) 15 p 20 (41)
“Historicality” stands for the state of Being that is constitutive for Dasein’s ‘historizing’ as such; only on the basis of such ‘historizing’ is anything like ‘world-history’ possible or can anything belong historically to world-history. Mind = memory? 16 p 20 (41)
Whatever the way of being it may have at the time, and thus with whatever understanding of Being it may possess, Dasein has grown up both into and in a traditional way of interpreting itself: in terms of this it understands itself proximally and, within a certain range, constantly. By this understanding, the possibilities of its Being are disclosed and regulated. Its own past—and this always means the past of its ‘generation’—is not something which follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes ahead of it. Mind has antecedents? All mind? [ If so, Dasein couldn’t be fundamental.] 17 p 20 (42), marked
If historiology is wanting, this is not evidence against Dasein’s historicality; on the contrary, as a deficient mode of this state of Being, it is evidence for it. Only because it is ‘historical’ can an era be unhistoriological. Very good: but then consciousness is not transcendentally accepted, but psychologically. Are you a realist?
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18 p 21 (42)
The question of the meaning of Being must be carried through by explicating Dasein beforehand in its temporality and historicality; the question thus brings itself to the point where it understands itself as historiological. This sounds Hegelian. Is essence going to turn the tables and swallow time in the end? Cosmology must describe events: but are events ultimate being? Is Sein existent? 19 p 21 (42)
Tradition falsely credited with self-existence. 20 p 21 (42)
Dasein: Here = dominant thought, Zeitgeist. 21 p 33 (56)
[…] because the is a letting-something-be-seen, it can therefore be true or false. But here everything depends on our steering clear of any conception of truth which is construed in the sense of ‘agreement’. The primary sense of “true” is disclosing. [ When speech is indicative or names the object sincerely.] Jacob with the hairy hand was a typical liar. 22 p 34 (57–58), underlined
Realismus und Idealismus verfehlen den Sinn des griechlichen Wahrheitsbegriffes, aus dem heraus man überhaupt nur die Möglichkeit von so etwas wie einer »Ideenlehre« als philosophischer Erkenntnis verstehen kann, mit gleicher Gründlichkeit.1 Truth = evidence. You want to make Plato’s Ideas pure essences: I agree that they were really that; but didn’t Plato hypostatise them and make them moral forces? 1 Both realism and idealism have—with equal thoroughness—missed the meaning of the Greek conception of truth, in terms of which only the possibility of something like a ‘doctrine of ideas’ can be understood as philosophical knowledge. 23 p 37 (61)
The idea of grasping and explicating phenomena in a way which is ‘original’ and ‘intuitive’ […] is directly opposed to the naïveté of a haphazard, ‘immediate’, and unreflective ‘beholding’. Intuition must be laborious and inquisitive; contemplation; analytic & synthetic perusal. Do you deny that fugitive useful images are “phenomena”?
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24 p 38 (62), marked
Being, as the basic theme of philosophy, is no class or genus of entities; yet it pertains to every entity. Its ‘universality’ is to be sought higher up. […] Being is the transcendens, pure and simple. Realm of Essence. 25 p 38 (62)
And the transcendence of Dasein’s Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation. Every disclosure of Being as the transcendens is transcendental knowledge. Phenomenological truth (the disclosedness of Being) is veritas transcendentalis. Realm of Truth 26 p 38 (62)
Ontology and phenomenology are not two distinct philosophical disciplines among others. […] Philosophy is universal ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analytic of existence, has made fast the guiding-line for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it arises and to which it returns. Both reduced to the analysis of Mind— [ of God?] 27 p 41 (65)
||The existential meaning of the Being of Dasein is care.|| Intent. [Santayana paraphrases:]
Mind is always somebody’s: it is appropriated, or mine. Mind is reflexive and refers to its own essence. 28 p 42 (67)
[Santayana paraphrases again:]
Mind is not a substance with qualities, but an impartial transparency or intensity that makes no difference yet all the difference, since it actualises itself and all phenomena. 29 p 43 (68–69)
? Page not understood. 30 p 53 (78)
Dasein is an entity which, in its very Being, comports itself understandingly towards that Being. In saying this, we are calling attention to the formal concept of existence. Dasein exists. Actuality is understanding (or intuition) of the essence of actuality (self). [Why not of any essence?] Or perhaps: Actuality is the feeling of actuality.
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31 p 57 (84)
[Santayana defines Heidegger’s term, “Sorge.”]
Concern or care: the primary connection of spirit with flesh. 32 p 57 (84)
Taking up relationships towards the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is as it is. This state of Being does not arise just because some other entity is present-at-hand outside of Dasein and meets up with it. Such an entity can ‘meet up with’ Dasein only in so far as it can, of its own accord, show itself with a world. The world must be discoverable to the mind. [ Note the transcendentalism of this ]. 33 p 58 (84–85)
||Heidegger raises the question of the untidy relationship between environment [Umwelt] and ontology.|| Only in terms of an orientation towards the ontological structure […] can ‘life’ as a state of Being be defined a priori, and this must be done in a privative manner. “Life” = what the idea of life imports, as thought distinguishes it. The objects of ideas are the essences the ideas define. [ This is a capital error.] 34 p 58 (85)
When Being-in-the-world is exhibited phenomenologically, disguises and concealments [Verstellungen und Verdeckungen] are rejected because this phenomenon itself always gets ‘seen’ in a certain way in every Dasein. [ A Freudian touch?] 35 p 62 (89)
[…] the perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it; even in perceiving, retaining, and preserving, the Dasein which knows remains outside, and it does so as Dasein. Here “being alive” = being concerned with natural objects. The study of essence is still subjective and proper to a mind concerned with matter. [ This may be granted, if the purity of the essence studied is recognized. There is no non-human intuition of essence.] 36 p 63 (92)
||A depiction of things in the world will not produce Being. What is the ontological meaning of substances?|| But even if this ontology should itself succeed in explicating the Being of Nature in the very purest manner, in
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conformity with the basic assertions about this entity, which the mathematical natural sciences provide, it will never reach the phenomenon that is the ‘world’. Nature is itself an entity which is encountered within the world and which can be discovered in various ways and at various stages. Matter (Nature) is found or sought within the object of intent transcendentally posited. [ Cf. Preface to R. of M.] 1 1
In that preface to The Realm of Matter, Santayana begins with an echo or analogue of Heidegger: “In metaphysics … the objection to matter is not that matter is evil, but that it is superfluous, unknowable, or even non-existent; and I might easily have avoided certain antagonisms by giving to matter a more fashionable name and speaking instead of the realm of events or of space-time or of evolution. I might … have called the realm of matter simply nature. But nature, events, space-time, and even evolution (when this means simply metamorphosis) are indicative terms, containing no ontological analysis: my problem is precisely to distinguish in this vast flood of existence the planes and qualities of reality which it contains or presupposes.” Realms of Being, vol. XIV, Triton Edition, 1937, p. 183. 37 pp 64–65 (92–93)
||The many uses of ‘world’; that ‘worldhood’ and world characterize Dasein itself.|| Meanings of “world” 1. The universe 2. The idea of it also (universe of discourse) 3. The world of literature & morals = anybody’s special world. Heidegger’s Welt. 4. The category of substance. 38 p 66 (94–95), marked
In ontology […] an attempt has been made to start with spatiality and then to Interpret the Being of the ‘world’ as res extensa. In Descartes we find the most extreme tendency towards such an ontology of the ‘world’, with, indeed, a counter-orientation towards the res cogitans—which does not coincide with Dasein either ontically or ontologically. N.B. 39 p 68 (96–97)
The Greeks had an appropriate term for ‘Things’: —that is to say, that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings ( ! ). But ontologically, the specifically ‘pragmatic’ character of the is just what the Greeks left in obscurity; they thought of these ‘proximally’ as ‘mere Things’. Dewey: instrumentalism. 40 pp 68–69 (96–97)
||The Greeks regarded as household utensils, things to fill up a room.||
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Pragmatism = possessiveness. It is the philosophy of acquisition, not inquisition. The difference between the U.S. and Spain. 41 p 69 (98)
[On the handiness of things-to-hand, the tool:]
It is handy on account of its handiness. [ Here is the danger of this sort of philosophy: to explain things by the words that express their qualities or functions.] 42 p 70 (99), underlined
||We are concerned not with the tool, but with the work which it produces.|| Das bestellte Werk ist seinerseits nur auf dem Grunde seines Gebrauchs und des in diesem entdeckten Verweisungszusammenhanges von Seiendem.1 This threatens to leave substance out and retain only morality hypostatised into instruments: but perhaps the mutual support of the instruments amounts to their substantiality in the world of action. There are natural things! 1
The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered. 43 p 71 (100)
||If Nature which provides raw materials for handiwork:|| If its kind of Being as ready-to-hand is disregarded […] the Nature which ‘stirs and strives’, which assails us and enthralls us as landscape, remains hidden. Nature viewed transcendentally as an extension of the busy hearth. This is German sentiment and homeliness, that sentimentalizes the universe. 44 p 75 (105)
[Santayana paraphrases:]
Indifference is a differentia of “the world”. Latency a category of substance in its transcendental justification. 45 pp 80–81 (111–12)
The south wind may be meteorologically accessible as something which just occurs; but it is never present-at-hand proximally in such a way as this, only occasionally taking over the function of a warning signal. On the contrary, only by the circumspection with which one takes account of things in farming, is the south wind discovered in its Being. i.e. in its moral essence. There is a sort of parody of Aristotle in Heidegger.
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46 p 87 (120)
Interesting transcendental turn given to the intent of mind in following the direction of bodily action. Your thought is turned a priori upon a world, because it is the notice that one part of the world takes of another part. 47 p 96 (129), marked
[Descartes] prescribes for the world its ‘real’ Being, as it were, on the basis of an idea of Being whose source has not been unveiled and which has not been demonstrated in its own right—an idea in which Being is equated with constant presence-at-hand. Thus his ontology of the world is not primarily determind by his leaning towards mathematics […]. Excellent criticism, in that the “world” of Descartes is essentially fantastic: a mathematical image hypostatized. 48 p 99 (132)
(The object of speculation is not to arrive at immediate experience, but to arrive at truth.) 49 p 110 (145), underlined
As Being-in-the-world, Dasein has already discovered a ‘world’ at any time. […] Freeing something and letting it be involved, is accomplished by way of referring or assigning oneself circumspectively, and this in turn is based upon one’s previously understanding significance. We have now shown that circumspective Being-in-the-world is spatial. And only because Dasein is spatial in the way of de-severance and directionality can what is ready-to-hand within-the-world be encountered in its spatiality. Die Freigabe einer Bewandtnisganzheit ist gleichursprünglich ein ent-fernend-ausrichtendes Bewendenlassen bei einer Gegend, d. h. Freigabe der räumlichen Hingehörigkeit des Zuhandenen.1 Cf. the psychology of the infant Oliver.2 1 To free a totality of involvements is, equiprimordially, to let something be involved at a region, and to do so by de-severing and giving directionality; this amounts to freeing the spatial belonging-somewhere of the ready-to-hand. 2 In The Last Puritan.
50 p 111 (145–46)
All this is most carefully imagined but would be clearer and less arbitrary if it were attached to animal instincts and organs. We cannot firmly conceive our embryonic experiences except by attaching the notion of them to embryonic changes, discovered now.
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51 p 112 (147), underlined
Das umsichtsfreie, nur noch hinsehende Entdecken des Raumes neutralisiert die umweltlichen Gegenden zu den reinen Dimensionen. Die Plätze und die umsichtig orientierte Platzganzheit des zuhandenen Zeugs sinken zu einer Stellenmannigfaltigkeit für beliebige Dinge zusammen.1 To transcend egotism is to sink. This is the modern sentimental view of intelligence. 1 When space is discovered without circumspection by merely looking at it, the surrounding regions become neutralized to pure dimensions. Places and the whole totality of places not directly seen but belonging to equipment ready-to-hand, sink to a multiplicity of positions for random Things. [I depart from Macquarrie’s and Robinson’s translation here.]
52 p 116 (152), marked Z
[On “I,” “not-I,” “I-hood”:]
This seems to become myth. 53 p 117 (153), underlined
Die Antwort auf die Frage nach dem Wer des alltäglichen Daseins soll in der Analyse der Seinsart gewonnen werden, darin das Dasein zunächst und zumeist sich hält.1 “Who is alive in daily living?” [ Answer: some animal, animals being the ordinary locus of life.] 1
The answer to the question of the “who” of everyday Dasein is to be obtained by analysing that kind of Being in which Dasein maintains itself proximally and for the most part. 54 p 118 (154), marked
By ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me—those over against whom the “I” stands out. They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too. “Others” are those I continually dramatise in my own play. 55 p 118 (154–55), underlined
Das »Mit« ist ein Daseinsmäßiges, das »Auch« meint die Gleichheit des Seins als umsichtig-besorgendes In-der-Welt-sein.1 Moral kinship. 1
‘With’ and ‘too’ are to be understood existentially, not categorically.
56 p 119 (155)
“Others” are primarily not mythically conceived, but physically. They are hunting in my preserves.
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57 p 120 (156)
Even if we see the Other ‘just standing around’, he is never apprehended as a human-Thing present-at-hand, but his ‘standing-around’ is an existential mode of Being— […]. “People” are essentially busibodies. Statuesque people are un-moral. Pfui! 58 p 121 (157), marked
[More on the status of Others:]
Even in our Being ‘among them’ they are there with us; their Dasein-with is encountered in a mode in which they are indifferent and alien. Quite accurate. Positing the world as that which we exist in we posit the self-existence of the other people in it. 59 p 121 (157)
Concern is a character-of-Being which Being-with cannot have as its own, even though Being-with, like concern, is a Being towards entities encountered within-the-world. But those entities towards which Dasein as Being-with comports itself do not have the kind of Being which belongs to equipment ready-to-hand; they are themselves Dasein. These entities are not objects of concern, but rather of solicitude. All right: but there is just a whiff of the malodorous Scheler. 60 p 124 (161)
[Santayana makes gossipy word-play of Heidegger’s terms, “fremden Seelenlebens” (the psychical life of others ) and “Einfühlung” (empathy ), by applying them to the lesbian writer whom he knew in Florence.]
Fie, fie, O Violet! (Paget). 61 p 129 (167)
The “they” is an existentiale; and as a primordial phenomenon, it belongs to Dasein’s positive constitution. The impersonal socius1 haunts primitive consciousness, which is afraid of its oil shadow. Hence the gods. 1
Companion.
62 pp 132–33 (171), top
Important hint. [Text doubly marked.]
‘Here’ and ‘yonder’ are possible only in a ‘there’—that is to say, only if there is an entity which has made a disclosure of spatiality as the Being of the ‘there’. […] By reason of this disclosedness, this entity (Dasein), together with the Being-there of the world, is ‘there’ for itself.
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And this is the felt existence of spirit, without intuition of any separate essence to be so called. 63 p 136 (175)
[…] when we master a mood, we do so by way of a counter-mood; we are never free of moods. Ontologically, we thus obtain as the first essential characteristic of states-of-mind that they disclose Dasein in its thrownness, and—proximally and for the most part—in the manner of an evasive turning-away. Spirit discovers itself in its repulsions. 64 p 137 (176)
[Santayana paraphrases and comments:]
Emotion belongs to complications, to plights. The occasions do not contain it, but it arises, phenomenally, out of them. [ Note how entirely dramatic this psychology is. It is not science, but pedantic & minute literature.] 65 p 138 (177), marked
Pure beholding, even if it were to penetrate to the innermost core of the Being of something present-at-hand, could never discover anything like that which is threatening. Capital. Care turns essences into things for the spirit. 66 p 139 (178)
It is into such a mood and out of such a mood that the orator speaks. He must understand the possibilities of moods in order to rouse them and guide them aright. You move, as literature does, in the moral world. 67 pp 141–42 (181)
One can also fear about Others, and we then speak of “fearing for” them. This fearing for the Other does not take away his fear. Such a possibility has been ruled out already, because the Other, for whom we fear, need not fear at all of his part. It is precisely when the Other is not afraid and charges recklessly at what is threatening him that we fear most for him. Cf. Oliver when he thought Jim was drowned.1 1
An episode in The Last Puritan.
68 p 146 (186), underlined and marked
Das Verstehen kann sich primaer in die Erschlossenheit der Welt legen, d. h. das Dasein kann sich zunächst und zumeist aus seiner Welt her verstehen. Oder aber das Verstehen wirst sich primär in das Worumwillen, d. h. das Dasein existiert als es selbst.1
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Self-consciousness defined. It is moral judgment or passion, that for whom things are important. 1
Understanding can devote itself primarily to the disclosedness of the world; that is, Dasein can, proximally and for the most part, understand itself in terms of its world. 69 p 158 (200–201)
[Santayana paraphrases and comments:]
Origin of intuition out of groping. Not very satisfying, because the psychic part is ambiguous being described in sub-mental rather than in biological terms. The sub-mental is fudge. Thought is not ready-made & disembodied. Quite true. Yet it is thought. Only not specific or distant, but like sheet lightning, or a headache, or nausea. 70 p 159 (201–2)
It is true, of course, that Aristotle did not pursue the analytical question as far as the problem of which phenomenon within the structure of the
is the one that permits and indeed obliges us to characterize every statement as synthesis and diaeresis. What is it within sweetness that makes sweetness sweet? Sweetness 71 p 165 (208), top
[ Note: a means of discerning spirit is to distinguish a felt interlocutor, an understood thought, from the sensation of a man’s voice.] [Text underlined.]
Das Dasein hat Sprache.1 Spirit discourses. It thinks things over—has flux & continuity. 1
Dasein has language.
72 p 169 (213)
Spirit is not the mere act of inspecting things as they are. It is a psychic faculty, morally & sensuously loaded. 73 p 171 (215)
||Ontology for Aristotle begins with:|| The care for seeing is essential to man’s Being. […] This Greek Interpretation of the existential genesis of science is not accidental. It brings to explicit understanding what has already been sketched out […] in the principle of Parmenides: 1 Being is that which shows itself in the
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pure perception which belongs to beholding, and only by such seeing does Being get discovered. i.e. spiritual existence, actuality. Parmenides probably meant that reality was that which can be defined in thought or being; to be is to be substantial. Descartes first meant that the act of thinking was spiritual existence, and Berkeley that it was the only existence. 1
Perception and existence are the same.
74 p 174 (219), marked
But this kind of Being of the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world dominates also Being-with-one-another as such. The Other is proximally ‘there’ in terms of what “they” have heard about him, what “they” say in their talk about him, and what “they” know about him. Into primordial Being-with-one-another, idle talk first slips itself in between. Note the frivolous side of idealism here confessed. 75 p 177 (221), top
If incarnation is essential to spirit, the human nature in Christ should be a sine qua non of his divine nature. The Son would beget the Father. In fact incarnation is essential to morality. That is perhaps the reason for this Protestant heresy. It is an expression of moralism & worldliness. 76 p 178 (222)
Versatile curiosity and restlessly “knowing it all” masquerade as a universal understanding of Dasein. But at bottom it remains indefinite what is really to be understood, and the question has not even been asked. Nor has it been understood that understanding itself is a potentiality-for-Being which must be made free in one’s ownmost Dasein alone. When Dasein, tranquillized, and ‘understanding’ everything, thus compares itself with everything, it drifts along towards an alienation in which its ownmost potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it. Falling Being-in-the-world is not only tempting and tranquillizing; it is as the same time alienating. Emptiness of the deracinés1 & intellectuals. (H. is a Nazi?) 1
Uprooted.
77 p 182 (227)
[Concerning Angst:]
Incarnation is like a dream in which anxiety dominates The “openess” lies in the question: what am I anxious about?
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78 p 220 (263), marked X
What is primarily ‘true’—that is, uncovering—is Dasein. “Truth” in the second sense does not mean Being-uncovering, […] but Being-uncovered (uncoveredness). Vice versa A-ware-ness of truth is not before truth. 79 p 225 (267)
When the assertion has been expressed, the uncoveredness of the entity moves into the kind of Being of that which is ready-to-hand within-the-world. But now to the extent that in this uncoveredness, as an uncoveredness of something, a relationship to something present-at-hand persists, the uncoveredness (truth) becomes, for its part, a relationship between things which are present-at-hand (intellectus and res)—a relationship that is present-at-hand itself. Discoveredness and assertion are not truth: they are accretions or actions developing in rerum natura So is the perhaps happy relation between intellect and thing, when the intellect describes the thing truly (in some respects only); and then this description is true because it reproduces a part of the truth for the benefit of spirit. 80 p 226 (269), underlined
[…] it is wrong to invoke Aristotle for the thesis that the genuine ‘locus’ of truth lies in judgment; […] Assertion is not the primary ‘locus’ of truth. […] The most primordial ‘truth’ is the ‘locus’ of assertion […]. Truth, understood in the most primordial sense, belongs to the basic constitution of Dasein. The term signifies an existentiale. This has at least the merit of recognising truth as prior to opinion: but still places truth in relation to Dasein, spirit, which it is not actually, though in this merely conceptual discussion, it is an intelligible view, because truth is synthetic and, as it were, addressed to spirit by a necessary harmony, being an essence such as spirit can apprehend. 81 p 228 (271), marked
We must presuppose truth. Dasein itself, as in each case my Dasein and this Dasein, must be; and in the same way the truth, as Dasein’s disclosedness, must be. This belongs to Dasein’s essential thrownness into the world. Has Dasein as itself ever decided freely whether it wants to come into ‘Dasein’ or not, and will it ever be able to make such a decision? This is the new & correct part of H’s analysis. That is if the transcendental attitude prevails.
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82 p 230 (272)
Sein—nicht Seiendes—»gibt es« nur, sofern Wahrheit ist. Und sie ist nur, sofern und solange Dasein ist.1 If “Sein” = essence and “Dasein” spirit, the assertion in the text would be true, when “gibt es” = Essence: because only by proxy, when given in intuition, may essences (not true of matter) be said to “exist”. 1 Being—not entities—is something which ‘there is’ only in so far as truth is. And truth is only in so far as and as long as Dasein is.
83 p 234 (277), marked Z
Manifestly, Dasein itself must, in its Being, present us with the possibility and the manner of its authentic existence, unless such existence is something that can be imposed upon it ontically, or ontologically fabricated. But an authentic potentiality-for-Being is attested by the conscience. And conscience, as a phenomenon of Dasein, demands, like death, a genuinely existential Interpretation. Such an Interpretation leads to the insight that Dasein has an authentic potentiality-for-Being in that it wants to have a conscience. But this is an existentiell possibility which tends, from the very meaning of its Being, to be made definite in an existentiell way by Being-towards-death. For a gaffe. This harkens back to Kant also (in another manner) vitiates Husserl. 84 p 237 (281)
When Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the Being of its “there”. […] In this way a termination of Dasein becomes ‘Objectively’ accessible. Dasein can thus gain an experience of death, all the more so because Dasein is essentially Being with Others. In that case, the fact that death has been thus ‘Objectively’ given must make possible an ontological delimitation of Dasein’s totality. Does it mean that we experience the loss of others morally, that we miss them in the picture, or that we find “ontisch” that they are dead? 85 p 239 (282)
The greater the phenomenal appropriateness with which we take the no-longer-Dasein of the deceased, the more plainly is it shown that in such Being-with the dead, the authentic Being-come-to-an-end of the deceased is precisely the sort of thing which we do not experience. The dead not phenomenally dead so long as the living remember them.
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86 p 251 (295), underlined and marked
Die Geworfenheit in den Tod enthüllt sich ihm ursprünglicher und eindringlicher in der Befindlichkeit der Angst. […] Das Worum dieser Angst ist das Seinkönnen des Daseins schlechthin.1 Yes: but we are not anxious because afraid of death, but because we are afraid of things. You say so yourself directly. 1 Thrownness into death reveals itself to Dasein in a more primordial and impressive manner in that state-of-mind which we have called “anxiety.” … That about which one has this anxiety is simply Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being.
87 p 251 (295), underlined
Das Sein zum Ende entsteht nicht erst durch und als zuweilen auftauchende Einstellung, sondern gehört wesenhaft zur Geworfenheit des Daseins, […].1 The plunge of being alive. 1 Being-towards-the-end does not first arise through some attitude which occasionally emerges, nor does it arise as such an attitude; it belongs essentially to Dasein’s thrownness, ….
88 p 252 (296)
As regards its ontological possibility, dying is grounded in care. I.e. if I were indifferent, I should not be a person, and there would be nobody to die. The clouds don’t die. 89 p 253 (297), marked
The notion of death is not applied by current talk to the transcendental spirit. Hence esoterically, the belief in immortality. 90 p 259 (303), marked Z
Der Tod ist als Ende des Daseins in Sein dieses Seienden zu seinem Ende.1 “Death is the end of life in that life is at its end”. Is this nonsense? Perhaps it means to express the difference that the doom of death makes in life while life lasts. Life is transitory. Or else: “Death exists in that life has a last moment.” 1
Death is, as Dasein’s end, in the Being of this entity towards its end.
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway
Edited by Malcolm Cowley. In the Viking Portable Library New York: 1944. Waterloo. No marginalia.
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Henri III: Les Amours des rois de France Series edited by Guy de la Batut Paris: 1931. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Edith Henrich
The Quiet Center New York: 1946. Waterloo. Five marginalia.
Herodotus
Le Move muse Edited by Lodovico Corio Milan, 19–[?] Waterloo. No marginalia.
Jeanne Hersch
L’Illusion philosophique Paris: 1936. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Gustav Friedrich Hertzberg
Alkibiades Halle: 1853. Waterloo. No marginalia.
A. L. Hilliard
The Forms of Value: The Extension of a Hedonistic Axiology New York: 1950. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Yrjö Hirn
The Origins of Art: A Psychological & Sociological Inquiry London, New York: 1900. Georgetown. Thirteen marginalia.
The Hispanic Society of America: Handbook New York: 1938. Waterloo. No marginalia.
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James Hogg
The Suicide’s Grave: Being the Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner London: 1895. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Pauline Holmes A Tercentenary History of the Boston Public Latin School, 1635–1935 Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1935. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Edwin Bissell Holt
The Concept of Consciousness New York: 1924. Texas. 420 marginalia.
[Marginalia consist of considerable repetition, and much merely verbal quibbling.] 1 p 31, underlined
Logic believes […]. Logic does not believe anything. 2 p 33, underlined
[…] there should be no difficulty with correspondence between logical and “real” systems. i.e. between nature and essence. Of course not. The essence being merely nature sub specie aeternitatis. 3 p 37
||Historic truth as an abstract system.|| Historic truth would not be “abstract” in that it omitted anything: it would merely be immaterially what history was materially—i.e. the essence of it all. Since it would be the ^ flux all at once it would be more “concrete” than the flux. ^ 4 p 51
[On “The Particular and the Universal”:]
And it must be urged once more that the repetition of identicals (with indeed some systematic difference of position) involves no contradiction. Cases of implication or pregnancy in Essences. The essence of space implies all geometrical relations. The essence of matter (the distribution & momentum of all its parts) at any one time,—implies their distribution at any other time. The psycho-physical nexus (if it were found) would imply the essences revealed to consciousness at any moment of the
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material flux. But each of these essences is not implied in the previous one. 5 p 58, marked
The proposition that “This tree is green” means no more than that “A tree is green.” If the judgement is uttered in a particular spot in space, by a corporeal mouth and accompanied by a specific gesture, ‘this’ tree may be referred to: yet the judgement has not so referred, but the physical hand pointing in a particular direction. The action, not the judgement, has seized the particular existence. Existence found in each instance by brute contact. 6 p 58, marked
Even less could the proposition “All trees are green” refer to corporeal existence; for here no comprehensive gesture is possible. In fact, all propositions endure in a way that cuts them loose from the ever-changing physical objects: whereas if corporeal existence were implied by a proposition to-day, such existence must remain fixed for ever. N.B. Therefore existence is not deduced from any proposition. ∴ says Holt Existence is impossible. 7 p 62, underlined
The place in logic of the category of substance is of importance to us in the present inquiry. It seems to be an ingrained habit of the human mind, at least since the time of Locke, to conceive that pretty much every entity of experience ‘inheres’ in something else, and this other an inscrutable something called ‘substance.’ Poor academic souls! And so uneducated into the bargain! 8 p 70, underlined
||Holt doubts whether|| the world that we experience is wholly true. Truth, of course, must not be confused with being. And I cannot conceive by what right a human philosophy has ever announced that the Eternal Order is spherical, or self-contained, is one, is perfect, or is true. What fantastic use of words is this? 9 p 79
[A general comment:] He [Holt] regards essence as the substance of things—a
Platonic error. 10 p 87, underlined
||On the constitution of consciousness, as|| not made of conscious or ‘ideal’ stuff, such that all the essential features of consciousness will follow as logical consequences.
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Has any one ever had this notion, except James and other blundering critics? 11 p 87, underlined
[…] since the process of cognition assuredly involves both a knower and a known, a subject and an object, it is implied that an individual mind, witnessing acts of cognition in order to describe the process, can include both the subject and the object, and can watch the changes in both. That is, other minds or parts of them and objects or parts of them, must be included within such an individual mind. !What language, Good God! 12 p 88, top
That a mind “contains” anything is a loose metaphor, at best: taken literally, it is an absurdity. 13 p 93, marked
||The world as idea, or mind, after Hegel.|| There is a parallelism here with the dim age of cosmological philosophy, when the universe was conceived as consisting now of earth, now of air, and now of water. But these praiseworthy generalizations had soon to be abandoned because it was seen that special parts of the universe really did consist of earth and air and water. Silly false history, after Hegel. 14 p 95, marked Z
[…] Berkeley’s squandering of the term ‘idea,’ to denote everything whatsoever, and his later need of something specifically ‘idea,’ led him into an unctuous case of eating his pudding and digesting it, and then still discovering it on his plate. Oh, oh! 15 p 97, underlined
||Berkeley’s supposition|| that mind or idea is the substance out of which each least term that is, is composed; […]. Oh no: this is wanton invention. Berkeley never supposed that ideas were composed of spirit. 16 p 107, underlined and marked
We may not for the present discuss the perceptions, for these are by definition physical objects in so far as physical objects are mental or are known, […]. Horrible, horrible, horrible.
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17 p 110, marked Z
When we discuss volition we shall find what the soul is, and that it is a very real and satisfying thing. But the soul or spirit as here meant, that sits in awful isolation and receives its own unique sensations, which nevertheless somehow ‘represent’ heaven alone knows what that is outside, is the veriest hocus-pocus. Bad, bad, bad. 18 p 113, underlined
[Holt refers to Willliam James’s “The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience,” and to such expressions as:]
[…] a weary road, a giddy height, a jocund morning or a sullen sky; […]. James does not say that these predicates are neutral entities, but after we have seen that they are strictly neither mental nor material, […] neutral is precisely what they are. Of course the essences of these feelings are essences and not feelings, which does not mean that the feelings are eternal etc. The feelings are instances of their essence, and they alone exist and are acts of the mind. 19 p 135, doubly marked
It has been shown […] that the idealistic doctrine that all being is idea is no more tenable than the derided materialistic doctrine that all being is matter: […]. The simple entities, of which in the last analysis all things are composed, have no substance. Quite so: if water were the substance, it would not have any. 20 p 137, marked
||On the notion that consciousness is without sound, smell, or taste or touch|| the colours, sounds, etc., being secondary qualities sensed within our skulls. Happily in practice, however, reason mostly retains her seat, and we ‘act as if’ the secondary qualities were out there ‘on the objects.’ Indeed, those who theoretically profess the representative theory may safely be challenged to act as if these qualities were not out there on the objects. But worse ensues; for the ‘sensations’ of colours, sounds, etc., are themselves colourless, soundless, and so on, as Berkeley and every psychologist since his time stoutly aver! Where and what, then, we vainly ask, are those familiar and actual qualities, the colours, sounds, odours, tastes and touches? They are neither on the objects nor in our skulls, nor yet are they in our experiences: but they are there ‘represented’ by ‘sensations’ which are destitute of every one of those qualities, whose presence in knowledge we began by trying to explain! Quote important paragraph
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21 p 141, underlined and marked
||Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities is only a flawed argument for the representative theory of knowledge.|| For as we perceive the secondary qualities so also do we perceive the primary—‘solidity, extension, motion or rest, number and figure.’ But the soul, according to the doctrine, is not solid or extended, and so can know these primary qualities only by the means of ‘ideas’ which are neither extended nor solid. The “representation theory of knowledge” is that there is knowledge, not “representation”. 22 p 145, underlined and doubly marked
||Auditory and visual sensations of space do not coincide.|| We shall then perhaps find that contradictions or errors are as objective as any other of the elements of experience, and that conflicting experiences with regard to space in no wise imply that knowledge of space is anything but space. Here is the latent idealism come to the fore. 23 p 149, underlined and marked
[Holt quotes from William James, “Does Consciousness Exist?”:]
“Our experience presents no such duplicity as the content of knowledge in contrast with its object; the content is the object.” This is true of intuition of essence; in the case of existing objects, where much is occult, it is not true, because the object of action & intent is not fully described by the present essence; it is symbolised or pointed to. But the act of perception is another thing entirely. James does not say that the idea is identical with the object: though he might have said anything. 24 p 154, underlined
In coming, now, to survey the realm of the neutral entities, the neutral mosaic, we recall that these entities, just as in any logical system, are graded in a strict and inalienable order of complexities. This order suggests the Platonic hierarchy of ideas, except that our first principle is not the Good, any more than it is the True. The first entities are the simple ones, and we may call these the fundamental entities. Precisely what these are, we are, as a race, even yet scarcely in a position to state. Delicious! 25 p 177, marked Z
So far as reflex-arcs that involve the cerebral cortex go, the Cartesian psychology has in large measure successfully imposed its caveat on the physiologist, who modestly betook himself to posterior regions. There
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might be, one feared, a Soul in the pineal gland or elsewhere, that was directing affairs from that end; and if disturbed it might fly away to lodge a complaint in high places. Little by little this preposterous tabu has lost its sanctity, although it still exerts some unhappy influence. The alienist is even to-day in doubt with his hysterical patient whether to administer bromide of soda and other medicaments or a good hearty walloping; ‘physick’ being good for the body, but discipline for the soul. Yet for the most part the physiologist has come to feel that he may now examine the cerebral cortex, and even the pineal gland, without apprehending an uncanny surprise. How ticklish all this is: one is afraid Holt will at every turn say something worse than what went before. 26 pp 195–96, underlined
[…] the boasted advantage of human over animal psychology, the fact that the subject can introspect, is rather a positive drawback if it leads us to forget that the introspection about an item in consciousness is not the original response that conditioned the entry to consciousness of that item. N.B. Two things that are neither of them the “item” nor the consciousness of it. 27 p 199, marked
We know that there are countless elements in consciousness which introspection cannot recount. It is thoroughly fallacious then, however prevalent the habit, to confuse the content of consciousness with such small part of that content as subsequent reflection is able to vouch for. Quite so. 28 p 202, marked
This fallacy of confusing immediate with reflective consciousness has borne its fruits elsewhere than in experimental psychology. It is responsible, so far as I can see, for that mysterious and luxurious jungle of the Subconscious, of which the finest flower is the Unconscious Conscious:—or is it the Conscious Unconscious? Here your fine scorn is not so much out of place. 29 p 202, marked Z
The literature of these precious speculations takes up a goodly space on the bookshelves, yet does not, I fancy, long detain any reader whose mental powers are in danger of impairment from this or any other line of thought. [Right margin:]
Oh oh.
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[Left margin:]
No: this is out of tune again. Was Hartmann an idiot pure and simple? 30 p 206, marked
[On tropism in plants:]
The plant turns toward the sun, but similarly turns toward other sources of heat and light, and indeed toward quite other stimuli. The plant does not, therefore, respond specifically to the sun: and in order to learn what that is to which it is specifically responding, and of which it is conscious, one must ascertain the one element or property that is common to all the stimuli that elicit that particular response. A man may respond to any woman: yet he may be conscious of more in each than mere femininity. 31 pp 207
[End of Chapter X, “Empirical Properties of Consciousness”:]
It is perfectly possible, and even plausible, that consciousness exists in all these cases: but you have not yet said a word about the fact of consciousness itself—wholly different from the imbedded and undistinguished cross-section of the object—and you have ignored all the properties assigned in consciousness to the cross-section, or the elements of it, in their psychic delimination which cannot be constituents of the object in its total quiescent being. The whole history of the matter is also ignored, and history is very important in natural history. 32 p 208
[Beginning of Chapter XI, “Sensation and Perception in the Conscious Cross-Section”:]
A cross-section of the realm of being means no more than a part of all possible essences. The responses of a nervous organism suggest material stimuli: how can there be a response to music rather than or besides, the response to vibrations of strings, etc? But it is the music, not the strings, that engage consciousness immediately. Only material things should engage consciousness, on this view; but ^ ^ actually engage it also. The initiative or immaterial things increment of quality that comes in appearance is accordingly real. Limitation of scope is itself a new quality. There are others. value, and all the secondary qualities of objects.
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33 p 215
And since one cannot analyse or describe even a memory image without reviving it in immediate consciousness, the reputed infallibility of ‘immediate’ introspection becomes infallibility of introspection as a whole. It is not introspection but intuition that is infallible, because it determines its object. 34 p 226, top
[Pent-up criticism:]
Faults of style: obscurity, uncouthness, vulgarity, repetitions, ^ pedantry, ghastly forced humour, insults, hypocritical com^ pliments, scorn, pertness, slang, and self-sufficiency. 35 p 232, top
The “parts” of a place have no position. (They are essences). 36 p 233, top, underlined
Stifling obscurity. ||Holt discusses position in space.|| But the main points are that the position which our knowledge-mass of a distant locality has, is not internal to itself but, like the position of the locality itself, resides in relations to entities outside. He seems to be speaking rather of the knowledge we have of its position. 37 p 233, underlined
The position of the town consists in its relations to the rest of space: the position of the knowledge-mass that is logically identical with a part of the town, in its relations to the rest of one’s knowledge. Ah! respiro!1 1
I breathe!
38 p 249, underlined and marked Z
If the ‘I,’ along with infinite other relations that give it position in consciousness, were also really ‘now,’ this fact would still not define its position. 39 p 249, marked Z
In fine, the knowledge of a past event is identical with a part of that event, and with just such part as there is knowledge thereof. As [Ralph Barton] Perry has said, “That which represents the event is the event, wholly or in part, and together with something else […].” 1 Here he seems to mean that the act itself is in the object! 1
Holt’s note: R. B. Perry, “The Knowledge of Past Events,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 1906, vol. III, p. 625.
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40 p 256, marked
[…] in the field of cognition: and they need not to be found tangibly assailing the person who experiences them […]. Apparently if I see a hippogryph I must be reacting on it and therefore it must exist in those constituents of the physical world which are hyper physical—like accelerations and potentialities. Its mere inclusion in the realm of being will not bring it to consciousness. 41 pp 257–58, marked
And if the words that I have used lack the ‘vital conscious quality’ of the rainbow and the nightmare, this is a common defect of printed symbols. But the meanings I have intended are just those things that we meet every day—both small and large, vague and clear, faint and glaring, soft and harsh, pleasant and agonizing, living and dead. This is almost eloquent. Not one word about “thought”. 42 p 259, underlined
[Chapter XIII, “Error.”]
Of course it avails nothing that there is somwhere a real and true realm if it is for ever and completely shut out from the ‘subjective.’ Except to knowledge. Holt thinks that to know you must be what you know. This is a mystical denial of knowledge. 43 p 260, underlined
[Holt quotes R. B. Perry, “Conceptions and Misconceptions of Consciousness, The Psychological Review, 1904, XI, p. 287:]
||Experience corrects itself.|| […] the corrected and replaced experience, in contradiction to the corrective experience, is viewed as merely my experience, a term of my blindness and struggle. […] Parson Perry, praying pathetically, Professor Peabody-like?1 1 Here Santayana’s contempt for his former colleagues at Harvard is undisguised.
44 p 261, top, down right margin, and bottom
It is common for books of philosophy to be strong in criticism of others and weak in their own contentions: the opposite is the case with Holt, and this is a sign, perhaps, of the fresh beginning of philosophy, in minds impatient of teaching, but alert to learn and speak for themselves. Bad style, captious and perverted reports of bits of[?] opinion? fearless plunges into very intricate [illegible ] paths of contradiction violent perspectives in which only what is most recent & what is peculiarly new & recent in this, is much regarded—
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all this is the sign of a promising, if unlovely youth, such as is that of the American mind. Expertness in certain special things, and want of ordinary training in all the rest. 45 p 268, marked Z
[On contradiction:]
Come to the point man. 46 p 280
||If two observers agree that what are in fact iron pyrites are gold:|| There is correspondence and there is truth of correspondence, but the essence of truth is consistency between propositions. Error is trouble How pragmatic! 47 p 292, underlined
[Chapter XIV, “Volition.”]
We need not here consider the minuter mechanism of volition, and if, like Hume, anyone should now find that he wills no act except an agreeable feeling is connected with the idea, I should admire but not presume to gainsay his findings. English 48 p 295, underlined
The ‘Ego’ was of course not free if she was a stagnant term watching the play of mechanical forces; […]. !oh! 49 p 298, marked Z
Of course this Ego cannot survey the total experience of a life at one gasp; it takes its leisure. And of course it does not recall all the insignificant details; it doesn’t wish to. But it may still tell an interesting story, and a fairly useful withal,—though embroidered here and there with untruth in order to lend point, interest and the satisfactory air of importance to one’s past self. The Ego surely is a grand unifier, and besides, what other unifier is there? Oh, oh! 50 p 308, underlined and marked Z
The theory of consciousness here offered is strictly monistic. I have tried to show how the manifolds called conscious must and do arise at a certain stage of complexity in the realm of being. The mental is deducible from a system that is absolutely non-mental, and mind is no new substance nor an isolated and independent system in the realm of being.
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I wonder if this is sincere: Too much Münsterberg?1 1
Another of Santayana’s former colleagues in the department of philosophy at Harvard. 51 p 310, marked
||On the psychology of the response of the nervous system to objects.|| This is the sane side of Holt. [Four end-pages contain 121 items in Santayana’s most minute hand, constituting an index of matter on the pertinent pages. I assume that Santayana intended to write an article or a review of Holt’s book, one which went unwritten or did not survive in manuscript.]
Homer
The Original Iliad Translated by Robinson Smith [n.p.] 1937. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Homer
Aphrodite: The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the Pervigilium Veneris Translated by F. L. Lucas Cambridge, England: 1948. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Sidney Hook
The Metaphysics of Pragmatism: With an Introductory Word by John Dewey Chicago and London: 1927. Georgetown. Twenty-two marginalia.
[Hook sent the monograph to Santayana in December 1929, the date of his dedication.] 1p7
[Dewey’s Introduction:]
Contrary to prevalent notions [of pragmatism] however, accentuation is not placed on intermediating affairs in the interest of a particular outcome but rather for the sake of a general consequence or rule. Not utility but fertility. 2 p 11, marked
Paradoxical as it may sound, the pragmatist maintains that a genuine and scientific way of answering questions in philosophy consists in discovering reasons why it is irrelevant to ask them. Certainly.
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3 p 22, underlined
[Hook’s text:]
Our organized purposes, especially in their historic embodiments and deposits, must reveal to a certain extent the nature of the world. Note this phrase: it is incongruous, but means “organized arts.” 4 p 22, underlined and marked X
An instrument is a monument to a felt lack in existence. cart before horse. Incipient acquisition. 5 p 24, marked
[…] even if all application is risk and life itself a gamble, the existence of mechanical agencies proves that the cards of the universe are not stacked against us, that the game is on for a genuine stake and that there are some exciting hands to be played out before everything becomes extinct in a common doom. New American ethos. 6 p 26, marked Z
||One may find|| romance in the history of the ship, intended originally to navigate familiar waters, venturing into strange seas, finding new continents and oceans, becoming an Argonaut in search of new vistas and treasures for the hungry eyes of men. False American eloquence, filling an empty soul with traditional clichés. 7 p 43, underlined
But we do not think in order to think anymore than we walk in order to walk or sleep in order to sleep. I do both. 8 p 45, marked Z
||A case history may not be pertinent to a particular historical instance,|| but at any rate the alleged instrumental efficacy of the historical anlysis is always the reason for dragging it in. Story-telling no fun? 9 p 54, underlined
Purpose for the instrumentalist is as different from motive as novelty is from surprise. use
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Sidney Hook
“What is Materialism?”
The Journal of Philosophy, XXXI, no. 9, 1934. Waterloo. No marginalia.
A. E. Housman
More Poems London: 1936. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Emile Hovelaque
Les États-unis et la guerre Paris: 1919. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Edmund Husserl
Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie Halle: 1913, 2nd printing, 1922. Waterloo. 214 marginalia.
[Generally I have followed in citations W. R. Boyce Gibson’s translation, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Collier Books Edition, London: 1962. Boyce Gibson’s pagination follows Husserl’s, thus: p 40 (63). His translations are enclosed in parentheses. My translations are indicated by omission of the parenthetical page-number and are not enclosed in parentheses.] 1 p 3 (39), underlined and marked
[Concerning changed horizons in philosophy:]
[…] und nun in voller Denkfreiheit die echten, die völlig neu zu stellenden philosophischen Problemen erfassen, die erst der allseitig entschränkte Horizont uns zugänglich macht—das sind harte Zumutungen. (That we should set aside all previous habits of thought, see through and break down the mental barriers which these habits have set […] and in full intellectual freedom proceed to lay hold on those genuine philosophical problems still awaiting completely fresh formulation […] these are hard demands.) 2 p 4, marked
The phenomena of transcendental phenomenology will be characterized as unreal. Essences non-existent. 3 p 4 (40), marked
(Our phenomenology should be a theory of essential Being, dealing not with real, but with transcendentally reduced phenomena.)
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4 p 4, doubly marked
[Santayana summarizes:]
Data of intuition have no natural locus. (Quote, and contrast with Whitehead.) 5p6
||Husserl notes the ambiguity of the words “idea” and “ideal.” He will use instead “Eidos” known, seen, or the German “Wesen” essence.|| He means essence in my sense, not in the Platonic? 6p8
[On the term “gegeben”:]
“Given” = assumed or conceived: the innocent object. It lies in the field of action, not of pure intuition. 7 p 10 (48), underlined
[Chapter I, section 3.]
(At first “essence” indicated that which in the intimate self-being of an indivdual discloses to us “what” it is. But every such What can be “set out as Idea.” Empirical or individual intuition can be transformed into essential [individuelle] insight (ideation)—a possibility which is itself not to be understood as empirical but as essential possibility.) i.e. particular, not “individual” which is proper to every essence. Every essence is “fully concrete”. 8 pp 10–11 (49), underlined and doubly marked
Das Wesen (Eidos) ist ein neuartiger Gegenstand. So wie das Gegebene der individuellen oder erfahrenden Anschauung ein individueller Gegenstand ist, so das Gegebene der Wesensanschauung ein reines Wesen. (The essence (Eidos) is an object of a new type. Just as the datum of individual or empirical intuition is an individual object, so the datum of essential intuition is a pure essence.) Isn’t this a question of words? It is only Wesenserschauung that I call intuition. Things can be objects of perception, not of intuition. Perception involves intent and animal faith. 9 p 13 (52), marked
[Section 5.]
Wesen können intuitiv bewußt, in gewisser Weise auch erfaßt sein, ohne daß sie doch zu »Gegenständen-worüber« werden. (We can be intuitively aware of essences and can apprehend them after a certain fashion without their becoming “objects about which.” ) Perhaps: but this is a matter of definition.
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10 p 18
[Section 8.]
||Experimental science has its own logic and formal principles.|| Yes: but this shows that science is all in the air. The facts are presumed to follow and express the theory clapped on to them. 11 p 18
||Facts follow from facts.|| (if that view is true of it.) 12 p 19 (57), marked
[Section 9.]
Jede Tatsachenwissenschaft (Erfahrungswissenschaft) hat wesentliche theoretische Fundamente in eidetischen Ontologien. (Every factual science (empirical science) has essential theoretical bases in eidetic ontologies.) Yes: whatever the facts, or system of facts, they must have an essence, but there seems to be here, at least in attitude, a false Kantian a priorism, as if essences were imposed on things. Which essences, pray? Those which the things impose, or suggest to one “science”. 13 p 24 (62)
[Section 11.]
(By syntactical objectivities we understand such as are derived from other objectivities by means of “syntactical forms.” ) Complex essences. 14 p 25 (64)
[Section 12.]
||On the relationship of genus and species, in which Husserl belabors the obvious at needless length.|| Le moyen d’ennuyer, c’est de vouloir tout dire.1 1
The way to create boredom is to want to say everything.
15 p 26 (64)
[Section 13, “Generalization and Formalization.”]
Wealth of specification does not lead away from essences to things. 16 p 27 (65), underlined and marked
Die Ausfüllung von logischen Leerformen (und anderes als Leerformen gibt es in der mathesis universalis nicht) ist also eine total verschiedene »Operation« gegenüber der echten Spezialisierung bis zur letzten
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Differenzierung. Das ist überall zu konstatieren; so ist z.B. der Übergang vom Raume zur »Euklidischen Mannigfaltigkeit« keine Generalisierung, sondern eine »formale« Verallgemeinerung. (The filling out of empty forms of a logical nature (and in mathesis universalis there are no forms that are not empty) is thus an “operation” which is totally different from the genuine specialization which extends to the limits of differentiation.) How nicely he avoids the word “abstraction”. God bless him. 17 p 31 (70)
||Although Husserl differs markedly from Kant in his reading of the Critique of Pure Reason,|| (one has only to interpret the regional axioms as synthetic cognitions a priori, and we should then have as many irreducible classes of such forms of knowledge as there are regions.) N.B. Too much Kant here. 18 p 32 (71), underlined
[Chapter I, section 17.]
Es war eben auf dem Boden der reinen Logik ein Schema zu zeichnen, als Stück der von[, und] ihr ausgehenden Grundverfassung aller möglichen Erkenntnis, […]. (The precise task [of Husserl’s chapter I] was to draw up a scheme on the foundations of pure Logic, as a sample of the logically originated fundamental constitution of all possible knowledge […].) This is nonsense, for if these pre-requisites are exclusive, the realm of essence contains their opposites, and all other variables from them, which might be imposed a priori just as well. Nothing is prescribed by logic, therefore save that which is posited by an already existing nature. All imperatives, logical as well as moral, are hypothetical: “if you are and are to remain that sort of being”. 19 p 38 (77), marked
[Chapter II, “Naturalistic Misconstructions,” section 20.]
(Empiricists appear to have overlooked the fact that the scientific demands which in their own theses they exact from all knowledge are equally addressed to these theses themselves.) Empiricism is popular: it assumes anything and everything that people are not inclined to doubt. 20 p 39 (79), underlined and marked
[Section 21.]
||Concerning probings into the self for self-evidence.|| Zwar spricht man von Evidenz, aber anstatt sie als Einsehen mit dem gewöhnlichen Sehen in Wesensbeziehungen zu bringen, spricht man von einem
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»Evidenzgefühl«, das als ein mystischer Index veri dem Urteil eine Gefühlsfärbung verleihe. (It is true that there is talk about self-evidence, but instead of its being brought as a process of insight into essential relations with ordinary seeing, one hears of a “feeling of self-evidence,” which like a mystical Index veri [index of truth] lends to judgment a feeling-colouring.) I never suppose that by feeling the evidence of a point anything but intuition of an essence could be meant. Is it an extraneous feeling that this ought to be so, even if perhaps it is not? 21 p 41 (80–82)
[Section 22, “The Reproach of Platonic Realism. Essence and Concept.”] [Santayana summarizes:]
Ingratitude of opinion and imagination. 22 p 43 (83), marked Z
[Section 23, “Spontaneity of Ideation, Essence, and Fiction.”]
(So too, precisely, with essences; whence it also follows that even they, like other objects, have meanings given them that are sometimes right, but, as in the case of false geometrical thinking, sometimes wrong as well.) You slip here into dangerous expressions. 23 p 53 (95), marked
[Section 31.]
(The General Thesis according to which the real world about me is at all times known not merely in a general way as something apprehended, but as a fact-world that has its being out there, does not consist of course in an act proper, in an articulated judgment about existence.) Animal faith implicit. 24 p 54 (97), marked
||Conditions attached to the act of doubting everything that Descartes tried to establish concerning Being.|| (It is clear that we cannot doubt the Being of anything, and in the same act of consciousness (under the unifying form of simultaneity) bring what is substantive to this Being under the terms of the Natural Thesis, and so confer upon it the character of “being actually there” (vorhanden).) Belief involves intuition of the nature of the thing believed. Doubt suggests the inhibition of the belief while the essence remains identical. It is not a denial or a doubt, but a fresh consideration. [Thus Santayana’s analogue in clear English.]
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25 p 55 (98), marked
||We may entertain a thesis without immediately acting upon it, neither do we abandon it. We bracket it, and in so doing, the thesis becomes modified, transformed.|| Diese Umwertung ist Sache unserer vollkommenen Freiheit und steht gegenüber allen der Thesis zu koordinierenden und in der Einheit des »Zugleich« mit ihr unverträglichen Denkstellungnahmen, wie überhaupt allen Stellungnahmen im eigentlichen Wortsinne. (This transvaluing is a concern of our full freedom, and is opposed to all cognitive attitudes that would set themselves up as co-ordinate with the thesis, and yet within the unity of “simultaneity” remain incompatible with it, as indeed it is in general with all attitudes whatsoever in the strict sense of the word.) Withdrawal into intuition always “free”. The object here is not to discover what (if anything) exists but merely to liberate intuition from faith. 26 p 61 (105), doubly marked
[Section 34.]
||The stream of experience and its relation to essences.|| […] jedes Erlebnis des Stromes, das der reflektive Blick zu treffen vermag, ein eigenes, intuitiv zu erfassendes Wesen hat, einen »Inhalt«, der sich in seiner Eigenheit für sich betrachten läßt. ([…] every experience in the stream which our reflexion can grasp has its own essence open to intuition, a “content” which can be considered in its singularity in and for itself. ) Quote 27 p 65 (109), marked Z
[Section 36.] [On consciousness and intentionality:]
(As the content which presents the whiteness of the paper as it appears to us it is the bearer of an intentionality, but not itself a consciousness of something. The same holds good of other data of experience, of the so-called sensory feelings, for instance.) Strong. 28 p 69 (113), marked
[Section 39.]
(Individual consciousness is interwoven with the natural world in a twofold way: it is some man’s consciousness, or that of some man or beast, and in a large number at least of its particularizations it is a consciousness of this world.) “Consciousness” is a natural existent. 29 p 71 (115), top
Analytic psychology, that is, literary psychology grown pedantic and expressed in scholastic terms.
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30 p 71 (115)
Ich meditiere zunächst als »naiver« Mensch […].1 “Naive” realism. 1 I meditate at first as a naif. Boyce Gibson translates “naiver Mensch” as “man in the street.”
31 p 77 (121), marked
[Section 42.]
(The inability to be perceived immanently, and therefore, generally, to find a place in the system of experience belongs in essence and “in principle” altogether to the thing as such, to every reality in that genuine sense which we have still to fix and make clear. Thus the Thing itself, simpliciter [plainly], we call transcendent. In so doing we give voice to the most fundamental and pivotal difference between ways of being, that between Consciousness and Reality.) Quote? [ No. ] Because it should be: “Between appearance to consciousness and substantive existence.” 32 p 81
Existence is knowable directly, but by intent or faith, which is essential to knowledge: intuition is of the non-existent. Is this what you mean? 33 p 85 (129), marked
(It is not nonsense to hold to the possibility that all exterior consciousness of which I am aware through intuition, may not exist. But my intuition and my consciousness is valid and absolutely given, not only in essence, but in its existence.) Pace Strong. This is wrong, but consistent with his song. 34 p 86 (131)
[Section 46.]
Critical axiom: knowledge is faith. 35 p 86 (131)
(The thesis of my pure Ego and its personal life, which is “necessary” and plainly indubitable, thus stands opposed to the thesis of the world which is “contingent.” All corporeally given thing-like entities can also not be, no corporeally given experiencing can also not be: that is the essential law, which defines this necessity and that contingency.) The absolute psychologist. He is right in fact: but the existence of feeling is assumed in feeling: if the intuition were lost in the feeling, there would be only a non-existent essence, not in place or time.
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36 p 88 (133)
[Chapter III, “The Region of Pure Consciousness,” section 47.]
(It is also conceivable that our intuitable world should be the last, and “beyond” it no physical world at all, i.e., that the things as perceived should lack mathematical and physical determinancy, that the data of experience should exclude every type of physics similar to ours.) Very sound N.B. Essence is approached here as correlative to consciousness: “possible” forms of being. 37 p 89 (134)
The idea of transcendence (or substance) is the correlate of the idea of possible experience! How wickedly Kantian! 38 p 91 (137), marked Z
[Section 49.]
([…] let us think of the possibility of non-Being which belongs essentially to every Thing-like transcendence: it is then evident that the Being of consciousness, of every stream of experience generally, though it would indeed be inevitably modified by a nullifying of the thing-world, would not be affected thereby in its own proper existence.) This pushes the transcendental method into physics. It is fallacious. 39 p 93 (138), marked
(Between the meanings of consciousness and reality yawns a veritable abyss. Here a Being which manifests itself perspectively, never giving itself absolutely, merely contingent and relative; there a necessary and absolute Being, fundamentally incapable of being given through appearance and perspective-patterns.) Husserl’s doctrine in a nut-shell. 40 p 93 (139), marked Z
([…] the whole spatio-temporal world, to which man and the human Ego claim to belong as subordinate singular realities, is according to its own meaning mere intentional Being, a Being, therefore, which has the merely secondary, relative sense of a Being for a consciousness.) Nature is all posited. Were it not posited might it not exist? Evidently: for otherwise it would be posited wrongly, & would not really exist. 41 p 95 (140–41), underlined and marked Z
[Section 50.]
||In natural science, we reflect, carry out the results of reflection according to a logic derived from experience, but we do not associate the results with
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new inquiries, but pursue reflexions directed toward them.|| Wir leben jetzt durchaus in solchen Akten zweiter Stufe, deren Gegebenes das unendliche Feld absoluter Erlebnisse ist—das Grundfeld der Phänomenologie. (We now live entirely in such acts of the second level, whose datum is the infinite field of absolute experiences—the basic field of Phenomenology.) Spirit is substantial? Animal faith is then wrong. 42 p 95 (141), underlined
[Section 51.]
Radikale Betrachtungen […] sind also notwendig, um zur Erkenntnis durchzudringen, daß es so etwas wie das Feld reinen Bewußtseins überhaupt gibt, […]. (Radical discussions […] are therefore necessary in order to penetrate to the knowledge that there is, indeed can be, any such thing as the field of pure consciousness, […].) Yes: this is what he means when he says reines Bewusstsein simply: not spirit but sphere: translate “conscious field” or “sphere”. 43 p 111 (158), underlined
[Chapter IV, section 58.]
||Teleology. The “divine,” if it existed,|| (would thus be an “Absolute” in a totally different sense from the Absolute of Consciousness, as on the other hand it would be a transcendent in a totally different sense from the transcendent in the sense of the world.) No: for this is the sense in which the world [ including God ] is transcendent from the beginning. 44 p 118 (166), marked Z
[Section 62.]
||Because of its capacity for criticism of previous philosophies, Phenomenology is|| (as it were the secret longing of the whole philosophy of modern times. The fundamental thought of Descartes in its wonderful profundity is already pressing towards it; Hume again, a psychological philosopher of the school of Locke, almost enters its domain, but his eyes are dazzled. The first to perceive it truly is Kant, whose greatest intuitions first become quite clear to us after we have brought the distinctive features of the phenomenological field into the focus of full consciousness.) “Every German” “must and shall” attribute himself to Kant. 45 p 142 (195), marked
[Section 76.]
||The relation between transcendental and transcendent Being:|| (Their very meaning implies that the domain over which phenomenology rules extends in a certain remarkable way over all the other sciences from which it has none the
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less disconnected itself. The disconnectedness has also the character of a change of indicator which alters the value of that to which the indicator refers, but if this change of indicator be reckoned in, that whose value it serves to alter is thereby reinstated within the phenomenological sphere.) “Immediatizing” changes the existential coefficient of ^ ^ objects & makes them essences. 46 p 153 (206), doubly marked
[Section 79.]
(Geometry and phenomenology, as sciences of the pure essence, know nothing positive concerning real existence. It hangs together with this, that clear fictions do not only serve these sciences for a foundation as well as do data of actual perception and experience, but to a certain extent even better.) Quote 47 p 156 (208–9)
[On the nature of reflection:]
Reflexion observes the fact that there has been an appearance and sees that intuition was implied in it. 48 p 161 (215)
[Section 81.]
(We must carefully note the difference between this phenomenological time, this unitary form of all experiences within a single stream of experience (that of one pure Ego), and “objective,” i.e., “cosmic” time.) specious time 49 p 162 (216)
Subjective realism is “nonsense”—i.e. contrary to intent. 50 p 162, marked
Moreover it should not be said, for instance, that the way in which cosmic time declares itself within the phenomenological is precisely the same as that in which other real essential phases of the world present themselves phenomenologically. N.B. Here the “phenomenal” seems to be secondary, and naturally produced. 51 p 163 (217)
Psychic time is physical time, connecting the dates of intuitions. 52 p 163, marked Z
But the stream of experience cannot begin and end. !Because it cannot be observed to begin or end!
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53 p 164 (218)
Psychic movement—many strands of it at once—is not in consciousness: but points of consciousness, sparks of feeling or intuition, occur in it in desultory fashion, and also a sustained intuition, of very varying scope and intensity, into which the changing essences drop, and under which the changing intentions line up. The sustained intuition has no centre or limits in physical time. This is well meant; but it is impossible to make a literary physics. Your outlook is forced and wrong. [Pages 173 to the end, p. 323, are unmarked.]
If I Had My Time Again: an anthology contributed by twenty distinguished men and women Edited by James Marchant London: n.d. [1948?] Waterloo. One marginale. 1 p 14
[W. L. Andrews to Santayana:]
If you must write, my boy, be a journalist and not a poet. This is not the age of Words worth but of Harms worth. William Ralph Inge
The Philosophy of Plotinus
Two volumes, London: 1918. Georgetown. Volume I. Forty-one marginalia. 1 p 14, marked
Catholicism, as Troeltsch says, is the last creative achievement of classical culture. The civilisation of the Empire, on its moral and religious side, expired in giving birth to the Catholic Church […]. 2 p 23, underlined
‘Nothing that has real existence can ever perish.’ = essence. 3 p 84, underlined
Number is the original picture of the world, […]. i.e. proportion. This is not so absurd. It is the principle contrary to chaos, for with proportion, or definite distribution, even the realm of essence is a chaos. 4 p 104, doubly marked
It was not Greek to allow the mythological imagination to run riot in serious thinking. Greece had a mythology, but the philosophers did not invent it. Fling at the Germans.
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5 p 110, marked X
The One is defined, in Aristotelian rather than Platonic fashion, as absolute activity. is not “energy” but “actuality”. 6 p 138, marked X
||The nature-philosophy of Wordsworth and Coleridge were anticipated by Blake:|| The sun’s light, when he unfolds it, Depends on the organ that beholds it. Lotze denies it; but no Platonist can do so. It is the real meaning of Plotinus’ famous canon, that ‘the spiritual world is not outside Spirit’ ( ! ). Thought and thing depend upon and correspond to each other. This would be sheer confusion if by “thought” were not meant the intuition of essence, and by essence a sort of timeless and im personal intuition of it. The one is “in” the ^ ^ other only because, so defined, they are identical. 7 p 153, marked X
Modern science is well aware that the world with which it deals is a mental construction from very imperfect knowledge. The landscape, or the atoms? It is the landscape that is the work of sense; the atoms are the real objects (if the theory is true) of the scientific quest. 8 p 153, underlined
The visible spectrum occupies only 1/27 of the known range of ethereal vibrations. We only see that small fraction of the colours which eyes differently constructed might see. Not a construction of knowledge, then! 9 p 161
||Plato, and Aristotle in particular, hold that all natural things long to share in the Divine life.|| ‘The Good moves the whole world because it is loved.’ This is to admit a principle of movement and progress in Nature. Wordsworth too cherished the ‘faith that every flower enjoys the air it breathes.’ Tut, tut. That isn’t at all the same thing: it is not movement. But the flower “loves” its own perfection, i.e. it has a definite psyche.
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10 p 167, underlined
||Plotinus’s quarrel with the Gnostics:|| The world which they ignorantly despise is created by Soul after the pattern of Spirit; […]. i.e. it embodies interesting essences, chosen by nature. 11 p 167, marked X
[…] in the mirror of Matter it reflects the realities of the eternal world. ‘All things that are Yonder are also Here.’ This is the error of Platonism. 12 p 170
||There is no future or past in the eternal world.|| Activity there is; but if it were possible to take a section of eternal life, as we attempt to do for this life when we separate ‘the present’ from the past and the future, the section would exhibit all the perfection of the whole. The form of existence in the world of Time is succession ( ’ ); the stages follow each other. One damned thing after another, or all thundering at once. 13 p 217
[Santayana generalizes:]
The
:1 the essence of a thing is treated as its substance, and its end as its cause. It is physics made out of rhetoric and morals. The motley eloquence of the pulpit, the lazy lines of a rhetorician and moralist who wants to talk about the world without studying it. 1
False beginning, topsy-turvy .
14 p 229
||The eyes say, the sun is an inch or two across.|| If painted on the wall of your room? William Ralph Inge
The Philosophy of Plotinus
London: 1918. Georgetown. Volume II. Fifty-six marginalia. 1 p 43
Intuition of essence. But of course the charm & life of all this come from the fact that the psyche is at work beneath. 2 p 44
Monists & Mohammedans are afraid that if they paint the picture they will make many pictures of it: so they whitewash it, to keep it one.
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3 p 50, underlined
The queen of the sciences is dialectic (which means metaphysics), […]. really! 4 p 74, marked
The whole philosophy of Plotinus is an ontology of moral, intellectual, and æsthetic values. Yes. 5 p 95, top
[General thought:]
essence matter truth spirit spirit is the actuality of essence, its presence to a psyche. Being is
determination position actuality
6 p 97, underlined and doubly marked
Nothing which can never die was ever born. 7 p 138
Hints that the One is unity or harmony. If all functions were perfectly harmonised, the One alone would be actual, yet it would be the unity of many things. 8 p 148–49
The best guides in the mystical life warn their disciples against these ‘monkey-tricks of the soul’ […]. Some persons […] ‘turn their bodily wits inwards to their bodies against the course of nature: and strain them, as they would see inwards with their bodily eyes, and hear inwards with their ears […].’ Introspection defined. Strong! Julio Irazusta
Actores y espectadores Buenos Aires: 1937. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
Julio Irazusta
Tito Livio: o del imperialismo en relación con las formas de gobierno y la evolución historica Mendoza: 1951. Waterloo. Two marginalia.
[A second copy contains no marginalia.]
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Henry Jackson
Plato’s Later Theory of Ideas London[?]: 1881–86. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Alice James
Alice James, Her Brothers—Her Journal [Her Brothers was written by Anna Robeson Burr.] New York[?]: 1934. Waterloo. Eighty-three marginalia.
1 p 57, underlined
[From Her Brothers:] There was William, of course, in loco parentis, encouraging, consoling, advising—but it was William at a distance—a little dazzling and indistinct in his Harvard glory— […]. Wm James had no “glory” at Harvard until after his reputation was made in Europe. 2 p 64, underlined
[Letter from Henry James to “My dear Caroline” concerning their brother Wilky’s Civil War letters.]
||To read them is|| to become lost over again, and what seems most to come forth are the old pains and sufferings and mistakes. And yet Wilky’s war letters are an extraordinary picture of young courage and cheery and happy reaction of every kind— […]. Yes: and with that hideous mock optimism and sentimentality covering up the misery of existence! 3 p 66
It was fortunate he [Henry James] did not live to see the Europe he delighted in as bare as a rifled cupboard and as emptied of kings and pageantry as the United States itself. Silly woman: the past remains here, and also the “passions”. 4 p 66, underlined
||Henry James’s need to make money|| filled his books with vast estates and vast fortunes and all the things his father had told him were “vulgar,” but which somehow did not appear so when they occurred in England. because they were not so. 5 p 67, underlined
[Letter from Henry James to Bob (Robertson) James, January 14, 1880:]
When I have written my regular letters to Cambridge, I have paid the indispensable tribute to family affection, […]. How I know the drag of that!
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6 p 68
[Conclusion to the January 14 letter:]
This is the letter of a person who pallavers and rakes up his smouldering sentiments by force. 7 p 71, underlined
[Of Robertson James:]
Shadows gathered and dimmed that brilliant spirit; depressions were longer and more frequent. How silly to call brilliant a spirit that lights up nothing but only spurts ineffectually. 8 p 97–98, marked
[Alice’s diary, June 28, 1889:]
Read the third volume of George Eliot’s letters and journal, at last. I’m glad I made myself do so, for there is a faint spark of life and an occasional remotely humorous touch in the last half. But what a monument of ponderous dreariness is the book! What a lifeless, diseased, self-conscious being she must have been! Not one burst of joy, not one ray of humor, not one living breath in one of her letters or journals; the commonplace and platitudes of these last, giving her impressions of the Continent, pictures and people, are simply incredible. Whether it is that her dank, moaning features haunt and pursue me through the book or not she makes the impression, morally and physically, of mildew or some morbid growth,—a fungus of a pendulous shape, or as of something damp to the touch. I never had a stronger impression. Then to think of those books, compact of wisdom, humour, and the richest humanity […]. 9 p 123, marked
[Diary, December 16, 1889:]
Two Frenchmen in a horse car in Washington, when two ladies got in and couldn’t find seats, said one to the other, “Levons-nous, c’est noble.”1 1
“Let us stand, it is noble.”
10 p 131, underlined and marked
[Diary, January 29, 1890:]
[…] one of the most intense, exquisite, and profoundly interesting experiences I ever had. I think if I try to give it form its vague intensity will take limits to itself, and the “divine anguish” grow less. 11 p 131, marked Z
[About the death of Henry James senior:]
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[Alice is] haunted by the terror that I should fail him, as I watched the poor old man fade, day by day,—“his fine fibre,” William said, “wearing and burning itself out at things too heavy for it,” […]. Or at nothing: because all this emotion is about itself. 12 p 153, marked Z
[Diary, March 30, 1890:]
There is such a charming face one sees here among the youngish men, although it often descends unlessened,—a look of such beautiful purity, innocence and simplicity; a serenity unimpaired by the complication of experience; a look of being as incapable of a theory as if they had emerged on the hour from the womb of nature. 13 p 219, marked
[Diary, April 22, 1891:]
||Alice describes her horror at the traditional idea of God, as opposed to her personal, Unitarian Deity|| that shapes himself from moment to moment to the need of the votary […]. Subjectivism run wild. 14 p 227, underlined
[Diary, May 7, 1891: a friend has commented on the slackness of English workingmen:]
||The absence of grit in all classes, and the construction and acceptance of life on a|| weak-kneed ||basis.|| this is because the Englishman lives in his body: any mental addition will serve. Cf. the Reformation, the Restoration, Irish Home Rule, Socialism, India, Votes for Women. 15 p 228, underlined
[Diary, May 9, 1891: Alice in England, commenting on a friend’s reaction to American girls there:]
You ask some question cousin-germane to the subject, when all the machinery stops and they, without a squirm, proclaim absolute ignorance. Such candour appeals, no doubt, to the Most High, but it discourages and interrupts the social flow to a greater degree than the hit-or-miss flutter and flap we give to the wings of imagination when we feel underfoot the distressful ooze of doubt. How Jamesian! 16 p 228–29, underlined and marked
[The English] stand to themselves as “mathematics”—not relative but
absolute, and rest placid and content therein, whilst the quivering Yankee catches up, in the ravelled edges of his culture, simply an approximate knowledge of many things. You are so impressed, at first when you come
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[to England], by the rounded smoothness of intellectual interchange, and are amazed until an illuminating ray is projected and you see that you can make no call of any sort upon the individual for a movement of inspiration, that his substance only in exceptional cases justifies the surface of inherited education and fortunate opportunity that has fallen to his lot; but who, I should like to know, ever saw an over-educated Yankee?—save always the egregious Norton.1 You don’t see that to be just a human being, without pretension, is the joy of life, and that being a gentleman is only the way you have of being yourself. 1
“Norton” is Charles Eliot Norton, professor of the history of art at Harvard University and a friend of the James family. 17 p 251, marked
[Diary, February 2, 1892: concerning communication with the dead:]
||Mediums have degraded the spiritual conception more than|| the grossest forms of materialism or idolatry—was there ever anything transmitted but the pettiest, meanest, coarsest facts and details, anything rising above the squalid intestines of human affairs? And oh! the curious spongy minds that sop it all up, and lose all sense of taste and humour. William. You forget dear William!1 1 Near the end of his life, William James, who died in 1910, apparently believed that he could communicate with the dead.
William James
Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking New York: 1907. Georgetown. Eighty-six marginalia.
1 pp 118–19, underlined
Free-will pragmatically means novelties in the world, the right to expect that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena, the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past. What are these? 2 p 166, underlined
||Noetic pluralism and noetic monism: must both be treated as one until facts force us to favor the pluralistic view.|| It may be that some parts of the world are connected so loosely with some other parts as to be strung along by nothing but the copula and. […] But this view leads one to the farther hypothesis that the actual world, instead of being complete ‘eternally,’ as the monists assure us, may be eternally incomplete, and at all times subject to addition or liable to loss.
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How does the supposition that connections are additive make fewer connections possible? J. cooses [sic] the point of view of eternity. 3 pp 168–69, underlined
Our minds thus grow in spots; and like grease-spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible: we keep unaltered as much of our old knowldege, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can. N.B. Synonyms? 4 p 187
[ James’s lecture on “Common Sense.”]
Why is science more than the common sense of the observant? Critical philosophy is a retrospective undoing of both, good only as so much history or as so much purgation. 5 pp 188–89
[On common sense and natural science:]
If common sense were true, why should science have had to brand the secondary qualities, to which our world owes all its living interest, as false, and to invent an invisible world of points and curves, and mathematical equations instead? There is a difference between common sense in its principle—in which it is science itself—from the discoverable errors associated with it in any stage of intellectual awakening. 6 p 193
It is assumed that history, if not common sense, is true. 7 p 201
[Lecture VI, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth”.]
True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. Truth = verifiability. 8 p 202
The connexions and transitions come to us from point to point as being progressive, harmonious, satisfactory. Verification = expectation fulfilled. 9 p 202
||True thought leads to action.|| […] our duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command from out of the blue, or a ‘stunt’ self-imposed by our intellect, can account for itself by excellent practical reasons. Truth in itself unimportant.
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10 p 203
Duty of having true ideas, is right expectations about sense (which are true only as such). 11 p 204, marked
True ideas would never have been singled out as such, would never have acquired a class-name, least of all a name suggesting value, unless they had been useful from the outset in this way. Quote. 12 p 205, underlined
Primarily, and on the common-sense level, the truth of a state of mind means this function of a leading that is worth while. N.B. Truth is prosperous thinking. 13 p 211, underlined
Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, […]. Ideal cohesions constitute a reality for J.! 14 p 215
True as the present is, the past was also. So that if the present ceased to be, the past would cease to have been? 15 p 217, underlined
Truth orthodoxy in science is what gives us the maximum possible sum ^ ^ of satisfactions. 16 p 222
‘ The true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient for what? If for bodily survival, truth transcends that: if for knowledge, it does not. So the Pragmatist can save himself from too much violence to words by abandoning the positivistic associations of his pragmatism and making any ideal goal the criterion of success. Of course, all success really has ideals only for its criterion, so that pragmatism, for an investigation = intellectualism. 17 pp 222–23, underlined
The ‘absolutely’ true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will some day converge. N.B. This is really extraordinary blindness.
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18 pp 223–24
The present sheds a backward light on the world’s previous processes. They may have been truth-processes for the actors in them. They are not so for one who knows the later revelations of the story. Later opinions are truer. (This only true if they are founded on better experience of the same world). 19 p 230, doubly marked
It pays for our ideas to be validated. Our obligation to seek truth is part of our general obligation to do what pays. The philosophy of success.—Truth is an instrumental good: what is ultimate? Pleasure? Pleasure in what? In truth, perhaps? 20 p 232
“Truth” is so haled because it suggests an infallible creed to be meditated on for ever. It is confused with truth-telling or confessing the truth, or with the duty to agree in thought with reality, or with a motive for wishing to know the truth. 21 p 235, marked
I try to imagine myself as the sole reality in the world, and then to imagine what more I would ‘claim’ if I were allowed to. If you suggest the possibility of my claiming that a mind should come into being from out of the void inane and stand and copy me, I can indeed imagine what the copying might mean, but I can conjure up no motive. N.B. There is no possible reason for caring to know, merely for the sake of knowing. [This is true if you have no nature and nothing known is agreeable to you. Cf. Aristotle] . 22 p 239
“Truth” an answer to a riddle, a mystic creed. 23 p 242
The events related in history are not indeterminate ambiguous because they are not simultaneous: the truth ^ about them ^neither arises nor disappears with them. It is their form & the fact that they possessed or shall possess it. 24 p 255, underlined
We plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have made already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines what we do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from one thing to another, altho the stubborn fact
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remains that there is a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own creation. James calls “facts” truths he respects and “truths” those he suspects & thinks will be superseded. 25 p 256
But may not our descriptions, Lotze asks, be themselves important additions to reality? And may not previous reality itself be there, far less for the purpose of reappearing unaltered in our knowledge, than for the very purpose of stimulating our minds to such additions as shall enhance the universe’s total value.1 The redundancy of life over its material basis in many directions is as true as its inadequacy in others. The redundancy being so good shows the accessory and incidental character of both “good” & “knowledge”. 1 It was James who steered Santayana to Lotze’s philosophy as a subject for his Ph.D. dissertation.
26 p 257, top
Why is “man” the Demiurgos, not mentioned among the elements of reality? Because “reality” = his [ James’s] idea of reality. 27 p 257
||The malleability of a world that suffers man to engender truth on it.|| Strange reversion from the cry about the poverty of nature. How smart of us to clothe her so well! 28 p 301
[On tough and tender-mindedness:]
Between the two extremes of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require. and not deal at the price. William James
Essays in Radical Empiricism
New York and London: 1912. Georgetown. Fifty-seven marginalia. 1 pp 10–11, marked
[From “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?”:]
The entering wedge for this more concrete way of understanding the dualism was fashioned by Locke when he made the word ‘idea’ stand
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indifferently for thing and thought, and by Berkeley when he said that what common sense means by realities is exactly what the philosopher means by ideas. Neither Locke nor Berkeley thought his truth out into perfect clearness, but it seems to me that the conception I am defending does little more than consistently carry out the ‘pragmatic’ method which they were the first to use. Oh, yes. 2 p 12, underlined
||Representative theories of perception|| violate the reader’s sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist. As if these were not the same! 3 p 15, underlined
If we take conceptual manifolds, or memories, or fancies, they also are in their first intention mere bits of pure experience, and, as such, are single thats which act in one context as objects, and in another context figure as mental states. Note the change of verb. James was really envisaging the fact here. 4 p 23, doubly marked Z
As ‘subjective’ we say that the experience represents; as ‘objective’ it is represented. What represents and what is represented is here numerically the same; but we must remember that no dualism of being represented and representing resides in the experience per se. N.B. 5 p 24, marked Z
||Immediate, passing, practical experience|| is always ‘truth,’ practical truth, something to act on, at its own movement. If the world were then and there to go out like a candle, it would remain truth absolute and objective, for it would be ‘the last word,’ would have no critic, and no one would ever oppose the thought in it to the reality intended. A lie not found out is a truth. 6 p 25, marked
The peculiarity of our experiences, that they not only are, but are known, which their ‘conscious’ quality is invoked to explain, is better explained by their relations—these relations themselves being experiences—to one another. That is when the consciousness is assumed to begin with and a material or ideal world is excluded in limine.1
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Empirical idealism and the denial of knowledge are assumptions made throughout. ^ ^ 1 At the outset.
7 p 27, underlined
The next objection is more formidable, in fact it sounds quite crushing when one hears it first. This is the preacher introducing the heretic who, he knows, is quite convincing. 8 pp 29–30, underlined
||If subject and object were totally separated, what part would come to realization through the senses, and what part|| ‘out of one’s own head’? Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse here so intimately that you can no more tell where one begins and the other ends, than you can tell, in those cunning circular panoramas […] where the real foreground and the painted canvas join together. [At “Sensations”:]
i.e. “things”! The confusion of James on these points is congenital. 9 p 30, marked
Of every extended object the adequate mental picture must have all the extension of the object itself. ! 10 p 31, underlined
But to argue […] that inner experience is = the ideal objects of inner ^ to me little short of absurd. experience. absolutely inextensive seems ^ The two worlds differ, not by the presence or absence of extension, but by the relations of the extensions which in both worlds exist./ represented, ^ since both worlds are mere “ideas in the mind”. ^ 11 p 32
The general group of experiences that act, that do not only possess their natures intrinsically, but wear them adjectively and energetically, turning them against one another, comes inevitably to be contrasted with the group whose members, having identically the same natures, fail to manifest them in the ‘energetic’ way. The dynamic and the aesthetic are here distinguished—to be afterward confused again.
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12 p 36
[…] the ‘evolution’ (in the life of reason) of “ the psychical ” from ^ ^ ^ ^ moral and otherwise ^^ the bosom of the physical, in which the esthetic, emotional experiences would represent a halfway stage. In rerum natura, of course, the evolution of the two is quite different. 13 p 36, underlined
||Many would say that consciousness intuitively contradicts James’s idea that consciousness is at least half based in the physical.|| My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic. Why? 14 p 40
Empiricism flirts with teleology; and, strangest of all, natural realism, so long decently buried, raises its head above the turf, […]. We are all biased by our personal feelings, I know, and I am personally discontented with extant solutions; so I seem to read the signs of a great unsettlement, as if the upheaval of more real conceptions and more fruitful methods were imminent, as if a true landscape might result, less clipped, straight-edged and artificial. Romantic hatred of the beautiful. 15 p 41, marked
Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of logic as well as in that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, […]. [From “Empiricism”:]
Vitalism then, would be anti-empirical. 16 p 48, underlined
Personal histories are processes of change in time, and the change itself is one of the things immediately experienced. James has not yet thought of denying that change is anything but the feeling of change. 17 p 49, marked
||A moment later in experience than an earlier one is an example of continuity.|| Continuity here is a definite sort of experience; just as definite as is the discontinuity-experience which I find it impossible to avoid when I seek to make the transition from an experience of my own to one of yours. In this latter case I have to get on and off again, to pass from a thing lived to another thing only conceived, and the break is positively experienced and noted.
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Good instance of inveterate subjectivism—as if any other man’s feelings were “only conceived”—that it is what it is for me, or is “experienced as” by me. 18 p 50, marked
Practically to experience one’s personal continuum in this living way is to know the originals of the ideas of continuity and of sameness, to know what the words stand for concretely, to own all that they can ever mean. Absolute immediatism. 19 p 54
||Knowledge by way of perception, as against conceptual knowledge.|| Note that James thinks of knowledge of essence as knowledge of fact, and of knowledge of existence as indirect or “conceptual.” 20 p 56
[Santayana’s reflection above goes on:]
The question is: How does a mind select the object to which it intends its idea to refer? Undoubtedly an assertion that this object has a certain context in rerum natura, and these can be pointed out by the finger. This is true even of mathematical objects, where the externality is that of the name and its conventional connotations. 21 p 57, underlined
Knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience. i.e. Anticipations of possible experiences. 22 pp 57–58
||In a sequence of experiences we may say that the termination was in our minds,|| even although at the outset nothing was there in us but a flat piece of substantive experience like any other, with no self-transcendency about it, and no mystery save the mystery of coming into existence and of being gradually followed by other pieces of substantive experience, […]. e.g. a dog smelling a bitch in heat at the distance of a mile, and starting in the direction, has knowledge of the bitch, the copulation, and the future puppies. 23 p 58, marked
But do not such dialectic difficulties remind us of the dog dropping his bone and snapping at its image in the water? Sophist, preacher, demagogue.
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24 p 59, doubly marked Z
Is it not time to repeat what Lotze said of substances, that to act like one is to be one? Should we not say here that to be experienced as continuous is to be really continuous, in a world where experience and reality come to the same thing? In a picture gallery a painted hook will serve to hang a painted chain by, a painted cable will hold a painted ship. N.B. 25 p 64, marked
Most thought-paths, it is true, are substitutes for nothing actual sensuous ; ^ utopias, ^ they end outside the real world altogether, in wayward fancies, fictions or mistakes. 26 p 65
But the distant parts of the physical world are at all times absent from us, and form conceptual objects merely, into the perceptual reality of which our life inserts itself at points discrete and relatively rare. // Round ^ partly ^ their several objective nuclei, partly shared and common and discrete, of the real physical world, innumerable thinkers, pursuing their several lines of physically true cogitation, trace paths that intersect one another only at discontinuous perceptual points, and the rest of the time are quite incongruent; […]. Here James passes to the physical from the psychological attitude—for there are many experiences in an inexperienced medium. 27 p 69, marked Z
Our experience, inter alia, is of variations of rate and of direction, and lives in these transitions more than in the journey’s end. The experiences of tendency are sufficient to act upon—what more could we have done at those moments even if the later verification comes complete? [At “The experiences of tendency”:]
How pathetic is the effort to account for action out of consciousness! 28 p 121, underlined
|| James on Bradley’s account of “why” and “whence” in experience.|| Polemic writing like this is odious; but with absolutism in possession in so many quarters, omission to defend my radical empiricism against its best known champion would count as either superficiality or inability. Oh, no. It is commission that counts for that.
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29 p 152, marked
If ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ meant two different kinds of intrinsic nature, immediately, intuitively, and infallibly discernible, and each fixed forever in whatever bit of experience it qualified, one does not see how there could ever have arisen any room for doubt or ambiguity. N.B. If things are different it is only because they seem different at first blush; if they were once confused, they are fundamentally identical. 30 p 171fn, marked
I see no inconsistency whatever in defending, on the one hand, ‘my’ activities as unique and opposed to those of outer nature, and, on the other hand, in affirming, after introspection, that they consist in movements in the head. The ‘my’ of them is the emphasis, the feeling of perspective-interest in which they are dyed. My activity is that of my body; and my body and its environment together are an idea in the mind of the world, or the mind that is the world. There are thus two worlds, as in Kant, experience and the ideal of nature. 31 p 183, marked Z
[…] to feel that our train is moving when the train beside our window moves, to see the moon through a telescope come twice as near, or to see two pictures as one solid when we look through a stereoscope at them, leaves motion, nearness, and solidity still in being—if not here, yet each in its proper seat elsewhere. a glimmer of Essence. 32 p 185fn, marked
‘Free will’ was supposed by my critics to involve a supernatural agent. As a matter of plain history the only ‘free will’ I have ever thought of defending is the character of novelty in fresh activity-situations. 33 p 185fn, underlined and marked
If an activity-process is the form of a whole ‘field of consciousness,’ and if each field of consciousness is not only in its totality unique (as is now commonly admitted) but has its elements unique (since in that situation they are all dyed in the total) then novelty is perpetually entering the world and what happens there is not pure repetition, as the dogma of the literal uniformity of nature requires. As if the idea of nature had to be uniform with itself, and all animals and madmen had always to think alike!
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34 p 200, marked Z
The viscera and cells are only possible percepts following upon that of the outer body. The atoms again, though we may never attain to human means of perceiving them, are still defined perceptually. Oscillation between nature, logic and factualism 35 p 200, marked Z
The mind-stuff itself is conceived as a kind of experience; and it is possible to frame the hypothesis […] of two knowers of a piece of mind-stuff and the mind-stuff itself becoming ‘confluent’ at the moment at which our imperfect knowing might pass into knowing of a completed type. [From “which our”:]
Roycean jargon. James Hopwood Jeans
The Universe around Us
Cambridge, England: 1929. Georgetown. No marginalia.
Robinson Jeffers
The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers New York: 1937. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Robinson Jeffers
The Double Axe, and Other Poems New York: 1948. Waterloo. Three marginalia.
Douglas Jerrold
An Introduction to the History of England, from the Earliest Times to 1204 London: 1949. Waterloo. Twelve marginalia.
1 p 11, marked
I believe that history, properly undertaken, is the record not of what has happened but of what has mattered. 2 p 51, marked
To this day, much of this early prehistoric Europe remains. Her foundations, the peasant, the priest and the warrior, endure. It is the presence of these three warring but complementary traditions which makes the history of Europe unique, and we, who are Europeans, must read our history in the light of this knowledge. Keep passage.
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3 p 83, marked
[…] we start with the knowledge that the civilisation of our island was wholly imported, that we are European first and British only in a secondary sense. We must begin to harbour a suspicion too, that the genius of our island lies in its capacity to receive, to absorb, and to use, rather than to create and to give. Juan Ramón Jiménez
Fifty Spanish Poems Translated by J. B. Trend Oxford: 1950. Waterloo. No marginalia.
[Opposite the title page:]
Lo que hubiera dicho Boileau Tous les noms des couleurs ici s’étalent bien, Mais les vers, bien ou mal, ne disent jamais rien.1 Lo que digo yo:2 All is atmospheric vapour And coloured tissue-paper. 1
What Boileau would have said / All the names of colors / are nicely strewn here, But the verses, good or bad, / never say a thing. 2 What I say.
Lionel Johnson
Some Winchester Letters of Lionel Johnson Edited by Frank Russell London: 1919. Georgetown. Sixteen marginalia.
1 pp 72–73
[Letter to “C,” April 1884:]
B.A.O.H. and two others whom you may know—these men are real in themselves to love or to ignore: and the common union of these in showing me the love which I can never externally seem to appreciate and return is a divine thing and a solution of many fitful doubts and longings. Was this the occasion on which he visited Russell at Balliol?1 1
On the relationship between Russell and Johnson, see George Santayana: A Biography, pp. 64–65. Because Johnson spent a night in Russell’s room, Russell was sent down for a month, and subsequently resigned from the university.
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2 p 76, marked
I do not love sensuality: I do not hate it; I do not love purity: I do not hate it; I regard both as artistic aspects of life. The ’80’s. 3 p 140, underlined and marked
Just think, a man’s life is not his acts of profession; drills, sermons, death beds, stone breaking, are not the life; but accidents of the life; the life is the sunsets we worship, the books we read, the faces we love; […]. 4 p 148, marked
I tell you, be happy, for that is to know God; be sinful, for that is to feel God; […]. the ’80’s 5 p 150, top
Facts be dead leaves beneath the impassioned foot of poesy. 6 p 151
||Two pages of quasi-poetic utterances about Johnson’s self-invented version of Christianity.|| You must bolster up the church because things would be too horrible otherwise.—Mankind cannot endure the truth. Juan de la Cruz
Aphorismes de Saint Jean de la Croix
Edited by Jean Baruzi Bordeaux, Paris: 1924. Waterloo. Four marginalia, markings only.
Horace Meyer Kallen
William James and Henri Bergson Chicago: 1914. Georgetown. Forty-three marginalia
[Kallen had been Santayana’s graduate assistant at Harvard. After Santayana’s retirement, the two corresponded for several years, with increasing chilliness on Santayana’s part.] 1 p ix
[Preface, about William James:]
His mind and eye were alert to the unique, the individual, hence the important, in all phases of life and reflection […]. His sympathetic and persuasive statement of one phase of [Bergson’s thought] has led many careless readers to regard him as a Bergsonian; […].
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What nonsense. J. could never understand anyone else, but made dramatic figments in his own mind, to call by their names. 2 p 18, underlined
||Kallen uses the phrase, “experiential complex.”|| ?Is it an animal? Kallen seems to think of sense-data as so many trooping beasts. 3 p 22, underlined
||Hypostasis in empirical philosophy.|| […] it is a question of the adequacy of the world to measure up to your standard system. If the world doesn’t, so much the worse for the world. You then call it mere appearance. The true and abiding reality is your system. What folly! 4 p 23, bottom
[General comment:]
Truly, it is very annoying to a pragmatist to take him [Kallen? Wm. James?] seriously. 5 p 28, marked Z
||Radical empiricism recognizes human values, but|| refuses to distort the world, as idealisms do, […] or to belittle value as such, as materialisms do, […]. What a stubborn denial of the power to discover anything! 6 p 40, underlined
In his A Pluralistic Universe, William James had insisted that “the higher thoughts . . . . are psychic units, not compounds; but for all that, they may know together as a collective multitude the very same objects which under other conditions are known separately by as many simple thoughts.” Incredible incompetence! As if, by knowing the same objects they became the same fact. 7 p 95
||On William James’s distinction between “knowledge-of-acquaintance” and “knowledge-about.”|| Curious how the blind-spot in the pragmatic eye always covers Intellect. Horace Meyer Kallen
The Book of Job As a Greek Tragedy New York: 1918. Georgetown. No marginalia.
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Horace Meyer Kallen
Culture and Democracy in the United States New York: 1924. Georgetown. No marginalia
Horace Meyer Kallen
Art and Freedom Two volumes. New York: 1942–1943. Waterloo. Volume 1, no marginalia; Volume 2, two marginalia.
1 p 741, marked
||On intuition; William James’s “knowledge of acquaintance”: how things look and feel at first acquaintance.|| Whatever we experience in this sort of isolation has an immediacy, a clarity, a vividness and absoluteness that it later loses. Like Santayana’s essences, it stands in consciousness ineffably that, and nothing else. Now conceivably, there may be a dark prior state of the spirit analogous to animal drive or sheer materiality, a state of push, tension, emotion, sensation without awareness. i.e. the psyche contains the potentiality of spirit. 2 p 742, marked
[…] Beauty has degrees. Beauty is successful expression. A high degree of success makes a lesser one Ugly. The feeling is “mental”; but the force and intent are psychic = vital. Horace Meyer Kallen
The Education of Free Men New York: 1949. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Horace Meyer Kallen
Patterns of Progress New York: 1950. Waterloo. Four marginalia.
1 p 80, underlined and marked
For the Progress whose wisdom is science and work civilization, the will to progress is the condition prior. Its spring is brave men’s lone initiatives, that stream together in their hazardous labors and join them in communions. Is it the quantity or quality of these that counts?
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Immanuel Kant
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Critique of Practical Reason Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott London: 1883. Georgetown. 114 marginalia.
[I have listed Santayana’s editions of Kant in the order in which I deduce he read them. He would have used this edition as a Harvard student, 1884, but from his note at 9 p 15, as well as from the change in his hand-writing, it is clear that he re-read at least parts of the volume in 1890. Marginalia are in the early hand, unless otherwise indicated.] 1 p ii
[Front matter.]
The difference between the free and the voluntary is that the free chooses because it sees a reason, the voluntary because it feels a desire. The desire to choose acccording to reason (grace) is preci necessary to all free acts. But if it is the reason and not the impulse that determines the will, the will is free. Suppose a teacher who is in the habit of calling “learnèd” “learned” has two pupils. The first pronounces learned without hesitation, because instinctively: he has ^ His action ^ never heard it pronounced otherwise. is voluntary but not free. The second knows the correct pronunciation to be learnèd: but in order not to seem to correct his teacher pronounces it learned. His action is free. The respect that makes him not wish to correct his teacher may be entirely instinctive and involuntary: it may be fear of a whipping, yet if it is present to his mind as the reason for his act he is free. 2p9
[“Transition from the Common Rational Knowledge of Morality to the Philosophical.”]
Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a Good Will. Why should this be so, if it is? A theory of the origin of this strange fact is needed.1 1
Santayana’s later hand.
3 p 9, underlined
Intelligence, wit, judgment, and the other talents of the mind, […] or courage, resolution, perseverance, as qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects; but these gifts of nature may also become extremely bad and mischievous if the will which is to
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make use of them, and which, therefore, constitutes what is called character, is not good. Is this one & the same thing? A good thing abused may be mischievous it cannot be bad. 4 p 10
||Without good will, one’s action may be villainous and cooly dangerous.|| His being without passion makes him better: his acting wrong without the excuse of being subject to that natural disorder, makes him worse. Besides the coolness itself makes him really admirable in our eyes. 5 p 12
The argument is thus: reason is not good for anything therefore it is good in itself. We find it influencing life for evil; yet we must admit it is intended to guide us in life. 6 p 13, underlined
I also set aside those actions which really conform to duty, but to which men have no direct inclination, performing them because they are impelled thereto by some other inclination. If this means that acts or things not good in themselves can never enter into the highest good, Kant is right. But duty, though it may be one direct object of preference, is not the only one, nor a primitive one. 7 p 15
[…] the moral worth of the character is brought out which is incomparably the highest of all, namely, that he is beneficent, not from inclination, but nor from duty./ , but from love, founded not on what things are ^ ^ on what^ they are in themselves. to him, but ^ 8 p 15
Suppose you say that to dress in the last fashion is a duty because injured vanity and envy[?] might otherwise sour[?] your character. This is about Kant’s argument. 9 p l5
||On the passages in Scripture urging us to love our neighbours,|| even our enemy. For love, as an affection, cannot be commanded, but beneficence for duty’s sake may; even though we are not impelled to it by any inclination— […]. Practical love is not love; rational love is. [1884] By rational love I suppose I meant insight into the independent value of other beings [ 1890.]
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10 p 27
||Are the principles of morality resident in our nature, or are they to be found a priori? || […] in pure rational concepts only […]. “I am hungry” our nature, for pursuit is the essence of life. “This will satisfy my hunger” my relation to the world, learned by experience: to satisfy your hunger take what will satisfy it “the categorical imperative,” given by reason. 11 p 37, underlined
[…] it may be discerned beforehand that the categorical imperative alone has the purport of a practical Law: all the rest may indeed be called principles of the will but not laws, since whatever is only necessary for the attainment of some arbitrary purpose may be considered as in itself contingent, and we can at any time be free from the precept if we give up the purpose: […]. Why does Kant always suppose that it is possible to give up the purpose? While we act we have to act with a purpose . . there is indeed a sense in which purpose (i.e. desire selfishness) may be given up—by holiness, which as Kant says, is free from all precept. 12 p 39, underlined
||Is the decision to commit suicide to avoid continuing evil based on self-love, and can it become a law of nature?|| Now we see at once that a system of nature of which it should be a law to destroy life by means of the very feeling whose special nature it is to impel to the maintenance of life, would contradict itself, and therefore could not exist as a system of nature; […]. Why? If it always led to the extinction of life, it would contradict itself, if (what is not true) it were also the principle which impels to the maintenance of life. But the conscious search after pleasure is neither what impels to life nor what would always lead to the extinction of life. It is only frivolity. 13 p 42, underlined
||When inclination contradicts universal law, the antagonism is against reason, not law.|| Now, although this cannot be justified in our own impartial judgment, yet it proves that we do really recognise the validity of the categorical imperative and (with all respect for it) only allow ourselves a few exceptions, which we think unimportant and forced from us. We recognise its validity as the dictate of reason, but by no means the authority of reason as a guide of life.
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14 p 46, marked
All objects of the inclinations have only a conditional worth, for if the inclinations and the wants founded on them did not exist, then their object would be without value. But the inclinations themselves being sources of want, are so far from having an absolute worth for which they should be desired, that on the contrary it must be the universal wish of every rational being to be wholly free from them. N.B. Cf. Hume. Reason is an unintelligible instinct. 15 pp 46–47
If then there is a supreme practical principle or, in respect of the human will a categorical imperative, it must be one which, being drawn from the conception of that which is necessarily an end for every one because it is an end in itself, constitutes an objective principle of will, and can therefore serve as a universal practical law. […] Accordingly the practical imperative will be as follows: So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only. the trouble with this is that it is narrow. for humanity read being. Nature and God do so: we also should. 16 p 53
||On the value of benevolence from principle rather than from instinct.|| Benevolence from principle is not benevolence it is beneficence. The dignity of benevolence is derived from love. 17 p 60
||I should promote the happiness of others; any maxim excluding it cannot be part of universal law.|| There seems to be something strange here. No concern of mine (∴not my happiness) is to be the aim: yet others’ happiness is to be aimed at. What true love aims at is to do good to others, not to make them happy: to free them from the tyranny of desire, not to encourage their subservience to it. 18 p 68, underlined
[…] we find that […] we must ascribe to every being endowed with reason and will this attribute of determining itself to action under the idea of its freedom. […] “I ought” is properly an “I would,” valid for every rational being, provided only that reason determined his actions without any hindrance. Cf. Spinoza’s “Men are good because they are happy.”
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19 p 75–76, underlined
[“On the Extreme Limits of all Practical Philosophy.”]
||On the dialectic of Reason arising from the circumstance that the freedom of the will seems to contradict the necessity of nature|| and placed between these two ways Reason for speculative purposes finds the road of physical necessity much more beaten and more appropriate than that of freedom; […] hence it is just as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reason of men to argue away freedom. Philosophy must then assume that no real contradiction will be found between freedom and physical necessity of the same human actions, […]. Yes: we must so define freedom that it may not contradict nature and experience. 20 p 102
[“Part First. Elements of Pure Practical Reason.”]
Understanding. Reason (one and identical in every body, but variously obscured and weakened) The understanding is in need of memory to furnish material (if not counsel ignorance) and of the absence of desire (if not comes difficulty.) the understanding sees that it contradicts itself unless it insists on the discovery of truth and the renunciation of desire. Memory. Presentations, perceptions, (individual and different in each man, but more or less resembling one another) these are necessary for the exercise of both reason and will, of which they are the subject matter. Will. Desire, instinctive imposed by nature. made conscious by the presence of reason; turned into love (contemplative) by the triumph of reason. The will, learning from reason that it must abandon desire, may or may not abandon it. This choice is essentially free; but is much facilitated by the character of the memory, i.e. of the presentations. Temptation and grace are presentations as to their matter: but what we call their influence on us is really our reaction on them. the idea of a possible sin is presentation: the delight in the idea is will. (Of course, subsequent reflection makes the circumstances and manifestations of this will the subject of thought, and this thought is presentation, but the will is as unpresentable as gravity, which by the way is nothing but the will of matter.)
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The will is perfectly free when it is unobstructed in its conformity to reason, and therefore cannot act wrong, i.e. contrary to itself. It would be perfectly enslaved if it were incapable of acting at all in conformity to reason, and never could submit itself to any law. The first state is holiness, the second animality. Starting from the latter, the aim of life is to reach the former. We are born in sin, i.e. with the animal nature acting, the reason dormant. As the reason wakes, it becomes possible for us to sin actually, i.e. to disregard the reason that we see in ourselves. The gravity of a sin depends on its opposition to the idea of perfect reason: the guilt of a sin in its opposition to the ideal of reason in the individual. Conformity of the will to this ideal absolves from sin; conformity of the ideal to perfect reason remits the sin, i.e. loosens from the necessity of purification. purgation 21 p 108
[Section II, Theorem I.]
[…] since susceptibility to a pleasure or pain can be known only empirically, and cannot hold in the same degree for all rational beings, a principle which is based on this subjective condition may serve indeed as a maxim for the subject which possesses this susceptibility, but not as a law even to him […]. Indeed, why should one desire pleasure? Pleasure is the smile with which nature rewards us for doing her work. Why should we care for it? 22 p 111
||Lower versus higher pleasures.|| It seems to me that the dignity of these higher pleasures comes from there being so much that is not pleasure in them. [1884] 23 p 112, underlined
To be happy is necessarily the wish of every finite rational ? being, and ^ ^ of desire. this, therefore, is inevitably a determining principle of its faculty It is in places like this that the uninspired Protestant nature of Kant makes him insupportable. Who, in reading this sort of thing, would believe that detachment had been preached for thousands of years? –[ 1884]–
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24 p 115, underlined
It is, therefore, surprising that intelligent men could have thought of calling the desire of happiness a universal practical law on the ground that the desire is universal, and, therefore, also one maxim by which everyone makes this desire determine his will. No one does so but a coxcomb. To make it a maxim to get the most pleasure out of life is as unnatural as it is vicious. [1884] 25 p 122, marked
[T]he sole principle of morality [the autonomy of the will] consists in the independence on all matter of the law (namely, a desired object), and in the determination of the elective will by the mere universal legislative form of which its maxim must be capable. Now this independence is freedom in the negative sense, and this self-legislation of the pure, and, therefore, practical reason, is freedom in the positive sense. N.B. 26 p 129, underlined
||On the relationships among duty, obligation, and moral law: the idea of duty cannot be derived from moral feeling,|| else we should have to suppose a feeling for the law as such, and thus make that an object of sensation which can only be thought by the reason; and this, if it is not to be a flat contradiction, would destroy all notion of duty, and put in its place a mere mechanical play of refined inclinations sometimes contending with the coarser. ie, your superstition. Kant is evidently thinking of a law that imposes itself on the world and justifies vengeance on breakers of it. 27 pp 129–30, underlined
[“Practical Material Principles of Determination taken as the Foundation of Morality […].”]
But the notion of perfection in a practical sense is the fitness or sufficiency of a thing for all sorts of purposes. This perfection, as a quality of man, and consequently internal, is nothing but talent, and, what strengthens or completes this, skill. These [talent, skill] make the perfection of the higher animals: man’s perfection depends on the contemplation of truth and the extinction of desire. At bottom Kant’s theory seems to me correct, but his manner of stating it obscure and objectionable. Reason must rule by its own authority, not by the favor of instincts.
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28 p 142, marked
[Kant’s criticism of Hume.]
||Mathematics claims a priori assent to the universal validity of its propositions,|| on the kindness of observers, who, when called as witnesses, would surely not hesitate to admit that what the geometer propounds as a theorem they have always perceived to be the fact, and, consequently, although it be not necessarily true, yet they would permit us to expect it to be true in the future. Exactly Hume’s position. 29 p 148
By a concept of the practical Reason, I understand the idea of an object as an effect possible to be produced through freedom. To be an object of practical knowledge, as such, signifies, therefore, only the relation of the will to the action by which the object or its opposite would be realised; […]. The object of practical reason is something that reason shows ought to be desired. 30 p 152, marked
||All rational men must concur in what constitutes a good, and see as evil with equal unanimity. Even a man who gets a deserved beating|| must in his reason acknowledge that he has met justice, because he sees the proportion between good conduct and good fortune, which reason inevitably places before him, here put into practice. Queer aesthetic judgment here introduced. 31 p 205, doubly marked
It is, however, evident that if the notion of the summum bonum includes that of the moral law as its supreme condition, then the summum bonum would not merely be an object, but the notion of it and the conception of its existence as possible by our own practical reason would likewise be the determining principle of the will, since in that case the will is in fact determined by the moral law which is already included in this conception, and by no other object, as the principle of autonomy requires. This order of the conceptions of determination of the will must not be lost sight of, as otherwise we should misunderstand ourselves, and think we had fallen into a contradiction, while everything remains in perfect harmony. This last paragraph is very instructive: but it is obscure. From my point of view it may be stated thus: It is evident that perfection (the possession of truth and extinction of desire) is not only the aim of life, and that the hope of attaining it is the spring of action, but also that it is the test
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of right conduct. An act performed not from instinct or desire, but from the apprehension of its reasonableness, is a right act: and the attainment of that state wherein we may never act by instinct or from desire is the aim and object of our life. The categorical imperative is “Be rational.” Therefore truly rational acts are right and a truly rational life is perfection. 32 p 206, underlined
[“Of the Dialectic of Pure Reason in Defining the Conception of the Summum Bonum.”]
It has been shown in the Analytic that virtue (as worthiness to be happy) is the supreme condition of all that can appear to us desirable, and consequently of all our pursuit of happiness, and is therefore the supreme good. There are two imaginable ways of being happy, by having desire fulfilled, or by having it extinguished. The former is a self contradiction, as we see in the Mohamedan [sic] and Protestant heaven: the latter alone is possible as pictured in the Buddhist and Catholic heaven. In order not to quarrel with Kant I will suppose he accepts the latter kind. In this case virtue and happiness go together simply because they are the same thing. 33 p 214, underlined
[S ]elf-contentment ||is an analogue to the happiness deriving from consciousness of one’s own virtue.|| This is an odious word: call it peace. 34 p 219, words double underlined
This principle of the moral destination of our nature, namely, that it is only in an endless progress that we can attain perfect accordance with the moral law, is of the greatest use, not merely for the present purpose of supplementing the impotence of speculative reason, but also with respect to religion.
?!! 35 p 228, underlined
We can also see from this that, when we ask what is God’s ultimate end in creating the world, we must not name the happiness of the rational beings in it, but the summum bonum, […]. Evidently God’s end is that which is accomplished otherwise God didn’t know how to bring it about. That the wicked should be damned is as much God’s end as that the
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good should be saved. They are damned because it is right they should be. We may wish that a man may not be wicked, and try to make him good (by praying for him, for instance) but we cannot wish that a wicked man should be saved. If we wish well to a man we call bad, it is because we feel him to be good. Now nothing good remains in the damned except existence. –[ 1886]– This note of mine is written in the true theological spirit. ^ so well? Because it occurs to me and I How do I ^know this like it. [ 1896.] Immanuel Kant
Critique of Pure Reason
Translated by F. Max Müller New York, London: 1900 (2nd edition). Georgetown. 308 marginalia. [From their tenor, as well as from the note to himself on p. 516: “Let the class omit this to p 537,” we know that many of Santayana’s notes here were material for lectures and discussion. See also the entries for 4 p 26, and 47 p 562.] 1 p 21, underlined
It is therefore from the human standpoint only that we can speak of space, extended objects, etc. N.B. The truths of geometry are then dependent on the accidents of human nature. What is human nature that it controls the stars? 2 p 21, marked
As the peculiar conditions of our sensibility cannot be looked upon as conditions of the possibility of the objects themselves, but only of their appearance as phenomena to us, we may say indeed that space comprehends all things […]. The stars are ideas of the unknowable. 3 p 22, underlined
We cannot judge whether the intuitions of other thinking beings are subject to the same conditions which determine our intuition, and which for us are generally binding. Why not provisionally? What rules at home only may rule there absolutely.
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4 p 26, underlined
||If time existed by itself, it would be something real; nor could it|| as a determination or order inherent in things themselves, be antecedent to things as their condition, and be known and perceived by means of synthetical propositions a priori. !To perceive by means of a proposition is a crying absurdity. 5 p 26, marked
Time is nothing but the form of the internal sense, that is, of our intuition of ourselves, and of our internal state. Exam? 6 p 37, top
[“Transcendental Æsthetic.”]
It is not the contradiction in our ideas that makes them not true, but their essence as ideas. [An early use of the term “essence.”] 7 p 37
But if we take the empirical in general, and ask, without caring […] whether it represents a thing by itself (not the drops of rain, for these are already, as phenomena, empirical objects), then the question as to the relation between the representation and the object becomes transcendental, and not only the drops are mere phenomena, but even their round shape, nay even the space in which they fall, are nothing by themselves, but only modifications or fundamental dispositions of our sensuous intuition, the transcendental object remaining unknown to us. i.e. if we know a thing it cannot be real. 8 p 41, underlined
||Our intuition is always sensuous and consists|| of the mode in which we are affected by objects. i.e. Things in themselves. Men have perception only from external shocks. (This is not quite true.) 9 p 45, underlined
||Kant questions the possibility of|| a priori ||objects of experience.|| All knowledge is a priori in itself, but is called empirical if its occasion (or result) is an external object. 10 p 47, top
[“Transcendental Logic.”]
Logic = the morphology of inference.
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11 p 55, marked
||Kant refers to concepts that spring|| pure and unmixed from the understanding […]. Pure assumption. What we may say is that transcendental philosophy assumes a unitary a priori intelligence. 12 p 66
[To Kant’s well-known division of Categories: quantity, quality, relation, and modality, Santayana asks:]
Where are similarity? identity? goodness? 13 p 106, underlined and marked
Pure concepts of the understanding are therefore a priori possible, nay, with regard to experience, necessary, […] because our knowledge has to deal with nothing but phenomena, the possibility of which depends on ourselves, and the connection and unity of which (in the representation of an object) can be found in ourselves only, as antecedent to all experience, nay, as first rendering all experience possible, so far as its form is concerned. N.B. 14 p 127, top
The medium of synthetic judgements is the internal sense under the form of time. True knowledge = understanding of experience. 15 p 129, top
Only if experience is forthcoming are the categories forms of knowledge. 16 p 133, top
[“Of the Axioms of Intuition.”]
All phenomena are extensive quantities, i.e. are composed of a multitude of separately perceived parts. [ This is false.] The synthesis of perception is of a successive manifold. [ False also.] 17 p 165
[Santayana paraphrases and comments:]
All historic objects would be mere fulminations and dreams, and could not stand criticism, were they not related by necessary causation. E.g. The resurrection of Christ. (Belief, however, is evidently possible without this relation.)
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18 p 185
[In the midst of Kant’s “Transcendental Analytic,” Santayana notes what appear to be the scores of Harvard-Yale football games, together with the Harvard captains.]
1898–9 Dibble 1898–00 Cabot 1900–01 Daly 01–02 Campbell
H 17 0 0 22
Y 0 0 28 0
19 p 245, top
Reason is an a priori principle for synthesising the rules of the understanding. 20 p 261
[At Kant’s heading, “Of Transcendental Ideas”:]
= Interests of the mind. 21 p 280
The artifice and conventional entanglement of all this thinking are puerile. 22 p 282, marked
We can, however, use as the foundation of such a science [a science of pure reason] nothing but the single, and in itself perfectly empty, representation of the I, of which we cannot even say that it is a concept, but merely a consciousness that accompanies all concepts. By this I, or he, or it (the thing), which thinks, nothing is represented beyond a transcendental subject of thoughts = x, which is known only through the thoughts that are its predicates, and of which, apart from them, we can never have the slightest concept, so that we are really turning round it in a perpetual circle, having already to use its representation, before we can form any judgment about it. And this inconvenience is really inevitable, because consciousness in itself is not so much a representation, distinguishing a particular object, but really a form of representation in general, in so far as it is to be called knowledge, of which alone I can say that I think something by it. Good passage on the inanity of the transcendental ego. 23 p 295
To say I endure = to say that I call time the perceptions I project in time.
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24 p 308, marked
[One among several examples of Santayana editing Kant and his translator.]
The transcendental object, which forms the foundation of lurks behind ^ which forms ^ external phenomena, and the other, transcendental ego ^ ^ the foundation of lies beneath our internal intuition, is are therefore ^ a thinking ^being by itself, but simply ^ an^ unknown neither matter, nor cause s of phenomena ; which phenomena supply ing to us the ^ ^ concept of both.^ transcendental ^ ^ ^ ^ ^& matter. empirical conditions mind / ^ ^ 25 p 319, marked Z
[…] all the wrangling about the nature of a thinking being, and its association with the material world, arises simply from our filling the gap, due to our ignorance, with paralogisms of reason, and by changing thoughts into things and hypostasising them. On this an imaginary science is built up, both by those who assert and by those who deny, some pretending to know about objects of which no human being has any conception, while others make their own representations to be objects, all turning round in a constant circle of ambiguities and contradictions. Nothing but a sober, strict, and just criticism can free us of this dogmatical illusion, which, through theories and systems, deceives so many by an imaginary happiness. Kant’s followers, O hear! 26 p 325, marked
[…] nothing is more natural or at least more tempting than the illusion which makes us look upon the unity in the synthesis of thoughts as a perceived unity in the subject of thoughts. One might call it the surreptitious admission of an hypostasised consciousness (apperceptionis substantiatae)1. Capital! 1
Apperception of substance.
27 p 325, underlined and marked
Thus, in the paralogism of substantiality, the concept of substance is a purely intellectual concept which, without the conditions of sensuous intuition, admits of a transcendental use only, that is, of no use at all. N.B. 28 p 368, underlined and marked Z
This requirement of reason to appeal in the series of natural causes to a first and free beginning is fully confirmed if we see that, with the exception of the Epicurean school, all philosophers of antiquity have felt themselves obliged to admit, for the sake of explaining all cosmical movements, a
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prime mover, that is, a freely acting cause which, first and by itself, started this series of states. They did not attempt to make a first beginning comprehensible by an appeal to nature only. [At “Epicurean school” and again at “started”:] ! Ignorance of the ancients. 29 p 391fn
Though we cannot answer the question, what kind of quality a transcendental object may possess, or what it is, we are well able to answer that the question itself is nothing, because it is without an object. All questions, therefore, of transcendental psychology are answerable, and have been answered, for they refer to the transcendental subject of all internal phenomena, which itself is not phenomenal, and not given as an object, and possesses none of the conditions which make any of the categories (and it is to them that the question really refers) applicable to it. Here Kant approaches Fichte. 30 p 407
Hence we see that the major of the cosmological argument takes the conditioned in the transcendental sense of a pure category, while the minor takes it in the empirical sense of a concept of the understanding, referring to mere phenomena, so that it contains that dialectical deceit which is called Sophisma figurae dictionis.1 Conditioned transcendentally is confused with conditioned empirically, or actually. Transcendental conditions are simultaneous, empirical are successive. The necessity of having the first is consistent with the impossibility of attaining the second. 1
The sophistry of the figure of speech.
31 p 413
[…] something useful and serviceable for the correction of our judgments will always result, though it may not be always that which we were looking for. Good of Kant’s own system. 32 p 427, top
Doesn’t Kant forget in all this that space in the Aesthetic was “one and infinite” //? and inclusive of all its parts”? 33 pp 442–43, underlined
||Man knows nature only through his senses; he knows his self through apperception,|| and this in actions and internal determinations, which he cannot ascribe to the impressions of the senses. Man is thus to himself
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partly a phenomenon, partly, […] with reference to certain faculties, a purely intelligible object, because the actions of these faculties cannot be ascribed to the receptivity of sensibility. We call these faculties understanding and reason. It is the latter, in particular, which is entirely distinguished from all empirically conditioned forces or faculties, because it weighs its objects according to ideas, and determines the understanding accordingly, which then makes an empirical use of its (by themselves, however , pure) concepts. ^ The ^understanding and reason are exceptions to empirical causality. 34 p 445
||According to reason, things happen in nature which ought not to have occurred, but empirically they are inevitable.|| And sometimes we find, or believe at least that we find, that the ideas of reason have really proved their causality with reference to human actions as phenomena, and that these actions have taken place, not because they were determined by empirical causes, but by the causes of reason. Illusion that expression is an effect of the idea expressed. 35 p 448
In order to illustrate the regulative principle of reason by an example of its empirical application, not in order to confirm it […], let us take a voluntary action, for example, a malicious lie, ( by which a man has produced a certain confusion in society, ) [...]. ^ ^ ^^ Innocent Kant! 36 p 484, top
[“Of the Arguments of Speculative Reason in Proof of the Existence of a Supreme Being.”]
Ontological proof. This fails because existence is no predicate, but indicates a relation to experience, and cannot be included in the definition of anything. 37 p 485, top
Kant misunderstands this proof because he does not take it literally enough. Of course it cannot prove the existence of “God”, but only of being. But the idea of God is not that of a being with all predicates[,] for such an idea is plainly self-contradictory. 38 p 493
Of what would a being with all possible predicates be the ideal?
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39 p 496
[In left margin:]
5 3 4 2 1 6 1 2 3 4 5 6
L. of R. Science History. Physics. & mech. physics Psychology. Mathematics. Logic. Ethics & Politics. ________ Ethics History & politics Psychology & mythology Physics & metaphysics Mathematics Logic.
1 Psychology Physics 2 History 3 Physics 4 Mathematics 5 Logic 6 Ethics. 40 p 496
||The heuristic principle|| tells us that we ought to philosophise on nature as if there was a necessary first cause for everything that exists, if only in order to introduce systematical unity into our knowledge, by always looking for such an idea as an imagined highest cause. (False idea of science being directed towards the self-evident.) 41 p 498, top
The idea of anything absolutely necessary (or self-evident) is a n demand ideal of science which experience can ^ ^ be realised: ^ and ^its authority is relative to the desire never in us to attain it. The cause is necessary only when the eff because the effect is given. In itself no existence can be necessary. 42 p 498
[Santayana paraphrases:]
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The Supreme Being is to be conceived as the ultimate explanation which we seek—i.e. as the system of things. 43 p 502
Roused from every inquisitive indecision, as from a dream, by one glance at the wonders of nature and the majesty of the cosmos, reason soars from height to height till it reaches the highest, from the conditioned to conditions, till it reaches the supreme and unconditioned Author of all. Doesn’t Kant see that all this is merely his idea, his conception? These sentiments belong to that part of the man which the philosophic man disturbed. It is like Socrates’ belief in providence. 44 p 547, top
–[ The idea of God is a moral regulative principle, more than a physical. –] 45 p 547, underlined and marked
We misapprehend at once the true meaning of that idea, if we accept it as the assertion, or even as the hypothesis of a real thing to which the ground of the systematical construction of the world should be ascribed. If God is made a reality he is made an absurdity. His function is to be an ideal of our experience. 46 p 556, top
The system of things—a necessary assumption—is not justified until the end of experience. To put it first is to absolve us from proof (unless it signify merely the postulate of eventual explanations.) 47 p 557, top
The postulates of reason must not be so interpreted as to absolve us from reasoning. 48 p 562, top
Ask in the examination: What is the regulative value of the idea of a creator in the comprehension of nature? 49 p 588, top
Philosophy has no axioms, because experience is the nexus of applied concepts, not a new concept as in pure science.
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50 p 590, top
Philosophical demonstration if cogent must be verbal, not ideal like mathematical demonstrations appealing in the end to intuition. 51 p 596
Reason is apparently in the field to defend theology simply. How chivalrous! 52 p 611, top
Scepticism not permanent: the grounds and method of it a new science. 53 p 613, top
Benevolent criticism of Hume. 54 p 615, top
Hume failed to distinguish synthetic methods from concrete conjunctions in experience. 55 p 617
Scepticism the antithesis in a Hegelian trilogy. 56 p 633, top
Rational proofs must be single. They must also be direct i.e. from insight into the nature of the subject. 57 p 633, marked
If therefore we see the dogmatist advance with his ten proofs, we may be sure he has none. Capital. 58 p 647, top
A pedant’s idea of virtue & a child’s idea of happiness. 59 p 647
Happiness is the satisfaction of all our desires, extensively, in regard to their manifoldness, intensively, in regard to their degree, and protensively, in regard to their duration. Miserable artifice and miserable idea of happiness! Virtue is an abstract merit and happiness a feast of sugar-plums. The nice little boy who has been good at school then goes home and gets a lump of sugar. Life hollow and heaven immoral!
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60 p 648, top
Freedom necessary to the reality of duty. Note. Metaphysical reality of duty (something inconceivable) is here present. 61 p 651, underlined
Morality, by itself, constitutes a system, but not so happiness, unless it is distributed in exact proportion to morality. This, however, is possible in an intelligible world only under a wise author and ruler. !The natural identity of happiness and virtue is here ignored and a Deus ex machina invented to put them together again. 62 p 653, top
Are animals unworthy of happiness? 63 p 654, top
Scholastic unification of practical and speculative reason: the world an Idea. 64 p 654–55, marked Z
And this, as it starts from the moral order as a unity founded on the essence of freedom, and not accidentally brought about by external commands, traces the design of nature to grounds which must be inseparably connected a priori with the internal possibility of things, and leads thus to a transcendental theology, which takes the ideal of the highest ontological perfection as the principle of systematical unity which connects all things according to general and necessary laws of nature, because they all have their origin in the absolute necessity of the one original Being. [From “transcendental theology”:]
Programme of the Post-Kantians. 65 p 657, marked Z
So far as practical reason is entitled to lead us we shall not look upon actions as obligatory because they are the commands of God, but look upon them as divine commandments because we feel an inner obligation to follow them. Essence of protestantism. 66 p 685, underlined
Locke, who in modern times followed Aristotle […]. !
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67 p 724–25, marked
||According to British empiricism,|| no pure mathematical science was possible either, on account of its certainly containing synthetical propositions: a priori and from such an assertion his good sense would probably have saved him. Evidently Kant had not read the Treatise. [At top of 724:]
Simple nonsense charms the Teutonic mind and elaborate nonsense absolutely enslaves them him. He is an infant phenomenon prodigy, a prodigiously learned, patient, skil^ robust ^and irresponsible. child. ^He has great ful innocent, ^ kindness but no tact, much wayward learning but little judgment: he cannot be [At top of 725:]
bored by the trivial, because his taste is unformed and he has not learned to distinguish the important. The ugly ^ as the beautiful, and the comic and interests ^him as much pathetic more than the tragic. Like a child sunk in day-dreams, who is afraid of real and repelled by real life, ^ vague hopes to definite ^ he prefers suggestion to vision and realisations. 68 p 803, underlined and marked
The proofs which are useful for the world at large retain their value undiminished, nay, they gain in clearness and natural power, by the surrender of those dogmatical pretensions, placing reason in its own peculiar domain, namely, the system of ends, which is, however, at the same time the system of nature; […]. Quote in L of Reason. Immanuel Kant
Kritik der reinen Vernunft Edited by Dr. Karl Kehrbach Leipzig: 1878. (Reclam Verlag). Harvard. 292 marginalia.
[Text der Ausgabe 1781 mit Beifuegung saemmtlicher Abweichungen der Ausgabe 1787. (Text of 1781 with various corrections from the edition of 1787.)] [The handwriting in this edition suggests that Santayana read the German text as undergraduate, or as graduate, either at Harvard or in Berlin. The only extant copy to my best knowledge is that in the Houghton Library, a cheap duodecimo volume with narrow margins. The only date in the volume, “May 31, 89,” would appear to date the draft of the poem in the end-papers (see below), rather than the date of
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textual study. In 1889, Santayana had returned from Berlin and was assuming his first tasks as instructor in the department of philosophy at Harvard, and living in his mother’s house at Roxbury. A large number of the marginalia are linguistic, evidence of Santayana’s wrestling with Kant’s notoriously impenetrable German. Still other marginalia anticipate comments and criticisms that Santayana recorded in his English translation of Meiklejohn (below).] [The following notes are on a blank page following p. xxi of “Corrections”:]
idealism Psychological—that things exist in the human mind as images. Metaphysical—that things exist in themselves as ideal essences determined by definition. Moral—that things exist as members or symbols of a concept of virtue or goodness. [End-paper.] “Inhalt”1 [Doubly marked.]
Space Time Reason Preference Distinguish in Kant the validity of projection, which conditions idealism, from the projected nature of all knowledge which involves it. Thus causality, being a scheme of projection is a subjective form, a principle of classification and distinction in the content of consciousness, a constitutive principle of nature as a system in the mind: but as knowledge, causality predicates a real order, beyond the moment in statement of which the discrimination and ^ ^ projection occurs, and predicates that this objective and diffused order corresponds with the order of conception in the mind. So that we have causality as an actual principle constitutive of the idea of a nature, or system of things, and in order to give validity to this idea, and make that system of things knowledge, we have a necessity of causality as the principle of evolution in an objective order. 1
Contents.
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[End-paper:] [Drawing of a church, and of a young man in profile. Then a list of sums spent:]
50 janitor 50 books $100 250 food 350 700 380 110 clothes 250 300 550
coat 20 suit 90
[Penultimate end-paper.]
Mightier sounds than this are brayed There have been greater things than this the earth That pricks thy bosom pale with summer traces, the past hath treasure of sublimer favors, And God is wrong[?] to this [illegible] worth. unexpungeable cruel Big is the future with portentous birth Of infinite children oaths numberless: and pours[?] ^ ^ Even now o’er top these feeble lives of ours With angels’ snow and with devils’ demons’ mirth ^ through ^ the plain. Flow gently placid river, flow in peace And are they pulsing[?] with the rushes sigh, The mountains slip[?] behind thee and the [illegible] Will merge thy life in sad infinity pain in its moaning merge thy gentle Awaits thee calling out[?] eternal pain Too [illegible ] to feel: greater things are done on high With patience: it is well that this shrouded age But beauty makes thy flowing not in vain Nor are thy lovliness and beauty vain and the holy stars on high Do not the mirror of thy heart disdain, nor no holy star with Artemis on high ^ the mirror of thy quietness disdain ^
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bosom’s pure peaceful heart quiet breast May 31. 89.1 1
This very tentative draft, aesthetically unfortunate, perhaps represents Santayana’s attempt at an elegy for his friend of undergraduate days, Thomas Parker Sanborn, who committed suicide in 1889. The draft palely imitates the diction and some of the imagery of Matthew Arnold’s elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough, “Thyrsis,” of 1866. Santayana’s obituary notice of Sanborn’s death had appeared in The Harvard Monthly in March of 1889. 1 p 51
Der Raum ist kein empirischer Begriff […] sondern diese äussere Erfahrung ist selbst nur durch gedachte Vorstellung allererst möglich.1 The spatial way of thinking preceeds the actual perception of objects, but only as the possibility of the world is prior to its reality. 1 Space is not an empirical concept … but the external experience [of representing parts of space] is possible only through thought-processes.
2 p 52
Man würde also nur sagen können, so viel zur Zeit bemerkt worden, ist kein Raum gefunden worden, der mehr als drei Abmessungen hätte.1 Cf. recent theories. 1 As far as observation has gone, no space has been found to possess more than three dimensions.
3 p 56
Interest or Preference is like space & time an a priori form. 4 p 57, underlined
[External objects are:]
[…] nichts anders als blosse Vorstellungen unserer Sinnlichkeit […].1 This is to be understood as mere faculty of feeling, not as involving the bodily organs of sense. For the body is itself a product of sensibility. 1
… nothing more than representations of our senses ….
5 p 68
||The concept of sensibility and phenomena would be rendered empty and useless if we were to accept the view of Leibniz and Wolf that our sensibility is only a confused representation of things […].|| Yet it is this view that we return to when we discard K’s inconsistencies and give up the objective unknowable.
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6 p 75, underlined
[Para. 4, “Transcendental Aesthetic.”]
||It is not necessary to limit our intuition of space and time to man’s sensibility, for it is possible that|| alles endliche denkende1 ||must agree on the point.|| How can we assume the existence of other beings, if not because we find them in space and time? Only if we treat phenomena as symbols and interpret them according to our emotional impulse. 1
All finite thinking beings.
7 p 99
[Kant’s table of the categories.]
Hegel 8 p 113
Categories cannot be pure experience, because experience is of them. 9 p 118
||Kant discusses apperception, connection, and Understanding.|| The past events are supposed to be not past.1 1 A preliminary to the famous “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”?
10 p 126, top
“Transzendentale Deduktion des allgemein möglichen Erfahrungsbebrauch der reinen Verstandsbegriffe.”1 [ K. here seems to prepare the way for the mystification of his followers. The empirical is no result of the transcendental, but an example of it. ] [ Or do you mean the idea of the empirical? ] 1 Transcendental Deduction of the Universally Possible Use of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding in Experience.
11 p 127, underlined
[…] die Synthesis der Apprehension, welche empirisch ist, der Synthesis der Apperzeption, welche intellektuell und gänzlich a priori in der Spontanität notwendig gemäss sein müsse. Es ist eine und dieselbe Spontanität, welche dort unter dem Namen der Einbildungskraft, hier des Verstandes, Verbindung in das Mannigfaltige der Anschauung hineinbringt.1
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It is idle to talk of powers a priori when we must begin with their products and infer the powers from the given accomplishments. This is [illegible]; the identity is projected. 1
The synthesis contained in the categories, of apprehension, which is empirical, and the synthesis of apperception, which is intellectual and completely a priori, necessarily must be in accordance. It is one and the same order of spontaneity, which there under the name of imagination and here of the understanding that are brought together in the multiplicity of intuition. 12 p 142
[General comment on the entire passage: “Der transzendentalen Doktrin der Urteilskraft.”1]
Kant is in perplexity, because he takes the categories to be given ideal. They are given forms of empirical materials. 1
The Transcendental Doctrine of Judgment.
13 p 142, marked
If the understanding is explained as the faculty of rules, the faculty of judgment consists in performing the subsumption under these rules, that is, in determining whether anything falls under a given rule casus datae legis or not. For as it takes no account of the contents of our knowledge, it has only to explain analytically the mere form of knowledge in concepts, judgments, and syllogisms, and thus to establish formal rules for the proper employment of the understanding. Quote in essay. 14 p 143, underlined
It is clear that pure concepts of the understanding, compared with empirical or sensuous impressions, are entirely homogeneous, and can never be found through intuition. How then can the latter be comprehended under the former, or how can the categories be applied to phenomena […]? [Kant uses the phrase:]
die Anwendung der Kategorie1 As if it were ever separate. 1
The use of the category.
15 p 143
[Of the categories:]
In so far as they are forms of projection, they are means of discrimination in the interest of thought, but if the projection is valid and constitutes knowledge, they must be forms of being as well.
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16 p 143, underlined and doubly marked
After what has been said in the deduction of categories, we hope that nobody will hesitate in answering the question whether these pure concepts of the understanding allow only of an empirical or also of a transcendental application, that is, whether as condition of a possible experience, they refer a priori to phenomena only, or whether, as conditions of the possibility of things in general, they may be extended to objects by themselves (without restriction to our sensibility). For there we saw dass Begriffe ganz unmöglich sind,1 and cannot have any meaning unless there be an object given either to them, or at least to some of the elements of which they consist, and that they can never refer to things by themselves (without regard as to whether and how things may be given to us). Because without content intent content they are nothing ^ of an objective it does not follow they^cannot^ ^be forms 2 substance. 1
That concepts are quite impossible. This would indicate Santayana’s early belief that essence is finally material.
2
17 p 148, doubly marked
||Kant’s schemata of the pure concepts of the understanding are proposed to subject all phenomena to general rules and make possible a general connection in experience.|| In dem Ganzen aller möglichen Erfahrung liegen aber alle unsere Erkenntnisse, und in der allgemeinen Beziehung aus dieselbe besteht die transzendentale Wahrheit, die vor aller empirischen vorhergeht und sie möglich macht.1 Here is something suggestive to the Hegelians. 1
All our knowledge is contained within this whole of possible experience, and transcendental truth, which precedes all empirical truth and renders it possible, consists in general relation of it to that experience. 18 p 164, underlined
[“Anticipations of Perception.”]
Apprehension, by means of sensation only, fills no more than one moment (if we do not take into account the succession of many sensations.) N.B. re James. 19 pp 164–65, underlined
[Kant on perception:]
Realität in der Erscheinung […].1 “felt object” James. 1
Reality in appearance.
20 pp 170–71, doubly marked
[“The Analogies of Experience.”]
Erfahrung ist ein empirisches Erkenntnis […].1
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What is Erkenntnis? Important. 1
Experience is empirical knowledge.
21 p 171, underlined and doubly marked
[Following on from “Erkenntnis”:]
[…] aus den Wahrnehungen selbst erhellet […]. Kant understands Hume well. 1
Illuminated from perceptions themselves.
22 p 173, underlined
||Perceptions are not subject to a priori analysis or category. Analogy in philosophy differs from analogy in mathematics, which can be learned by rule.|| Eine Analogie der Erfahrung wird also nur eine Regel sein, nach welcher aus Wahrnehmungen Einheit der Erfahrung (nicht wie Wahrnehmung selbst, als empirische Anschauung überhaupt) entspringen soll, […].1 Evidently the unity is posterior to the multiplicity. Kant’s whole argument seems to be founded on a contradiction or ligereza:2 the manifold is regarded as external to the unity of apperception, so that it has to be gathered in and collected according to rules. The real rules are principles of projection, not of combination. 1
An analogy of experience can be no more than a rule according to which a certain unity of experience may arise from perceptions (but not how perception itself, as an empirical intuition) may arise …. 2 Oversight. 23 p 174
That is they [“the real rules”] are necessary fictions. 24 p 174, underlined
||If the objects to which the regulative principles were independent things, one could know nothing of them a priori and synthetically.|| […] folglich können jene nichts, als bloss die Bedingungen der Einheit des empirischen Erkenntnisses in der Synthesis der Erscheinungen, zum Ziele haben; […].1 The analogies there only refer to the phenomena and substance is a fiction of phenomena. Cf. Lotze, substance the property of suggesting substance. 1 Those principles can aim at nothing but the conditions of the unity of empirical knowledge in the synthesis of phenomena.
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25 p 186, doubly marked
||The question of succession in apprehension.|| This is a mere question of emphasis: Hume says causality is regular succession: Kant says a rule of suc[cession]. 26 p 203, doubly marked
A concept is to be considered empty and referring to no object if the synthesis which it contains does not belong to experience, whether as borrowed from it (in which case it is called an empirical concept) […]. This is clear. 27 p 261, marked
[“Transcendental Logic: of Transcendental Illusion.”]
Truth or illusion is not to be found the objects of intuition, but in the judgments upon them, so far as they are thought. An animal might react without judging of the nature of the impression, which would involve discourse of reason. 28 p 274
[“The Transcendental Dialectic, Book I,” First Section.]
||Kant discusses Plato’s archetypes.|| […] it is by no means unusual, in ordinary conversation as well as in written works, that by carefully comparing the thoughts of an author on his own subject, we succeed in understanding him better than he understood himself, because he did not sufficiently define his concept, and thus not only spoke but sometimes even thought in opposition to his own intentions. Speak for yourself, John. 29 p 275
It is obvious that when a person is held up to us as a model of virtue, we have always in mind the true original with which we compare the alleged model and judge it accordingly. Cf. Adam Smith. 30 p 284
[A stray note without reference to the text:]
For love is God in unfathomable ways Brings forth the beauty for which fancy pined. 31 p 293
[“The Transcendental Dialectic, Book 2.”]
Nun beruhet wenigstens die transzendentale (subjective) Realität der reinen Vernunftbegriffe darauf, dass wir durch einen nothwendigen Vernunftschluss auf solche Ideen gebracht werden.1
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Kant is very unhappy in his words. This is no Begriff nor Urteil2 but an always possible association of object & subject. 1
The transcendental (subjective) reality, at least of pure concepts of reason, depends on our being led to such ideas by a necessary syllogism of reason. 2 Concept nor judgment. 32 p 296, doubly marked
||The soul is substance, simple, possessing unity, and relation to possible objects in space. From these elements all concepts in psychology arise.|| Hieraus beziehen sich nun vier Paralogismen einer transzendentalen Seelenlehre, welche fälschlich für eine Wissenschaft der reinen Vernunft, von der Natur unseres denkenden Wesens Gehalten wird.1 Here it is: Kant might have been perfectly clear had he been brief. 1
To these concepts refer four paralogisms of a transcendental psychology, which is falsely supposed to be a science of pure reason, concerning the nature of our thinking being. 33 p 306
[A summary comment on Kant’s “Second Paralogism of Simplicity:”]
Undoubtedly, the unity of consciousness hints nothing about the nature of the substratum, if any, on whose modifications our thought depends. The brain must, in our philosophy, supply this substratum, thus completing the philosophical circle. 34 p 329, doubly marked
How easy it is to lose sight of the conditions of particular ^ ^ causality, namely, experience. 35 p 358, marked
[Observations on the “First Antinomy of Pure Reason: Antithesis II”:]
The proof of the infinity of the given series of world, and of the totality of the world, rests on this, that in the opposite case an empty time, and likewise an empty space, would form the limits of the world. This is muddled. 36 p 372, marked
||On the transcendental idea of freedom and its connection to causality.|| We are speaking of the absolutely first beginning, not according to time, but according to causality. This is against Royce’s reading.
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37 p 390, marked
[Conclusion to the Third Antithesis:]
Die menschliche Vernunft ist ihrer Natur nach architektonisch, d. i. sie betrachtet alle Erkenntnisse als gehörig zu einem möglichen System und verstattet daher auch nur solche Principien, die eine vorhabende Erkenntniss wenigstens nicht unfähig machen, in irgend einem System mit anderen zusammen zu stehen. Die Sätze der Antithesis sind aber von der Art, dass sie die Vollendung eines Gebäudes von Erkenntnissen gänzlich unmöglich machen.1 This is a more positive fault than K. makes it. It is a contradiction to reason. 1
By its nature, human reason is architectonic; that is, it observes all knowledge as part of a possible system, and it permits accordingly only those principles that a scrupulous intelligence may accept as possible with respect to any other system. The sentences of the Antithesis, however, are of the sort that render quite impossible a scientific construction. 38 p 393, marked
||Cosmological proof cannot produce evidence for the existence of a necessary Being. Concepts of contingent beings would be essential to such proof, which belongs to a transcendent philosophy.|| This is phenomenalism. 39 p 394, underlined
Ausser der Transzendentalphilosophie gibt es noch zwei reine Vernunftwissenschaften, eine bloss speculativen, die andere praktischen Inhalts: reine Mathematik und reine Moral.1 !Think of morals without feeling, without the sense of value! 1
Apart from the transcendental philosophy, there are still two disciplines of pure reason. One is only speculative, and the other practical: pure mathematics, and pure moral philosophy. 40 p 394, marked
[Kant refers to:]
[…] den allgemeinen Principien der Sitten […].1 oh! note the perversity of moral fanaticism that destroys the essence of morality itself. 1
The general principles of morality.
41 p 401
[Sixth Section of “The Antinomy of Pure Reason”: “Transcendental Idealism as the Key to the Solution of Cosmological Dialectic.”]
Transcendental idealism means that the actual is the given: that what is real is not the phenomenon. It means
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that the phenomenon is not the thing in itself, but that there is another thing in itself of which the phenomenon is the effect, thus it is not transcendental, but psychological idealism. 42 p 412, marked
[Seventh Section of “The Antinomy of Pure Reason.”]
Man siehet daraus, dass die obigen Beweise der vierfachen Antinomie nicht Blendwerke, sondern gründlich waren, unter der Voraussetzung nämlich, dass Erscheinungen oder eine Sinnenwelt, die sie insgesammt in sich begreift, Dinge an sich selbst wären.1 Kant makes Erscheinung really illusion, explicable by virtue of something else than faculties of an existent subject, and aimed at something else, the transcendental object. This object is not a Platonic idea, and the phenomenon is in itself contradictory. 1 One sees from the foregoing that the fourfold Antinomies were not delusions, but fundamental on the assumption that phenomena, or a world of sense consistent to itself, are things in themselves.
43 p 432, marked
[“The Possibility of Causality through Freedom, in Harmony with the Universal Law of Natural Necessity.”]
||If an object of the senses is not phenomenal, Kant calls it “intelligible.”|| The subterranean ego.1 1
Santayana called T. S. Eliot’s mind “subterranean” rather than profound.
44 p 466, marked
[Third Section of “The Ideal of Pure Reason.”]
||Reason would be deficient if all its resources were not put to work on the question of the existence of a Supreme Being.|| Cf. James. 45 p 474, underlined and doubly marked
[Fourth Section of “The Ideal of Pure Reason”: “On the Possibility of an ontological Proof of the Existence of God.”]
Bei Gegenständen der Sinne geschieht dieses durch den Zusammenhang mit irgend einer meiner Wahrnehmungen nach empirischen Gesetzen; aber für Objecte des reinen Denkens ist ganz und gar kein Mittel, ihr Dasein zu erkennen, weil es gänzlich a priori erkannt werden müsste, […]. [Mueller’s translation:]
[…] the illusion, in mistaking a logical predicate for a real one (that is the predicate which determines a thing), resists all correction. Everything can become a logical predicate […] because logic takes account of any contents of concepts.
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A priori as to the source of the principle in use: but its validity is not a priori, but depends on its serviceableness. 46 p 478, marked
[Fifth Section of “The Ideal of Pure Reason”: “Of the Impossibility of a Cosmolgical Proof of the Existence of God.”]
||Sophistical arguments are put forward.|| Cf. Ebbinghaus’s statement: a highest real being exists, a highest among existing things: there is also a highest ideal being, our most sublime conception. That these two coincide, remains utterly improbable. 47 p 490, marked
[Sixth Section of “The Ideal of Pure Reason”: “Of the Impossibility of the Physico-theological Proof.”]
||Kant lists the principal points of the proof, including the argument that the proof according to intention is inconsistent with the things of this world|| and belongs to them only by contingency. Has any one rationally exposed the futility of this conception? 48 p 531
Psychology can never be sound until the idea of external reality is clear: for else the subjective modification cannot be shown. 49 p 653, underlined and marked
[Supplement ii.]
||Kant uses the term Nothwendigkeit1 concerning Physics.|| There is no necessity. 1
Necessity.
50 p 658, doubly marked
[Supplement iii.]
Here note the assumption of truth in our mental operations. Immanuel Kant
Critique of Pure Reason Translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn London: 1884. Harvard. Seventy-two marginalia.
[Marginalia in Santayana’s early hand, most of which are, I believe, a student’s paraphrase for study.] [Preface to the First Edition.]
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1 p xix
||Kant poses the question of the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics.|| Is metaphysics possible? If not, why not? [Preface to the Second Edition.] 2 p xxiv
Metaphysics ought to be certain, like logic. 3 p xxix, underlined
Before objects are given to me, that is, a priori, I must presuppose in myself laws of the understanding which are expressed in conceptions a priori. i.e. we discover our faculties by observing what a priori knowledge we have. What is a priori is the contribution of the mental structure. 4 p xxxi
||The speculative versus the practical.|| But practical reason may suggest what the unknowable may be. 5 p xxxi
This attempt to introduce a complete revolution in the procedure of metaphysics, after the example of the Geometricians and Natural Philosophers, constitutes the aim of the Critique of Pure Speculative Reason. Finality of this system. 6 p xxxvi
I appeal to the most obstinate dogmatist, whether the proof of the continued existence of the soul after death, derived from the simplicity of its substance; of the freedom of the will in opposition to the general mechanism of nature, drawn from the subtle but impotent distinction of subjective and objective practical necessity; or of the existence of God, deduced from the conception of an ens realissimum 1—the contingency of the changeable, and the necessity of a prime mover, has ever been able to pass beyond the limits of the schools, to penetrate the public mind, or to exercise the slightest influence on its convictions. God, freedom, and immortality are really practical beliefs, not resting on logic. 1
Most real being.
7 p xxxvii
The strict proofs are pretentious and hollow, and even dangerous.
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8 p 12
||Hume came close to treating the problem of the possibility of synthetic knowledge a priori, but he stopped short of connecting an effect with its cause, saying that such a proposition was impossible a priori.|| 9 p 13
Kant had not read the Treatise. 10 p 23, underlined
[Santayana illustrates in marginal drawings the text, which deals with the external sense by which we represent to ourselves exterior, imagined objects in space.] 11 p 52, marked
[“Transcendental Logic: Introduction.”]
[…] there lies so seductive a charm in the possession of a specious art like this—an art which gives to all our cognitions the form of the understanding, although with respect to the content thereof we may be sadly deficient—that general logic, which is merely a canon of judgment, has been employed as an organon for the actual production, or rather for the semblance of production of objective assertions, and has thus been grossly misapplied. O Hegel! Is this thy master or thy judge? 12 p 57
But we can reduce all acts of the understanding to judgments, so that understanding may be represented as the faculty of judging. This is more natural in Greek or German: ur-Theil: to divide = to analyse = to make abstractions. 13 p 76, underlined
||Experience constantly suggests causes for phenomena. But this is no valid explanation for cause.|| […] on the contrary, it must either have an à priori basis in the understanding, or be rejected as a mere chimæra. Which, after all, would simply amount to saying that we do expect observed coincidences to recur. 14 p 77, marked
Now the question is, whether there do not exist à priori in the mind, conceptions of understanding also, as conditions under which alone something, if not intuited, is yet thought as object. There is of course the fact that we do regard our thoughts as valid: this is an a priori form of objection for every thing—ideas & concepts.
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15 p 82, marked
[…] only because I can connect a variety of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible that I can represent to myself the identity of consciousness in these representations; in other words, the analytical unity of apperception is possible only under the presupposition of a synthetical unity. i.e. remember them all. That the ideas are connected is the meaning of calling them mine. Cf. Lotze, to whom the soul is the principle or law by which ideas are connected. 16 p 86, marked
[…] the empirical unity of consciousness by means of association of representations, itself relates to a phænomenal world, and is wholly contingent. N.B. 17 pp 88–89, underlined
The manifold in an intuition, which I call mine, is represented by means of the synthesis of the understanding, as belonging to the necessary unity of self-consciousness, and this takes place by means of the category. The category indicates accordingly, that the empirical consciousness of a given manifold in an intuition is subject to a pure self-consciousness à priori, in the same manner as an empirical intuition is subject to a pure sensuous intuition, which is also à priori. I can’t help feeling that all this is more innocent/innocuous[?] than the Hegelians make it. The thought is subject to the faculty of thought—to our habit of thinking. 18 p 101, underlined and marked
Either experience makes these conceptions possible, or the conceptions make experience possible. Why separate what God has put together? 19 p 120, marked
There is no danger of our mistaking merely empirical principles for principles of the pure understanding, or conversely; for the character of necessity, according to conceptions which distinguishes the latter, and the absence of this in every empirical proposition, how extensively valid soever it may be, is a perfect safeguard against confounding them. This is K’s weak point. Necessity is known only subjectively. Our nature being what it is, we find them necessary. 20 p 121
[Kant lists principles of the pure understanding:]
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1. AXIOMS of Intuition. 2. ANTICIPATIONS of Perception. 3. ANALOGIES of Experience. 4. POSTULATES of Empirical Thought in general. Learn Arthur Berriedale Keith The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads Two volumes. Cambridge, Mass., and London: 1925. Georgetown. [Volume I, no marginalia. Volume II, seventeen marginalia.] 1 p 438, underlined
Brahmanaspati is of interest, since his personality as the god of prayer is closely connected with the mighty power of the prayer to secure the ends of man. This idea finds expression also in the hymn which celebrates Va–c, speech, as the supporter of the world, as the companion of the gods, and the foundation of religious activity and all its advantages. Sound 2 p 527, underlined
||In the Jaiminiya Upanisad Bra–hmana, a good deity prevents the soul from passage to the sun or beyond, for that soul has done evil. Only the good may pass.|| The soul replies, ‘Thou didst see whatever I used to do; thou wouldst not have made me do it (i.e. had it been evil); thou thyself art the doer.’ The answer satisfies the deity, who, therefore, lets him pass. The dangerous implications of the doctrine are obvious and undeniable. Morality is an animal interest: this is not dangerous to animals. 3 p 534, marked
[Concerning the theory of transmigration:]
The whole theory is one mass of difficult paradoxes, despite its seeming elegance and simplicity of structure. The main basis of the conception, that there is suffering through the connexion of the soul with nature, is contradicted by the fact that there is really no connexion: the suffering is produced by a connexion which does not exist, and is only imagined to exist, but an imagined connexion is no ground for results which a real connexion alone could produce. Quite so: but Indian logic starts from an intrinsic view of spirit: & then the connexion is false, because external. In the generative order, however, spirit is a product of matter. 4 p 537, marked
||A passage in the Kausitaki Upanisad lists ten senses in opposition to ten objects,|| and the presence of intellect, Prajña–, is said to be essential for
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every kind of sense-knowledge, including the activity of mind […] reflected in some manner in Purusa. The more common idea of the senses being powerless without mind lies doubtless at the back of this more advanced conception, […]. Splendid insight. 5 p 540, underlined
. It is clear […] that the seeds of the Sa–mkhya lie in the philosophy of the Upanisads: the conception of the deliverance from the round of rebirth . and misery is wholly absurd on the Sa–mkhya theory of the universe, which denies any real connexion of spirit and nature, and, therefore, makes any suffering impossible, since without connexion there is no illumination, and without illumination of nature by spirit no suffering of any kind. To discover this truth is deliverance. “Real” here means essential: of course there is a physical & temporary connexion. 6 p 551, marked
In the philosophy of Ya–jñavalkya the identity of the supreme and the individual souls is carried to the extreme extent, but at the same time the term soul is deprived of any distinct meaning. The identity of the soul of man and the absolute is due to the mere fact that, by reducing the soul to nothing save what may be termed the mere abstraction of subjectivity, or of the transcendental unity of apperception, the soul becomes nothing but an aspect of a process. It is perfectly legitimate then to identify the supreme and the individual souls, but we are really carried no further by this than the occasional remarks of the Brhada–ranyaka Upanisad, which regards the universe as made up of nothing except subject and object. 7 p 569
||The soul in a state of dreaming sleep is not conscious of inner or outer.|| […] we have in fact the condition of a pure objectless knowing subject, continuing in this condition. The soul now passes from the 72,000 veins in which it has moved during dream-sleep, and rests in the pericardium in supreme bliss, like a great king or Brahman. Good symbol for distraction. [End-papers:]
To mortal folly and to doubt resign’d I paced the pillar’d cloisters of the mind; A vainly travers’d wilderness of sea, Plough’d and replough’d, my prison was to me.
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Frederick Kettner
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Life and Spirit: Biosophical Poems New York and Chicago: 1948. Waterloo. No marginalia.
John Maynard Keynes
A Revision of the Treaty London: 1922. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Graf Hermann A. Keyserling
Menschen als Sinnbilder
(Mankind as symbol) Darmstadt: 1926. Georgetown. 173 marginalia. 1 p 17
[Santayana’s summary:]
Virtue & happiness worthless because not creative of history. 2 p 20
The pathetic creates greatness by admitting s’en fichisme.1 1
The philosophy of to hell with it.
3 p 21
[Santayana paraphrases and interprets:]
A man can’t have a revolutionary influence if he belongs to the estab^ lished type. O wisdom! ^ 4 p 22, marked
Today men are fundamentally so far advanced that they are able to dispense with all pious frauds. This is your good side. 5 p 23, marked
Abklärung im üblichen Sinn hoffe ich nie zu erreichen, denn dann wäre ich kein schöpferische Mensch mehr, sondern ein harmloser Popanz.1 That would be awful! The worship of one’s own vices is “creative”. 1
I hope that I shall never become detached, for then I would cease to be creative but become a harmless idiot. 6 p 25, marked Z
||In spirit, Nietzsche embodies the spirit of Jesus Christ.||
!
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7 p 25
Nur die Liebe ist wertvoll […].1 Love says: Move on! 1
Only love is worthy.
8 p 25
Stagnation is the sin against “Geist”—i.e. fashion & snobbery. 9 p 51, marked
||Keyserling writes of a round-the-world trip in 1911 that he was not interested in India or China paticularly; he went as a man who studies material for a novel.|| N.B. 10 p 52
He had already transcended and labelled everything before he saw it. “Travelled a book to write a book.” 11 p 55
||Keyserling’s travel diary made him “vitaler.”|| Not more vital; but more active. 12 p 55
||The relationship between himself and Buddhist ascetics is his highest point of spiritual development.|| N.B. 13 p 57
Insight becomes a means [ to imposing a meaning on things ] . 14 p 63, underlined and marked
||With his marriage, Keyserling had to think materially, and found himself close to actual need.|| Jetzt erlebte ich die Produktivität des Unzulänglichen zum erstenmal in seiner elementaren Form. Jedes Tier verdient recht eigentlich sein Brot.1 No: he doesn’t see the joke! 1
Now I experienced the productivity of the hard up for the first time in its elementary form. Every animal earns his own specific bread. 15 p 71, marked
||In Darmstadt, 1922, Keyserling underwent psychoanalysis.|| There for the first time I discovered my great technical gift, that of orchestra conductor of intellects
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[Sinne]. Since then year by year the ground-themes of the universal polyphony spread to a new level of comprehension owing to my new frame of mind. N.B. Impayable. Quote. 16 p 73
He is the spiritual Kaiser. 17 p 88, top
[Summary:]
Belief in feminine or Bergsonian intuition. 18 p 90
Goethes lichte Seele […].1 What does he mean? Naturalism? Omnivorence? 1
Goethe’s light soul.
19 p 95
Schopenhauers Wille ist im Grunde die Negation des Willensbegriffs.1 It is agitation or complication in matter. 1
Schopenhauer’s will is at base the negation of the conception of will.
20 p 103, marked
||Schopenhauer’s pessimism had nothing to do with his system of thought.|| 21 p 107, marked
If ever a man was a genius, it was Goethe, but he too owed his historic mission to a gift, which in regard to his intrinsic being meant no more than an exceptional circumstance: his expressiveness as poet. It is quite false to maintain that one cannot separate Goethe from his poetry, for the man was very much greater than his talent as poet. Of course without that talent, the man would have achieved no superb work […]. The negative part of this is very true. It remains to see what this mysterious greatness was. 22 p 109
Goethe’s completeness indicated various directions of his reality with respect to being itself. The psyche? Harmony & just measure in the person? 23 p 117, underlined
[…] der grüblerische Tiefsinn eines Plotin.1
! 1
The ponderous thoughtfulness of a Plotinus.
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24 p 126
When Tolstoi speaks, he must have meaning for us, but what he says is not always true. Wahr.1 1
True.
25 p 129
[Santayana paraphrases:]
Goethe’s humanism—problems without answers, interests without achievements. 26 p 137
||Keyserling compares man to a plant, receiving the fruit without having the least to do with its production.|| Doesn’t the plant do all the work? Who else? 27 p 138
Basic artistic dogmas declare significantly enough: who speaks well what he thinks, thinks well. Whoever knows how to give his existence artistic form will live a great life. Shaw, Bergson, Wells, etc. 28 p 144
||Kant’s simplicity, clarity.||
? 29 p 145
Was Kant als Denker tat, hat Goethe als Poet, hat Christus als lebendiger Mensch vollbracht.1 O rot! 1
What Kant did as thinker, Goethe as poet, and Christ as living man completed.
30 p 149, marked
Sinn:1 not having any insight into nature, he thinks expression a magical effect of the essence expressed manifested. ^ ^ 1 Being.
31 p 150, top
Automatism in matter (as distinct from mechanical laws formulated by human science) is what these Germans call freedom.
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32 p 159, underlined
||Oswald Spengler’s|| Geschichtsdichtung.1 [Santayana’s underlining “dichtung” expresses criticism and astonishment.] 1
Poetic history, or history as poetry.
33 p 165
Can elements have Sinn? Sinn must be imagined: it pre-supposes persons. 34 p 174, underlined
So sieht Spengler die Tiefe des Lebens nur in Dasein und Blut verkörpert, womit der Unterschied zwischen Mensch und Tier verschwimmt, so sieht Klages im Geist nur des Lebens und seiner Tiefe Feind.1 Hurrah for Spengler Good dog! No useless Geist for him! 1 Thus Spengler sees the depths of life embodied only in blood and struggle, in which the difference between man and beast disappears. Thus he sees in the lamentations of spirit only lives and their profound enemy.
35 p 186
||Greatness depending on personal force: Mohammed, Mary Baker Eddy.|| Is Kant like that too? A little. 36 p 189, marked
This is obscure but good. The psyche is a movement. 37 p 199
||Kant’s achievement in part was to place side by side in one theory the irrational and the rational.|| The greatness of Kant is to have made Kaiserling [sic] possible. He betrays Kant, who agrees with him! 38 p 215, top
[“Jesus als Realpolitiker,” summary:]
(1) no hostility to political or to religious institutions (2) a monastic order within the world 39 p 216, top
[continued from 38 p 215:]
(3) Incorporation of feeling and non-national human kinship. 40 pp 216–17, marked Z
||The cult of Mithra signalled the end of the old order of religion; insofar as it still exists, it may be seen in the bullfighting of Spain and France.|| Bull-fights are pagan mystic cults!
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41 p 217
[Santayana paraphrases:]
Jesus is a local worthy: it is always a question of influence, not of attainment. Spirit = force. 42 p 224, marked
Obviously man as such in relation to the divine is not creator but creature. There is a part of Power in a man, and when it is in harmony with all Power, he can cease to feel dependence on the God of Power and instead feel identity with him. Piety turns to zeal & prophecy. 43 p 227
||In the past, philosophy was regarded as the handmaiden of religion.|| Now, it is clear that when metaphysics comes in question, and metaphysics is a presupposition of every philosoph […]. I knew I was no philosoph. 44 p 227
But is scientific philosophy really the highest and ultimate pursuit? Surely living wisdom is more than defining terms, und Zaubern-Können1 more than demonstration. Poor Kant! 1
And magical knowledge.
45 p 232, marked
The center out of which a child lives is not the I, but a super-personal background. i.e. not the idea of himself. 46 p 233
[…] alle schöpferischen Kräfte1 […]. The Psyche. 1
All creative powers.
47 p 235, marked
||Keyserling refers to the “protoplasmic” renewal of the psyche.|| How lovely. 48 p 243, marked Z
||The magus draws on instinctive beliefs to construct a form of wisdom; so the artist, who embodies a type of modern magus, thus differing from the scientist. The artist does not deal in formulas, in contrast to the learned.|| O rot!
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49 p 243, underlined
Ein Kunstwerk wird wesentlich genossen. Der ästhetische, nicht der ethische Wert ist vom Standpunkt des Beschauers letzte Instanz.1 Why exclude the moral suggestion? It is there. 1 A work of art will essentially be pleasing. The aesthetic, not the ethical point of view is finally of central value to the viewer.
50 p 244
||Certain words of Laotse, Heraclitus, Christ, the ethical Indians, or Nietzsche are always revalidated quite apart from time and place.|| Undoubtedly certain words & images belong to attitude rather than to thought: they are symbols & watch-words. 51 p 253, underlined and marked
||In the course of defining the Magus, Keyserling asserts that|| Der männliche Logos ist nur befruchtend, nur Anstoss, Dynamik, Initiative. Sein Gesetz ist nicht das weibliche “Erhalte, was ist”, sondern “Stirb und werde”.1 This is truly felt. Cf. Lord Jim.2 Impulse, devil-may-care, & transitions are masculine. So reform. 1 The masculine logos is only fruitful, impulsive, dynamic initiative. His law is not the feminine, “Hold on, what is this?” but “Die and become.” 2 Lord Jim of The Last Puritan? Or Conrad’s? Or both?
52 p 263, marked Z
So wird auch Gott als Geist allein zugestanden, dass er wesentlich Subject ist. Aber was von Gott gilt, gilt grundsätzlich von allem Geist.1 Il ne dit pas le fin mot.2 1
Thus God pertaining to spirit alone comes into existence as the essential subject. But what is valid with reference to God, is fundamentally valid of all spirit. 2 He does not speak the final word. 53 p 265
||Spengler was wrong in his account of Buddha and Christ.|| I thought there was no disputation in the School of Wisdom. Mary Cyril Edwin Kinney A Critique of the Philosophy of George Santayana in the Light of Thomistic Principles Washington, D.C.: 1942. Waterloo. One marginale.
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David Knowles
The Benedictines London: 1929. Waterloo. Marked, but not by Santayana.
H. V. Knox
The Evolution of Truth and Other Essays London: 1930. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Korean American Cultural Association
The Culture of Korea
Edited by Changsoon Kim Honolulu: s.n. 1945–46. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Jean de La Fontaine
Fables, contes et nouvelles Paris: 1948. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Corliss Lamont
Humanism as a Philosophy New York: 1949. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Corliss Lamont
The Illusion of Immortality New York: 1950. Waterloo. No marginalia.
John Brett Langstaff
Man and Christmas Verse New York: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Last Chance: Eleven Questions on Issues Determining Our Destiny Edited by Clara Urquhart Boston: 1948. Waterloo. One marginale.
In order to put a question intelligently it is necessary to understand the facts; and, if you understand the facts, it is unnecessary to put the question.
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It is my opinion that “true progress” in life or government has never been brought about by thinkers or philosophers. They have perhaps advanced their abstract sciences, although often they have confused and misguided them; but these sciences are centrifugal; and if they ever collided on one subject (say good chemistry, topography and strategy on Hiroshima), they only implement the incompetence of the politicians, who force a war to the point of complete victory only to crown that victory with a stalemate, and bring chaos among themselves as well as on their victims. The consequences of human folly may lead to wisdom in the wise, but wisdom in them will not prevent fresh folly. William E. H. Lecky
A Victorian Historian: Private Letters of W. E. H. Lecky London: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Félix Le Dantec
L’Athéisme Paris: (1906), 1912. Georgetown. Two marginalia.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The Philosophical Works of Leibnitz
Translated and edited by George Martin Duncan New Haven: 1890. Georgetown. Eleven marginalia. [Signed, 7 Stoughton Cambridge.] 1 p 77, marked
[…] our internal feelings […] being only phenomena consequent upon external objects or true appearances, and like well-ordered dreams, it is necessary that these internal perceptions within the soul itself come to it by its own proper original constitution, i.e., by the representative nature (capable of expressing beings outside itself by relation to its organs), which has been given it at its creation and which constitutes its individual character. This is virtually a Fichtean idea. 2 p 103, marked
And as possibility is the principle of essence, so perfection or the degree of essence (through which the greatest possible number is at the same time possible), is the principle of existence.
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3 p 104, marked
||Leibniz would not confound moral perfection with metaphysical goodness or greatness, nor does he deny moral goodness or grant metaphysical goodness;|| it must be known that it follows from what has been said that the world is most perfect, not physically, or, if you prefer, metaphysically, because that series of things is produced in which there is the most reality in action, but also that it is most perfect morally, because really moral perfection is physical perfection for souls themselves. [Final two lines:]
N.B. 4 p 224, top
1. The final cause of all existence must be one; as also the nature of it. 2. The possible involves the actual, and the ground of all possibilities is a necessary and real being—and infinite. [Santayana’s paraphrase:]
The existence of truth carries with it the possibility of things—their logical consistency or essence—and this involves the existence of God and of the testimony to existence every where. Edouard Le Roy
Dogme et critique Paris: 1907. Georgetown. Thirty-eight marginalia.
[Santayana read no more than 100 of Le Roy’s 386 pages.] 1 p 14
||The duty to think about what authority has laid down concerning belief.|| Why should authority impose a duty, rather than an idea? Because your transcendentalism is intellectual rather than moral. 2 p 17, underlined
||The dogma of God as personal.|| […] nous voilà en plein anthropomorphisme; et les catholiques seront certainement d’accord avec leurs adversaires pour rejeter une pareille conception.1 ? All religious belief—even abstract teleology—is anthropomorphic. 1 … here we have frank anthropomorphism; the catholics will surely agree with their adversaries in rejecting such a conception.
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3 p 19, marked
In brief, the dogma “God is personal” conveys no positive conception to me […]. ? This is what Bergson calls God. 4 p 20
The dogma of the resurrection teaches that death for Christ unlike death for ordinary mortals, does not signify the definitive end of practical activity. ! 5 p 27, marked
||Faith in the dogma of irreducible mysteries lacks intellectual utility and cannot constitute a virtue.|| This shows the unimaginative logic of the author. 6 p 51
If you start with the notion that action is more real than truth, and yet esteem your religion, you must of course try to make it a matter of action and not a truth. 7 p 51
||The results of intelligent thought are not dogmas, and there is no obligation to adhere to them through an act of faith.|| All thought is false to reality—this is “idealism”! 8 p 61, marked
||The mediaeval, scholastic conception of nature is very like that of Kant in many respects.|| Celle-ci enveloppe le même abus des métaphores spatiales, des divisions et coupures numériques et géométriques, la même attitude de logicien confiné dans le monde intemporel et immobile des abstractions. Le criticisme, en effet, ne caractérise-t-il pas l’esprit par un ensemble de lois et formes a priori données elles-mêmes une fois pour toutes en dehors de toute durée.1 Human nature a fetich for Kant—and the ground of all nature. 1
The latter [Kant’s] embraces the same abuse of spatial metaphors, the same numerical divisions and geometrical denominations, the same logical attitude confined by a grouping of forms and laws delivered a priori once and for all throughout eternity. 9 p 63
||Any truth, including religious truth, must be apprehended in our own being and felt to be truth indeed; if not,|| le moins qu’on en pourrait dire est qu’elle n’aurait pour nous aucun sens: comme quand on parle de philosophie à un animal. une femme. 1 ^ ^
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This shows the error of the author: for women embrace and prize religion without any transcendental approach to it. 1
… the least we might say is that it makes no sense to us: as when one talks philosophy to an animal. a woman. ^ ^ 10 p 79
||Le Roy uses the words, majoration, maximise.||1 Barbarous terms. 1
Increase, maximize.
11 p 84
||The idea of hell: if one eliminates the intellectual idea, one is left with imagination alone.|| What is intellect without imagination? 12 p 97
Le Roy is more interested in proving that Catholics must be pragmatists than that men should be Catholics. Hermann Levy
England and Germany: Affinity and Contrast London: 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Hans Lietzmann
Geschichte der alten Kirche Berlin and Leipzig: 1932. Waterloo. Seventy-one marginalia.
[Marginalia in Santayana’s late hand, probably while he was preparing to write The Idea of Christ in the Gospels.] 1 p 14
||The Lord himself is a King.|| Triumph to be miraculous: the means moral, the end material. Holiness and wealth glorify one another. 2 p 15
||Concerning Roman times, and the new religion: with the coming of the Messiah,|| Dann wird Jerusalem in alter Herrlichkeit neu erstehen; die zwölf Stämme werden Palästina wieder in ihren alten Grenzen bewohnen, die Verstreuten werden aus der Diaspora zurückkehren, […].1 Heil Balfour & Lloyd George. 1 Then Jerusalem will arise in its former dominance; the twelve tribes will return to Palastine to dwell within their former borders, and the dispersed will return from the diaspora.
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3 p l5
||In the new Israel, there will be no heathens, no Greeks, no Samaritans.|| The Kingdom of God is pure non-Aryan. 4 pp 16–17
||As for the doctrine of damnation, the pious will know within themselves God’s judgement.|| That is typical pharisaical piety. In the Old Testament, we find the circle of the pious, who in quiet, holy inwardness are withdrawn from the uproar and immorality of their cultural surroundings. Cf. old Boston. 5 p 27
Die Stillen im Lande.1 No, this is all wrong in spirit. In the East there is no spiritual lower middle class. There are prophets, and there is the canaille. The prophets are all magnificant: they are not little people. So the humility of Jesus isn’t this German village humility, but a voluntary grand simplicity and rejection of the world. In spiritual things too, il faut de la tenue.2 1 2
The humble in the land. One must maintain one’s position.
6 p 38, underlined and marked Z
||Of Jesus, born in Nazareth:|| Sein Vater Joseph muss früh gestorben sein: wir hören immer nur von seiner Mutter Maria.1 N.B. He was early suppressed. This shows a strange naiveté in the critic. Is it typical? 1 His father, Joseph, must have died early; we always hear only about his mother, Mary.
7 p 41, marked
||An interpretation of Christ’s preaching.|| The true Jesus was a Lutheran! 8 p 41, marked Z
||The idea of Christ as all-powerful.|| This is a fantastic reconstruction. If a man had felt this, he wouldn’t have preached or suffered. He would have been a Buddha, a philosopher. 9 p 43, marked
||Matthew 20: 1–16 cited, concerning the latecomer to the vineyard.|| Im Reich Gottes ist alle Gerechtigkeit nichts anderes als Gottes Gnade.1 Do you feel the tragic despair of this? 1
In God’s kingdom, all justice is no different from God’s mercy.
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10 p 44, marked
||In the kingdom of heaven, a sinner is more welcome than a merely just man.|| This is better. It penetrates to the non-moral economy of nature. 11 p 46, marked Z
||Christ’s disciples followed him as the Messiah because of his miracles.|| Not a judgement justified by any evidence. The proof, for the disciples, was the resurrection: & they attributed foresight of this to Jesus! 12 p 46, marked Z
||No Jew knew of the Messiah that it was his duty to sacrifice his life; the idea was imported from elsewhere and was not Jesus’s own.|| Really this is too innocent. The reference to Isaiah was discovered when the risen Christ had to be identified with the crucified Jesus. 13 p 52
||On the re-appearances of Jesus after his death:|| Perhaps these apparitions were the beginning of Christianity; and the less (like St. Paul) the disciples had seen or heard of Jesus, the surer they were of his nature & resurrection. He existed as risen (which of course implied that he had lived and died before). 14 p 55, underlined
Die Urgemeinde wird also durch das gemeinsame Erleben der Gegenwart des auferstandenen Herrn zusammengehalten.1 [At Erleben:]
German substitute for faith. People only experienced this because they heard and imagined it: everything was worked up to create the “experience”. So today with the Sacraments. 1
The early Church community was also held together by their experience of the presence of the resurrected Lord. 15 p 115, underlined and marked X
||An interpretation of St. Paul on sin and God’s justice.|| But a condition attaches: the sinner must “believe,” which means to be certain in full knowledge of his own inadequacy and helplessness of heavenly justice, and ohne Zweifel gewiss sein, (positive beyond doubt) that God will make him whole and lead him to life [everlasting].
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This assurance couldn’t be absolute unless God is reduced to a subjective term. E.g. to the mystical insight that there is no sin. 16 p 127
||Further interpretation of Paul.|| The Lutheranism of St. Paul was not zeitgemäss!1 1
Timely.
A[lexander] D[unlop] Lindsay
The Philosophy of Bergson
London: 1911. Georgetown. Sixty-four marginalia, plus four full end-pages of notes. 1 p 1, underlined
[Introduction.]
[T]he philosopher’s task […] may be judged to have succeeded if in his new statement he brings together the elements of importance in the old problems. Importance for what? 2 p 11
Let us ask whether our metaphysic cannot be reconciled with science simply because it lags behind science, being the metaphysic of a rigid science with entirely mathematical categories, in short of the science that flourished from Descartes to Kant, […]. This is like a cheap sermon by an oily parson. 3 p 45
[At the end of the Introduction:]
Bergson the most distinguished & characteristic phil. of the day. He is (1) a literary psychologist & a fresh phil (in appearance). (3) [sic] a Time-worshipper, a Jewish, & [illegible]tionary. (4) A metaphysician opposing reality to appearance; the reality is the unusual[?], felt or imagined (re-felt). (5) The dramatic & moral aspect of things being the reality, predictability is impossible; yet it is real among appearances; [ are appearances, then, the guides to reality?] (6) An entirely superficial and retrograde thinker. (7) A delightful, subtly sentimental expression of the perplexities and prejudices weaknesses[?] of the moment. ^ ^ [illegible] his judgment on life is that of a liberal French Jew & Republican—all life is good if it can hold its own—or if it can’t. So that beneath the presumption about freedom
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responsibility and individuality, there is a profound ^ demoralisation,^ a denial of nature. 4 p 56
||About volume, size, weight, measurement.|| Why this drivel? 5 pp 56–57, underlined
[Lindsay quotes Bergson:]
“There is a gradual transition possible from empirical to pure consciousness till the real [sic] of it vanishes completely and there remains a merely general consciousness a priori of the manifold in space and time; […].” i.e. a mystical sense of mere space mere time & mere self-hood. 6 p 81, underlined
If brain movements are made the key to states of consciousness they are thereby isolated, because they are isolable in perception: but this contradicts the denial of the real independence of things perceived as separate. Does he mean that in being the bases of single mental acts they acquire a functional unity which is real? 7 p 81
||In more simple form, Bergson’s argument is that|| metaphysical absurdities of an assumption may be disregarded for the sake of its scientific usefulness. Quite so: their entelechy individuates them. 8 p 93, underlined
[…] we carry our past mental life along with us into each act of consciousness. Instead of a series of discrete states side by side and an unchanging self somewhere above or behind them, we find a continuous duration which changes and is yet one, just because the past states do not disappear but enter into the present. ! i.e. the essences presented in them may be represented, or very similar essences. The “state” is lost. 9 pp 94–95, underlined
We can anticipate the future there because we are concerned only with order and changes of order. When the same order is repeated, we are in the presence of the same fact. essence The lapse of time makes no difference to it. Hence in the calculations of such sciences the lapse of time is ignored.
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i.e. the laws are regarded as constant; time as equable. For each time that the earth repeats its position in regard to the sun, the moon repeats its position in regard to the earth rather more than twelve times. Time is measured by a comparison between such different recurring orders, and its real duration neglected altogether. i.e. sense of duration. 10 p 95, underlined
||Order in space permits us to measure time|| just because we think that these systems have no time of their own. durée, a rather mystic consciousness of lasting and having lasted 11 pp 96–97, marked X
||On the question whether biological beings have genuine individuality, or whether their evolution does not differ from the evolution of rocks or the earth’s surface.|| Mechanical change is real; but B. perhaps means substantial; but consciousness is no substance: it is a dependent existence, expressing formal relations in substance, relations which mechanical change makes and unmakes continually. 12 p 100, underlined
Thus we have time explicitly denied. [Now Lindsay quotes and paraphrases Bergson, Creative Evolution: ] “The present reposed potentially in the cosmic vapour.” Differences are mere differences in arrangements in molecules, and understanding is possibility of prediction. Living beings are no more separable or distinct from the general system of molecules than is anything else. In Bergson’s words, “Radical mechanism implies a metaphysic where the totality of the real is given en bloc, and where the apparent duration of things expresses simply the infirmity of a mind which cannot know everything all at once.” !Strange attitude! Time is denied if its course can be changed and its periods deduced from one another! 13 p 115, top
Nature without and within is the prerequisite of a moral philosophy. It is not possible in B. where any experiment in living is equally derived (freely) and creative: it is not to be expected since the Reformation, which made the word “external” odious.
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[ His God is a cosmic wind, blowing where it listeth, it is not an omniscient mind, or a perfect good.] 14 p 126
We said that quantitative psychology was a study of correspondences. All measurement of time is a counting of such correspondences or simultaneities. […] We are concerned only with the simultaneities, not with the real nature of the processes which we measure by them. We may therefore come to call two durations equal, which, as we directly experienced them, were of the most different character and complexity. N.B. If lives of very different durations have simultaneous ends, what is the ground of their simultaneity? How is it observed? The objects presented[?] are the same? 15 p 130, top
Dreadful page! [Lindsay quotes from Bergson, Time and Free Will: ] “Outside of me, in space, there is never more than a single position of the hand and the pendulum, for nothing is left of the past positions. Within myself a process of organisation or interpenetration of conscious states is going on, which constitutes true duration. . . . Thus, within our ego, there is succession without mutual externality; outside the ego, in pure space, mutual externality without succession; mutual externality, since the present oscillation is radically distinct from the previous oscillation which no longer exists, but no succession, since succession exists solely for a conscious spectator who keeps the past in mind and sets the two oscillations or their symbols side by side in an auxiliary space.” [From “since succession,” marked Z:]
What a gratuitous assertion. 16 p 130, underlined
“There is a real space without duration, in which phenomena appear and disappear simultaneously with our state of consciousness. There is a real duration, the heterogeneous moments of which permeate one another:” […]. ! objects are maintained for a while together. 17 p 151, top
He has expressed with a tender care that confused immediate experience out of which the great conceptions of philosophy have been laboriously drawn. 18 p 159, top
Spirit is immaterial, synthetic, cognitive, & impassioned.
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19 p 166, marked X
As any perception is selective, and the reason why one element in reality is selected rather than another is explained in general by the relation of that element to the needs or purposes in life, so, as these develop with the development of memory, the selection operated by consciousness becomes more wide and indeterminate. This is as if you said the movement of a billiard ball becomes[?] more & more indeterminate the more pockets the table has, or the more kinds of strokes may be used. So the path of a river is determined by the ground and its own force only; that of a dog, by many other things—the scents, the care of his master, etc. 20 p 176, marked Z
||The relationship of memory and physiology. Bergson says|| that the brain cannot be the storehouse of memories, but it may contain the machinery by which memory translates itself into action. Interesting instance of perplexity arising from the substantiation of mind: of course, when the action based on the past fails, the memory does not arise. If my brain does not furnish the series of words in a poem, I cannot remember it. 21 p 179, underlined
If we are repeating a series of movements, we are acting in the present, but our action may be determined by a recollection, however vague, of the past movement which we are trying to reproduce. The present in action implies memory of the past, […]. Oh no! It may be accompanied by it—unless by “memory” you mean training or past experience. 22 p 183, top
B’s account of memory is better than his account of perception, in that in memory he recognises the stable object and machinery for revealing[?] or disclosing it occasionally. But he does not allow for error. The machinery has a bias of its own, and vitiates or adorns the object. 23 p 211
[A quotation from Bergson, Matter and Memory:] “To give up certain habits of thinking and even of perceiving, is far from easy; yet this is but the negative part of the work to be done; and when it is done, when we have placed ourselves at what we have called the turn of experience, […] there still remains to be reconstituted, with the infinitely
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small elements which we thus perceive of the real curve, the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them. . . .” The real is at the dawn of experience and behind it. The real is matter. B. is a materialist, in that he ignores essence, and disparages spirit. 24 p 228, marked X
Bergson shares the modern interest in the subjects treated in the biological sciences. But in his conception of philosophic insight he follows Plato.
! 25 p 236, marked Z
[Metaphysics] attempts to apprehend reality, not in the light or as it may serve the particular purposes of action, but as it is in itself. Vile english. 26 p 239, bottom
Aesop the great philosopher of life, and the true natural historian—not Darwin. 27 p 240, underlined
History never repeats itself. But it is not a mere collocation of facts, for it is a synthesis of them—a synthesis for which there are no rules; its success depends on the individual insight of the historian, […]. Vile style. Is the author an American? [End-papers, which I letter a, b, c, d. These drafts indicate, as perhaps nothing else can, that Santayana’s fluency was earned hard.] [End-paper a:]
[ After passage about a bullet stopping the élan vital.] What an obviously mechanical accident you abolish would seem to be something in its causes itself on the mechan^ deal about ^ life from authors who ical level. We hear a great seem never to have heard of death: yet death, with birth, is the natural revelation analysis of what life is. The ^ but it is never out of study of death may be out ^of fashion, season.—This omission, which is almost the omission of all wisdom from philosophy, warns us that we are dealing with something occasional and partial, with the work of persons whose interest in reality spirit is essentially that ^ ^Like all metaphysof partisans and advocates of prejudice. ical idealism, the system of M. Bergson has neither ^ ^ rigour, nor good sense, nor thoroughness, nor solidity. It is a very [?] brilliant attempt to confuse great the lessons of ^
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experience truths issues by [illegible ] with small ones, and to halt, by ^refining upon ^its [illegible ^ ] for the sake of very ^ passions, ^ unphilosophical immediate nor the path ^ ^ progress of discipline & reason [sic ] It is likely to prove ^ ^ [End-paper b:]
a successful attempt, because it flatters the illusions of the moment, expresses them with elegance, and covers them with a feint at scientific speculation. It is not, however, a powerful system, like that of Hegel [four heavily crossed-out lines, most words illegible] […] oppressing disconcertive […] who rebel against it. not fall into its snare. abuse and shame. It will ^ on[?] its highest vogue ^ deceive anybody who never even ^ does those only who do really not^ wish to be aching to ^ ^ a while, be deceived bewildered ; but it will [illegible] for ^ ^ ^ reduce increase their number. For Instead of telling men ^ does would [illegible] how remote, diffias true^philosophy ^ cult, and unsuspected the truth ^is, and how vast and nonhuman the universe, it tells yet how precious to their better selves is the knowledge of it, it tells them that the truth is nothing is more precious than their animal life, with its blind internal instincts and premonitions: that every ^ ^ thing remote ideal is fictitious, and that the universe, at ^ ^ Why then strain the inquiry? Why heart, is unintelligible. then seek to achieve[?] dominate ^mortality ^by in confessing to understanding it. Rather, drift on: exert^ our vegetating ^ y our ^ ^ Why no rest in the sham which is most familiar, in the illusion, which is most immediate or in the philosophy which is most novel & titillating? Why be as Wm James ^ a duped, to observed so [illegible] troubled[?] about being / ^ ^ ^ him as having to be duped in any case? [End-paper c:]
powers of social and moral vegetation, let your philoso^ an a frank expression ^ phy itself be of this flux; and not a ^ ^ vain attempt to a momentary posture[?] of a moving soul stark and not a stark vain adorations of things inhuman eternal . So the lazy intellectual depression laziness and ^ ^ ^ the unguided activity ^ of the irrepressible feverish mater^ ^ justify ial activity of the age are encouraged together both itself themselves theoretically; they say their cry together ^ non peccavi;1 which is the modern modern^ formula for ^ ^
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confessions/: and while philosophy indeed is not advanced, it the age leaves behind an interesting document of its ^momentary ^ weaknesses and perplexities—a document, as ^M. Bergson^ writes it, full of psychological subtlety keen^ ^ His ness^ , and a kind of restrained sentimental piety. It ^ ^ ^ ^ thought has all the charm that can go without strength ^ ^ ^ and all the competence that can go without mastery. For ^ an age of mastery: for it has no vision of the aim This ^is not of life. 1
I have not sinned.
[End-paper d:]
The mind of This age is like acknowledges like the ^ be in^ this philosophy, ^ ^ is not ^ a mind is as represented^ to master but is [sic] a servant, and not a master. It has no ^ of life; and the mind, which that aim the vision of the^ aim ^ it true end being life at its highest actuality and perfection ^ can understand only as a means; and it confusedly takes mind to be a means like all the rest in what is a turbid & ^ life itself ^ endless process. But clear mind is the end, being in its actuality and perfection morally; and this as ^ ^ ^ Dante says. the master knows. ^ Elsewhere he says, in a phrase that, etc. the human spirit elan vital is able in man is able to overwhelm [one word illeg^ sought^resistance and to break through many an obstaible] cle, perhaps even death. Passage about death:—The tenor has struck ended on the inevitable the high note, to impress the ^gallery. But^does it come from the chest? Was it set down in the music? ^ only one two passages in which death is I^ remember ^ M. Bergson it is in order to mentioned even hinted^at by ^ ^ intimate though with conscious embarrassment, that ^ immortality is still possible —a passage already ^much quoted and perhaps destined to be famous. his system also has the advantage of securing immortality. In one he asks for the if we are not “led to believe” that consciousness passes through matter in order to form distinct personalities and prepare them for a higher existence. Other animal minds are but human minds arrested: but men less cap able of remembering all and will ing all. and ^con^ ^ ^ trolling their past and their future (what other are there, I wonder):
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A Preface to Morals London: 1929. Georgetown. 131 marginalia.
[Three and five end-papers filled with notes. Lippmann had been Santayana’s undergraduate student at Harvard and was his graduate assistant as he worked on an M.A. degree in philosophy. Santayana reviewed A Preface to Morals in the Saturday Review of Literature (December 7, 1929), 513.] 1 p 3, underlined and marked
[Lippmann] is concerned with those who are perplexed by the conse-
quences of their own irreligion. Might do for a title. 2 p 3, marked Z
||The young who lack a moral code.|| Morals undermined, or only the conventional sanction of morals? Isn’t it often a change in moral estimation that produces irreligion? 3p4
||The modern individual finds it hard to prefer one thing to another.|| Discouragement: from fatigue? selfishness? Pessimism? 4 p 7, marked Z
||A litany of restraints from which people have been freed but who are not happy; freedom is nerve-wracking.|| “My sensibility,” said Flaubert, “is sharper than a razor’s edge; the creaking of a door, the face of a bourgeois, an absurd statement set my heart to throbbing and completely upset me.” Not many such in America: there the senses are dulled. 5p7
Where is my home? cried Nietzsche: “For it do I ask and seek, and have sought, but have not found it. O eternal everywhere, O eternal nowhere, O eternal in vain.” Lack of definition in interests. What has this to do with the decay of religion? “Freedom” is not indetermination. 6 p 8, underlined and marked
||Serenity of a man’s soul is more than|| pursuing his casual ambitions, satisfying his hungers, and for the rest accepting destiny as an idiot’s tale in which one dumb sensation succeeds another to no known end. N.B. Is this reported or is it L’s own feeling?
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7 pp 8–9
||With reference to the Gospels:|| The older fable may be incredible to-day, but when it was credible it bound together the whole of experience upon a stately and dignified theme. ||People turn their backs on freedom by joining the new comforting cults.|| Yes: but the insane suffering imported into life by the same fables quite balances this. 8 p 15, underlined and marked
For what [Luther] believed in was Protestantism for good Catholics. 9 pp 16–17, underlined
The rebel, while he is making his attack, is not likely to feel the need to answer such questions [about the outcome of revolutions]. For he moves in an unreal environment, one might almost say a parasitic environment. […] For in attacking idols there is a kind of piety, in overthrowing tyrants a kind of loyalty, in ridiculing stupidities an imitation of wisdom. […] the rebel […] is under the spell of an illusion. For what comes after the struggle is not the exaltation of freedom but a letting down of the tension that belongs solely to the struggle itself. Cf. Berty1 1
Bertrand Russell.
10 p 22, bottom
||Lippmann quotes the Rev. Fosdick on God.|| Better Walt Whitman: “Words cannot express how much at peace I am about God and about death.” 11 p 46
Merely to tell men, however fervently, that they may conquer mortality by renouncing the flesh, will not go far toward persuading many of them to renounce the flesh. You must offer them nicer flesh. 12 p 105, top
The painter of the great epochs was like an actor: his task was to realise, to vivify a subject or a passion already indicated by tradition. 13 p 111, marked
The religious synthesis has dissolved. Yes: and what of it? After all a synthesis presupposes all its elements, save that special synthesis itself.
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14 p 129, marked Z
The place at which curiosity rests is not a fixed point called ‘the truth.’ The unscientific man, like the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages, really means by the truth an explanation of the universe in terms of human desire. What modern science means by the truth has been stated most clearly perhaps by the late Charles S. Peirce when he said that “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all those who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.” 15 p 133, top
When you have reconciled your religion with science, science changes, and where are you? 16 pp 134–35, underlined and marked
“The procedure of Divine Justice,” said Calvin, “is too high to be scanned by human measure or comprehended by the feebleness of human intellect.” That was good which man understood was good in the eyes of God, regardless of how it seemed to men. Thus the distinction between good and evil, including not only all rules of personal conduct but the whole arrangement of rights and duties in society, were laws established not by the consent of the governed, but by a king in heaven. N.B. In this case, religion subverted natural morality. So far is religion from being necessary to mortals. 17 p 136–37, marked Z
||For Kant, God had to exist to justify morality.|| For Kant’s proof of the existence of God was nothing but a plea that God ought to exist, and the whole temper of the modern intellect is to deny that what ought to be true necessarily is true. Too simple. 18 p 183
In place of a world, where like children we are ministered to by a solicitous mother, the understanding introduces us into a world where delight is reserved for those who can appreciate the meaning and purpose of things outside ourselves, and can make these meanings and purposes their own. In so far as man is pure intellect, this is happiness: but how far is he, or can he be, pure intellect? 19 p 203, underlined and marked
The peculiarity of our modern situation is that multitudes, instead of a few, are compelled to make radical and original adjustments. These multitudes, though they have lost the anicent certainties, have not outgrown the needs
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to which they ministered. They need to believe, but they cannot. They need to be commanded, but they cannot find a commander. They need support, and there is none. Their situation is adult, but their dispositions are not. They have passed from one tutelage (which they never entirely submitted to) to another or to their native anarchy. 20 p 208
You must chasten the herd. This was always the Protestant idea. 21 p 209
[…] there no longer exists a moral code which the moralist can interpret, administer, and enforce. […] Since there is no principle under modern conditions which authorizes the re-establishment of a moral code, the moralist, unless he revises his premises, becomes entirely ineffectual. Morality is a matter of custom: it establishes itself, and changes itself in disregard of all theories. The theories come afterwards to justify it, or proclaim it in words. 22 p 221, underlined
||To understand the passions consciously|| is to render them disinterested. A disinterested mind is harmonious with itself and with reality. Isn’t it perhaps merely to wash one’s hands intellectually and to say: “I am like that”. 23 p 229
There has always been some difference between official virtue and that which men and boys actually admired. 24 p 239, top
A mathematical prodigy, like a musical one, in spite of the ethereal and disinterested nature of his art, may be in everything else irritible [sic], vain, lecherous, and half idiotic. Abstraction can absorb only one some abstract past ele^ ^ ^ ment function of our nature being. ^^ ^ 25 p 239, underlined
It is no exaggeration to say that pure science is high religion incarnate. ! I am afraid the abstract character of science keeps men from dwelling in the object: they dwell in the application and manipulation of [erasure] and instruments.
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26 p 240
Docility to the facts has become a part of action, as it always was in the arts. Management of affairs has become more of an art, more of a science than formerly. But as the arts never bred saints, no more will science. 27 p 275
The real law in the modern state is the multitude of little decisions made daily by millions of men. As in advertising and selling. 28 p 292, marked Z
||An older generation discovered the pleasure of sexual intercourse in marriage apart from the generation of children. Hence it could not preach to the young that sex was evil.|| It could only maintain that the psychological consequences are serious if sexual gratification is not made incidental to the enduring partnership of marriage and a home. Why? If you liberate passion, you reinstate, in marriage, the classical aim and temper. 29 pp 308–9, marked
Mates who are not lovers will not really cooperate, as Mr. Bertrand Russell thinks they should, in bearing children; […] they will be merely dutiful. Lovers who have nothing to do but love each other are not really to be envied; love and nothing else very soon is nothing else. The emotion of love, in spite of the romantics, is not self-sustaining; it endures only when the lovers love many things together, and not merely each other. But why should love endure, if you mean not .1 1
Passion, not intellectual love.
30 p 313
[Santayana summarizes:]
Business—Corporations running themselves Government—Equilibrium of social energies Love—Cooperative marriages 31 p 317, marked Z
The moralists fancy that they are standing upon the rock of eternal truth, surveying the chaos about them. They are greatly mistaken. Nothing in the modern world is more chaotic—not its politics, its business, or its sexual relations—than the minds of orthodox moralists who suppose that the problem of morals is somehow to find a way of reinforcing the sanctions which are dissolving.
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32 p 317, doubly marked
They have misconceived the moral problem, and therefore they misconceive the function of the moralist. An authoritative code of morals has force and effect when it expresses the settled customs of a stable society: […]. Crucial passage 33 p 318–19, underlined and doubly marked
||In order to persuade, the moralist must indicate that his course|| is not an arbitrary pattern to which vitality must submit, but that which vitality itself would choose if it were clearly understood. Here is the appeal to reason and self-knowledge. 34 p 319, marked
The moralist is irrelevant, if not meddlesome and dangerous, unless in his teaching he strives to give a true account, imaginatively conceived, of that which experience would show is desirable among the choices that are possible and necessary. 35 p 328
There is no itch in the religion of the spirit to make men good by bearing down upon them with righteousness and making them conform to a pattern. Its social principle is to live and let live. It has the only tolerable code of manners for a society in which men and women have become freely-moving individuals, no longer held in the grooves of custom by their ancestral ways. This impartiality is super-moral: it is contrary to any particular allegiance. It is supra-mundane. A Little Treasury of American Poetry
Edited by Oscar Williams New York: 1946. Waterloo. Four marginalia.
A Little Treasury of American Prose
Edited by George Mayberry New York: 1949. Waterloo. One marginale.
[At the index of authors, the following are marked X:]
Henry Adams, Irving Babbitt,? Van Wyck Brooks, T. S. Eliot, R. W. Emerson, O. W. Holmes, Jr., Wm. James,? Francis Parkman,? W. H. Prescott, F. D. Roosevelt, George Santayana. [“?” are Santayana’s.]
Harvard
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Living Philosophies
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Albert Einstein et al. New York: 1937. Waterloo. Six marginalia.
1 p 301
[Beatrice Webb:]
But why should we expect to describe the invisible world? All we can do is to explain our own state of mind, so that we may enter into communion with those of like temperament, and thus encourage and strengthen each other in our common pilgrimage through life. Science holding hands. John Locke
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Two volumes. New York: 1825. Georgetown.
[Volume I, 122 marginalia; Volume II, 20 marginalia, plus a draft of verses on two end-papers. Many of the marginalia are illegible owing to the binder’s having cut the margins severely, and to Santayana’s soft-lead pencil. Obviously a copy for classroom use.] [Volume I.] 1 p xviii, top
Read
{
Book II Augustine
1, 8, 23, 27. (March 1893)
2 p 20, underlined
Our understanding and the things we understand are not different: how then are you [to] know one without the other? Answer: Our understanding is one of the things we understand through recognition. Locke evidently expects his inquiry to test the possibilities of knowledge. This is impossible. What it might do is on the authority of the new[?] science to connect something in the old. 3 p 27
[Book I, ch. l, § 5: “Our capacity suited to our state and concerns.”]
There is no scepticism in all this. L. trusts the faculties he is about to examine. 4 p 45, marked
[Book I, ch. 3, § 3:]
Nature, I confess, has put into man a desire of happiness, and an aversion to misery: these indeed are innate practical principles […].
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5 p 52, underlined
[Book I, ch. 3, § 15:] [Locke quotes Herbert of Cherbury’s De religione laici, in which he lays down the principles of natural religion, i.e., Deism.]
Though I allow these to be clear truths, and such as, if rightly explained, a rational creature can hardly avoid giving his assent to; […]. Ha! 6 p 74, top
[Book II, ch. 1, § 10:]
Three stages of this question 1st there is a soul, which sometimes thinks 2nd But it would be nothing while it didn’t think, therefore it thinks always. 3rd Therefore it does not always exist. To assert that the soul always thinks is to begin to deny its substantiality. 7 p 75, top
[Book II, ch. 1, § 11:]
Memory makes personality. 8 p 87
[Book II, ch. 7: on pleasure and pain.]
Does this mean that pain is an idea both of sensation & reflection? It is a present reaction of the mind (is an idea of “reflection”) on ideas of sensation and reflection. 9 p 97
[Book II, ch. 9: “Of Perception.”]
= psychic existence 10 p 103
[Book II, ch. 10, § 5:]
Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us: and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are approaching; […] Fine 11 p 149
[Book II, ch. 18: “Of other Simple Modes.”]
Skip this chapter. 12 p 159
[Book II, ch. 21, § 10:]
Liberty ability to do what one desires. 13 p 163
[Book II, ch. 21, § 23:]
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That willing, or volition, being an action, and freedom consisting in a power of acting or not acting, a man, in respect of willing or the act of volition, when any action in his power is once proposed to his thoughts, as presently to be done, cannot be free. This only says that a man must avoid exercising his will. 14 p 167
[Book II, ch. 21, § 34:]
“It is better to marry than to burn,” says St. Paul; where we may see what it is that chiefly drives men into the enjoyments of a conjugal life. A little burning felt, pushes us more powerfully, than greater pleasures in prospect draw or allure. Locke was a bachelor. 15 p 171
[Book II, ch. 21, § 44:]
What good is desired, what not. Though this be that which is called good and evil, and all good be the proper object of desire in general, yet all good, even seen and confessed to be so, does not necessarily move every particular man’s desire; but only that part, or so much of it as is considered and taken to make a necessary part of his happiness. It is the desire that determines the happiness, not inverse. 16 pp 174–75
[Book II, ch. 21, § 51:]
The necessity of pursuing true happiness, the foundation of liberty. As, therefore, the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness, so the care of ourselves, that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness, is the necessary foundation of our liberty. Freedom acclaimed on principle. 17 p 175, marked
[Book II, ch. 21, § 52:]
For since the will supposes knowledge to guide its choice, and all that we can do, is to hold our wills undetermined, till we have examined the good and evil of what we desire. N.B. Is this decision to wait absolute? 18 p 177
[Book II, ch. 21, § 56:]
How men come to choose ill. Men only free to suspend their judgment as to what is good.
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19 p 213, top
[Book II, ch. 25: “Of Relation.”]
The Hegelians are right as far as perceived things go; they are perceived only as relations: but insofar as things are at all, they are wrong; for being is not a relative term to nonbeing. 20 p 215
[End, ch. 25:]
Black is relative, but color is not: being a mode of perception. Color is materia prima, which is absolute black is for [illegible] which is relative. If all were of one color, we should be unconscious of color, the color sense would remain potential in us, which could not be if things[?] had no color at all[?]1 1 This passage, like dozens more seriously damaged, is illegible in part because of the bookbinder’s disregard for the marginalia.
21 p 246
[Book II, ch. 28, § 6:]
||Moral rules or laws by which we judge the right or wrong of our actions are of three sorts.|| But the law of God is in us. 22 p 259, marked
[Book II, ch. 30, § 2: “Of Real and Fantastic Ideas.”]
First, our simple ideas are all real, all agree to the reality of things. Cf. Berkeley. 23 p 296
[Book III, ch. 4, § 8: “Of the Names of Simple Ideas.”]
The names of simple ideas are not capable of any definitions; the names of all complex ideas are. All these are definitions not of [?] ideas, but of realities. definitions are not poetic descriptions. They are intended to bring up images in the mind. How would y2 = a2 do to give a blind man an image of a circle? 24 p 310
[Book III, ch. 6, § 9:]
Not the real essence we know not. […] what is that texture of parts, that real essence, that makes lead and antimony fusible; wood and stones not? What makes lead and iron malleable, antimony and stones not? and yet how infinitely these come short of the
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finite contrivances, and unconceivable real essences of plants or animals, every one knows. Nothing makes them visible but the fact that they are visible. Suppose we discover a certain arrangement in all finite[?] bodies, we have learned one more attribute of finite bodies[?] but not why things having this constitution are fusible. [Volume II.] 25 p 107
[Book IV, ch. 7, § 9:]
Here again Locke takes the principle to be its abstract expression. 26 p 109
[Book IV, ch. 7, § 10:]
For a man cannot confound the ideas in his mind, which he has distinct: that would be to have them confused and distinct at the same time, which is a contradiction: and to have none distinct, is to have no use of our faculties, to have no knowledge at all. Locke’s psychological method is here, obviously contrasted with the analytical method of the transcendentalists. 27 p 128
[Book IV, ch. 10, §16: “Knowledge of the Existence of God.”]
A system of incogitative matter cannot be cogitative. For unthinking particles of matter, however put together, can have nothing thereby added to them but a new relation of position, which it is impossible should give thought and knowledge to them. Note the logic and physical confusion here. 28 p 132
[Book IV, ch. 11, § 6, Santayana paraphrases:]
We remember the place etc. where we had the pain, & what we said to ourselves about it, rather than the pain itself. [End-papers:]
Walt Whitman Dec. 26 ’91 This is no funeral rite, when happy-eyed We strew his ashes in the teeming sod, He gave his soul to nature ere he died And poured his blood into the veins of God He It is a marriage, making wholly one ^ ^lovers that in mind were one before These By the all healing hallowing by the sacrament of death. ^ ^ ^ ^
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Their bodies mingle as their souls had done. And To breathe no longer with divided breath. ^ ^ That little heap of atoms called a man, averse that for a moment fed ^ ^ A moment burning with the heavenly flame, Where there is strength he now is strong He is become ^ ^ the spirit of the throng All tempest’s rage, all lover’s love All child’s delight, the ^ ^ shepherd’s watch is he. His grey is now gladness is the sunlight, and his song The ^ and the ^sea rumor of the forest He has no private grief, no other pain Than this all moving ignorant unrest, That clothes the valley with the golden grain, And peoples sends the winds upon their wayward fateful quest. And sends the seasons in each other’s quest Who that is happy knows it at the time? Ah, thou art happy, not to live to be nought apart ^ From that great remorse In this ^vast dreary dreaming Distinct and lesser than the fluid whole whole: To know thy name no longer [illegible ] : nor the [illegible] ^ ^ vast burden A single body and the One captive[?] feeble Of a frail body and one banished ^ ^^ ^ soul But even as if life than partly ideal[?] With the high privilege of eyes divine Thou, who art nothing To live best in Thyself but nothing, yet are all things; things I’ll feign you goblins, too, with power to damn, Fairies to bless; Ah, well the poet saith: Words cannot tell how much at peace I am Concerning God and death. Above these ashes build him not a tomb, For they will live again ere it be done carved, He is returned into his mother’s womb.1 1
This embarrassing draft of an elegy was probably mis-dated 1891; Whitman died in 1892.
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Simples réflexions sur le décret du Saint-office
Montier-en Der (Haute-Marne): 1908. Georgetown. 17 marginalia. 1 p 32, marked
||Whether the Bible should be open to modern, scholarly investigation.|| The official Church has never entertained the idea that a historical study of the Bible should be independent of dogmas and theology. Loisy is not clear as to the obvious assumption in criticism that the books are not inspired. 2 p 38, underlined
L’histoire est ce qu’elle est, et l’on ne voit pas ce que les définitions des conciles et des papes pourraient changer a l’état des témoignages et des faits.1 Confusion between the past and the reconstruction of the past by the historian. 1 History is what it is, and one cannot see that how the definitions of councils and popes could change evidence and facts.
3 p 42
Absolute faith in history & a scientific method. “I may be wrong, says Loisy, but only you show me to be wrong by following my method. My method is infallible.” 4 p 45, marked
God is the author of the Bible just as he is architect of St. Peter’s in Rome and Notre-Dame in Paris. N.B. 5 p 158, marked
Further, what I have said concerning science and history is not deduced from a theoretical principle: it is the simple statement of a fact which seems to me beyond discussion. Loisy misses the transcendental assumptions of his science. Alfred Firmin Loisy
Y a-t-il deux sources de la religion et de la morale? Paris: 1933. Waterloo. Ninety marginalia.
[A critique of Bergson’s Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion.] 1 p v, underlined
[“Avant-propos”:]
Ici le mysticisme s’entend exclusivement du haut mysticisme chrétien, which in principle is the only religion really worthy of the name, that which M.
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Bergson calls dynamic, and which he believes he can regard as the transcendent complement to his own philosophy. Yes: and most astonishing in a prefac-ded[?] free philosopher. 2p7
||Religion is necessary to make one love human kind.||
A mystic break with nature is requisite for me to stroke a kitten or give a sugar plum to a Chinese baby. 3 pp 13–14
||If we believe Bergson, mystical love in essence is metaphysical rather than moral.|| Its direction is precisely that of the spirit of life; it is this very spirit, communicated integrally to privileged men who would like to imprint it on all mankind. This is not far from the Gospel idea of the Father, counting the sparrows and the hairs of the head: it is pantheistic. It explains Jesus liking low people. 4 p 15, marked
Theory of creation by love (under conditions) of the conditions of life in babies. 5 p 17, marked
||When Bergson speaks of the sources of morality and religion, he does not first address the problem of historical sources.|| How far does it profess to explain anything? Only morally, by finding its final cause. 6 p 20, underlined and marked
||Loisy writes of|| la fiction mythique et l’amour divin […]. The “love of God” is a fact if you mean our love for God: it is a cruel fable, if you mean God’s love for us. The élan vital in us is our love of ourselves, cruelly created by the general order of nature. 7 p 24, marked
The nature of the individual may suffer pressure from society (which may be full of mystics): and it may aspire to a deferred form of existence from that socially prescribed; but variation in the nature of the individual is always forced & accidental. Far from being a source of m.[morality] & r.[religion] it is an irruption into them and destruction of them: on which cataclysm, indeed, a new morality & religion may be
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founded. B. ignores this because he is not really tracing origins but assigning final causes. 8 p 27, top
Morality imposed on the individual by fear or brow-beating (as it is in children) may be said to have its source in society: but not the felt excellence of social obedience or unison: that is inspired. 9 p 36
[Santayana paraphrases:]
An eschatology, at once optimistic and ruthless, engages the Christian in political action and propaganda, and justifies all coertions [sic] and inquisitions exercised in the interests of salvation. 10 p 36, marked
Plotinus, a philosopher indirectly influenced by Orphism, and who attained mystical ecstasy, did not use the term “supreme” concerning mystical union, “in which contemplation comes to be spoiled by action, and the human will is mistaken for divine will.” It is true that Christian mystics act because their God is also Jehovah = matter. Charity acts only remedially, never genetically. 11 p 38, marked Z
||Loisy on Bergson on the great Christian mystics,|| “se ramassant sur eux-mêmes pour se tendre dans un tout nouvel effort, ils ont rompu une digue, et un immense courant de vie les a ressaisis.”1 B. raving & wordy. Il n’en est rien.2 1 … falling over themselves to exert new efforts, they broke through a barrier and were seized again by an immense current of life. 2 There’s nothing to it.
12 p 41
||Bergson does not regard mysticism as mental disorder, but as intellectual health; it shows a taste for action, prophetic discrimination between the possible and the impossible,|| a spirit of simplicity that triumphs over complexity, finally superior good sense. This is genius (as in Julius Caesar) not intelligence simply, not health and the opposite of spirituality. 13 p 49
||Bergson sees religion as|| a defensive reaction of nature against what it might do in depriving the individual and dissolving society in the exercise of intelligence.
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It is the old theory of political imposture, only the wicked priest is “nature” = l’élan vital. It inspires fables to protect its work and “mysticism” to renew it. 14 p 51, marked
Insofar as he makes the evangelical Christ the absolute beginning of true mysticism, Bergson returns to Marcion; but he reduces all the more the God of Israel by grouping him simply among national gods, gods resulting from fantasy and who exist only in fable. 15 p 53, underlined
||The prophets of Israel were mystics by their|| inspiration. Voilà le mot.1 1
There’s the right word.
16 p 55, underlined
||Loisy asks whether in Bergson mysticism is crystallization of religion, or vulgarization.|| Distinction subtile […]. No. That is just your distinction. You choose the second view. 17 p 78, marked
||Is incantation a form of magic in prayer?|| Yes: and the litany has a certain magic power over the reciter too: it attunes his sentiment to the magic in things, as well as his magic to his sentiment. 18 p 81, doubly marked
||On the important place of the inspired word in the Old and New Testaments, making possible the greatness of both Judaism and Christianity.|| Inspiration requires that facts should conform to it. God otherwise would deceive us and contradict himself. 19 p 91, top
By spirit, I understand, feeling, consciousness or moral actuality—something that has value in as much as, in assigning value to other things, it implicitly assigns value to itself and is [an] a priori condition for the existence of values at all. 20 p 91, underlined
||Bergson sees two kinds of morality:|| la morale de pression et la morale dite d’aspiration, la première, sorte de dressage social, […] et la seconde,
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émotion individuelle et conquerante, tendant à rompre les cadres de la première, […].1 [At “pression,” Santayana writes:]
constraint Note that the static is not constraining unless it is foreign; nor the expansive free or welcome unless one is naturally expansive, & in the same direction. The descriptive & the eulogistic (or condemnatory) meaning of these terms is to be distinguished. 1 … the morality of pressure and the morality named of aspiration. The first is a kind of social training; the second is an individual and conquering emotion, tending to break up the framework of the first.
21 p 97, marked
[Concerning social constraint:]
Humanity is no more open than England is: much less so, because England sympathises with nature at large. 22 p 99, underlined
Par ailleurs, l’opposition des sociétés closes serait de nécessité naturelle, en sorte que la société ouverte, la morale d’aspiration, la religion d’amour, sembleraient […] une façon d’ordre surnaturel;1 […]. Jenseits von Gut und Böse.2 1 In other respects, the opposition of closed societies will be natural of necessity, just as the open society, the morality of aspiration, the religion of love, will seem to be of the supernatural order. 2 Nietzsche’s title, Beyond Good and Evil.
23 p 106, marked Z
||Bergson insists on the necessity of closed societies, but they are not a hereditary prejudice nor willed in nature. Such a prejudice is open to amendment.|| Yes: but the question is whether the expansion of natural interests, or the mortification of nature in all men, is the goal. The mystic is super-moral. The Christian, for that reason, can only be a partial mystic. 24 p 109
[Santayana glosses critically:]
Spiritual life is not animal life in the tribe, but immortal life in the individual. It is ascetic: not a vicarious selfishness. 25 p 140
||About the “bonté”—goodness—of the evangelists.||
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This goodness, before Plato, is simply occasional, and directed upon favourites by a sort of regal effusion, sentimentally or whimsically conditioned. (The rain etc is not more divine than the drought. But Christ here is a true mystic: he sees Good beyond good & evil, and calls this goodness. Cf. Spinoza). [End-papers:]
Note That the inspiration of St John the Baptist, etc. is odious to the worldling; yet the worldling is odious to the pure mystic also (Cf. Rimbaud, Shelley, etc): so that the inspirations of the Spirit, as against the world of politics, science, & conventional morality, are divergent among themselves. The christian [sic] system posits another world, a life to come, to which the pure mystic might make all the objections that he makes to this life and to this world. Inter- or extra rational transitions from one “closed” system to^another. ^If good, good only because there was a static self imperfectly liberated in the old order, and better expressed in the new. The greater part of any “static” system is dead wood. Alfred Firmin Loisy
La Naissance du christianisme Paris: 1933. Waterloo. Seventy-seven marginalia.
1 p 75, marked
||Variations among the Jews concerning Christ. The Saducees tended to think that the reign of God is realized in observance of the law. The Essenes believed that they possessed God in their mystery and for the eternal future. Many of the Pharisees taught the validity of the idea of the reign of God on earth and that the dead would arise; that those events would occur at the pleasure of the divine power.|| Jewish expectations. 2 p 86, top
N.B. [Text marked:]
||In the first three evangelists, but above all in the fourth, the miracles of Christ are seen as|| symboles de l’oeuvre spirituelle accomplie par le Christ. A ce titre de symbole spirituel, ils anticipent la formation du mystère chrétien.1
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symbolic miracles. Miracles in the cures are turned to symbols, and symbols, in the sacraments are turned to miracles. 1
… symbols of the spiritual work that Christ accomplished. By this title of spiritual symbol, they anticipate the formation of the Christian mystery. 3 p 93, marked
||Christ did not so much as think of founding a religion.|| 4 p 95, marked
In truth, neither the revelation of God, nor the price of the soul, nor the law of love, nor the dignity of the poor is eminently marked in the early Gospels, as many in our time would have it. 5 p 96, marked
Jesus was not presented to his contemporaries as a wise man or a moralist, but as one sent from God, and not as a simple prophet. He implied by his relationship to God a grand advent, a mission special and unique, although not defined precisely; in our language his words were the equivalent of “the Messiah.” Zoroaster and the Buddha, as far as one can judge, Mani and Mohammed expounded similar claims. 6 p 97, marked
|| Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem, which ended in the triumph of his death, was the result of his faith and the faith of his disciples.|| Very good: but isn’t this dramatised? Even your history is inspired. 7 p 109, marked
In a general way, the words and attitudes attributed to Jesus in the evangelical accounts make sense only in their relationship to christology and to the liturgical drama of the passion, but not in historical reality concerning the arrest, condemnation and crucifixion. Quite so: & that is what gives them significance for religion. 8 p 111, marked
Jesus was summarily judged, summarily executed; he died in torment, and his sufferings had hardly any witnesses other than his executioners. End of Loisy’s fable. 9 p 119, marked Z
||Loisy provides a psychological explanation for the report that Jesus’ followers fell down in shock at finding the empty tomb.|| Fiction: “they” all fell in unison, like a Greek chorus. Fable still.
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10 p 119fn1
||Modern theologians tend to disregard the falling down of Christ’s followers.|| La plus belle scène de tout l’Evangile!1 1
The most beautiful scene in the entire Gospel!
11 p 122, marked
Religious faith in itself is no more than the effort of the mind, the imagination, the intelligence and the will to break through the apparently mechanical and fatal natural frame of existence. 12 p 123
||The doubting Thomas and naive proofs of the corporality of Christ: if the disciples had scrutinized all the evidence, they could have believed nothing. The first disciples flattered themselves that they had seen the living Christ, but they did not state as fact His resurrection.|| This is a point favouring the mythical essence of Christ. 13 p 127, marked Z
||Peter’s treachery in the garden of Gesthemane is a fiction invented to diminish an apostle who was the great authority of Judeo-Christianity.|| Loisy’s fables. 14 p 130
||Peter affirmed the faith of his brothers and formed the group who placed all their hope in Jesus of Nazareth.|| This is the true beginning of Christianity. 15 p 135, top
Quote [Text marked:]
||Loisy on communion, and the last supper.|| Le fait est croyable chez ces saints du dernier jour. Le Christ allant bientôt venir, il n’ètait que de s’entr’aider, les plus fortunés subvenant aux besoins des pauvres et pourvoyant à la table commune.1 The charity & brotherly love of the early Christians was due to the expectation of an immediate end of that world. (Couple this nonsense about love with nonsense about a “Loving Father”.) 1 The event is credible concerning these saints on the last day. Since the Christ departing was soon to return, it remained for them to help one another, the most fortunate caring for the needs of the poor and supplying the common table.
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16 p 152fn1, marked
||Christianity got its name from pagans at Antioch, who heard the name Christ among believers and thought it a proper name, one to denominate the sect according to its founder.|| 17 p 158, top
N.B. Quote passage opposite in chapter 1. The freshness, the life-like detail, of the gospels, in certain places, proves their poetic source: the writer is speaking of something now standing before his eyes, of which his heart is full. He is not collecting reports, he is not remembering events: he is inspired. If he overhears those discourses it is by telepathy; if he sees those scenes it is by a vision, if he knows those truths, it is by faith.1 1
Cf. chapter 1 of The Idea of Christ in the Gospels: “In the Gospels, the unction, the freshness, the life-like details in many places are so many proofs of their poetic source. The writer is telling of something now standing before his eyes, of which his heart is full. He is not collecting reports, he is not remembering events that he himself has ever witnessed. If he overhears those discourses, it is by telepathy; if he sees those scenes, it is in a vision; if he knows those truths, it is by faith.” (New York: Scribner’s, 1946, p. 4.) 18 pp 164–65, marked
Perhaps it would be convenient to consider as probable the hypothesis in which the evangelical propaganda would not have had, at the outset, the politically inoffensive character that is affected in the New Testament, but that it would have provoked, in the great Jewish quarter at Rome and particularly at Alexandria a veritable messianic agitation. Yes: & it suffices to start the cry: The end of the world is at hand! Repent! 19 p 261, underlined
||In the second century A.D.,|| La différence entre le cristianisme et le paganisme est beaucoup moins dans la métaphysique et la théologie, qui est une mythologie, que dans l’idéal moral.1 Yes, but not the same sort of mythology. The idea of Christ is not a bit like that of Dionysus. 1
The difference between Christianity and paganism is less pronounced in metaphysics and theology, which is a mythology, than in moral ideals. 20 p 277, top
Quote An obscure, young, unhappy prophet, exciting veneration, & disappearing in a terrible martyrdom—what an excellent
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figure, when out of sight, to identify with the Messiah, when once the spiritual & suffering Messiah could be conceived! 21 p 283, marked
|| Jesus was identified with the emblem of the sun of justice and salvation; therefore he had to rise from the grave in daylight with the rising sun.|| He rose, immortal, on the Sunday morning, with the rising sun. 22 p 353, marked
||Loisy discusses the doctrine of Mark that a supreme power guided Jesus from his baptism onward.|| The historical Jesus completely lost sight of. Alfred Firmin Loisy
George Tyrrell et Henri Brémond Paris: 1936. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Alfred Firmin Loisy
Les Origines du nouveau testament Paris: 1936. Waterloo. Eighty-one marginalia.
[This, too, was a source for Santayana’s The Idea of Christ in the Gospels. Loisy here repeats many arguments of La Naissance du christianisme.] 1 p 24, underlined and marked
[…] on pourrait appeler des miracles rédactionnels, improvisés pour la mise en scène […] déconcertants pour notre goût; ils n’en montrent pas moins sur quel terrain s’édifie le merveilleux des relations évangéliques, et que ce terrain n’est pas celui de l’histoire mais de la légende instructive et pieuse.1 1 … one might call the miracles editorial, improvised for a scenario … disconcerting to our taste; they reveal the terrain on which the gospel accounts are built, a terrain which is not that of history, but of pious and instructional legend.
2 p 26, top
The Resurrection an after thought (visions, the Transfiguration, perhaps years later. [sic] 3 p 33fn1
||A reference to Paul Claudel,|| already almost a member of the Académie française, thought to celebrate the victory of Roman Catholicism over science, modernism, and biblical criticism. Loisy is bitter at not being a member.
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4 p 37, marked
The Last Judgment is like the preliminary condition to the natural introduction to divine rule. From it comes the fact of the exhortation to repent preceding that rule, and that baptism, the sacrament of purification, is like a mystical guarantee of innocence in the light of the judgment to come. The point was to escape the bombs coming. A moral government of the world was pre-supposed. This is the
.1 It had been a trust in the destinies of Israel = political courage. It had turned into belief in the domination of an idea. 2
Basic lie.
5 p 39, marked
||Faith in the ability of baptism to wipe out the sins of publicans and whores was revolutionary, for it subverted established powers.|| 6 p 41, underlined and marked Z
Jésus ne se proposait pas d’instituer une religion, il annonçait que la grande espérance d’Israël était près de s’accomplir; il ne songeait pas à créer une propagande universelle, il disait que le règne de Dieu allait s’instaurer pour toujours sur la terre de Judée; […].1 Trick of trying to describe the psychology of a real Jesus. 1 Jesus did not propose to found a new religion; he announced that the great hope of Israel was near fulfillment. He did not imagine that he was creating a universal propaganda; he said that the reign of God was about to be formed forever in the land of Judea.
7 p 42
[With reference to the “trick” above:]
All this is futile. The point is how much of a foot-hold for Christianity may be found in the figure attributed to Jesus in the gospels. 8 p 42
||Did Jesus live a life or an illusion?|| This does justice to the revolution, not to the religion, in question. And the latter begins where the former ends. 9 p 43
||The disciples had not even the idea of the miracle of the resurrection.|| ? S. Paul had it.
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10 p 46, marked
||There exists a ritual from 100–130 A.D. in which any consideration of the life of the historical Jesus is absent.|| 11 p 49, marked
||The evangelists transposed Christ’s prayer in the garden of Gesthemane to His hours on the cross, as well as His “cry,” which was transposed from Psalm XXII.|| The passion ideal before it was made historical by identification with the actual crucifixion. 12 p 85, marked
At the moment when one expects the messianic epiphany in the public ministry of Jesus, he is consigned as though to perpetual silence; the explanation is naive enough but inevitable to the new marvels to be related concerning Him. That Christ had come in Jesus was one after-thought. The life of Jesus was at first (for St. Paul) of no consequence: its impact had been “concealed,” and was added later, when the Kingdom became less interesting than the Church. 13 p 90, underlined and doubly marked
[…] l’extrême indigence de la légende évangélique au point de vue des réçits, et la non moins extrême incohérence, l’arbitraire et l’artifice de la construction littéraire. Ce qui importait au succès de la catéchèse était l’instruction morale et l’éducation de la foi. A cette fin, les évangélistes ont su trouver ou mettre dans leurs narrations plus ou moins fictives la profondeur de sens qu’ils découvraient ou introduisaient dans les paraboles. Pas n’est besoin de méthode compliquée pour le comprendre, ni de recherches infinies pour le constater.1 Justifies literary criticism of the N.T. 1 … the extreme poverty of the evangelical legend from the point of view of stories related, and their no less extreme incoherence, the arbitrary nature and the artifice of their literary construction. What mattered to the success of the catechism was moral instruction and education in the faith. To that end, the evangelists knew how to find or to place in their more or less fictional narratives the depth of wisdom which they discovered or introduced into the parables. No complex method is needed to understand their footsteps, nor endless research needed to record the results.
14 p 117, underlined
||The silence of the women at the discovery of the empty tomb:|| L’évangéliste n’a pas soupçonné que sa relation paraîtrait bientôt insuffisante.1 No: because the thing is inspired and dreamt spontaneously but ingeniously, as dreams come. 1
The evangelist did not suspect that his story would soon appear to be insufficient.
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15 p 122fn1, underlined and marked
||The Jewish source gives the ancestry of Joseph, then of Jesus.|| La vraie leçon, préévangélique, est surement: “Joseph engendra Jésus, appelé Christ.”1 The canonical Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, annuls toute signification of the genealogy. matérièlle, mais on tenait a la signification légale. Ils étaient juifs.2 1 The true lesson, which is pre-evangelical, is surely, “Joseph engendered Jesus, called Christ.” 2 Material, but one holds to the legal meaning. They were Jews.
16 p 183, underlined
||Loisy writes that the conclusion of Luke XXIV, 34,|| is quite unintelligible: for the equilibrium of the story, it is the disciples of Emmaus who had to say to the others, “The Lord has truly risen, and he has appeared to us.” This is captious. Quite naturally the disciples from Emmaus find their news anticipated by other apparitions. A risen Lord could appear anywhere it[?] liked. 17 p 313, underlined
When Paul wrote to the Thessalonians (I, 9–10): “You have been converted from idolatry to God in order to serve the true and living God, and to await his Son, ( qu’il a ressuscité des morts, Jésus, ) 1 and who will save us from the ^ ^ to come, […]. ^^ anger This clause gives the eschatology a historical starting-point and makes it Christian 1
Jesus, whom He has revived from the dead.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Prose Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow London: 1852. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Hermann Lotze System der Philosophie: Metaphysik Drei Bücher der Ontologie, Kosmologie, Psychologie, Zweite Auflage Leipzig: 1884. Wells College Library. [See Paul Grimley Kuntz’s edition of Santayana’s Ph.D. dissertation, Lotze’s System of Philosophy (Bloomington, Indiana, and London: 1971). Appendix: “Santayana’s Reading of Lotze’s Logik and Metaphysik Revealed in Marginalia,” pp. 95–105.]
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Hermann Lotze
System der Philosophie: Erster Theil, Drei Bücher der Logik, Zweite Auflage Leipzig: 1887–88. Wells College Library. Marginalia, but uncounted and unavailable to this editor.
Robert Lowell
The Mills of the Kavanaughs New York: 1951. Waterloo. Eight marginalia.
1 p 5, underlined
Persephone—illusory, perhaps, Yet her renewal, no illusion, for this air Is orgied, […]. 2 p 12, underlined
She sees the flurries blind The barren Christmas greens, as winter dusks The double window, […]. Abuse of nouns as verbs. Lucian [Lucianus Samosatensis]
Lucian’s True History Translated by Francis Hickes London: 1902. Waterloo. No marginalia.
Lucretius [Titus Lucretius Carus]
T. Lucreti Cari De rerum natura libri sex
with notes and a translation by H. A. J. Munro London: [1886], reprinted 1900, notes, 1903. Georgetown. 323 marginalia. [Latin text, Volume I; Explanatory notes, Volume II; Translation, Volume III. Many pages of Santayana’s own translations, written between the lines of the Latin text of Books I–IV are not here considered as true marginalia, nor so tallied.] [Book III, cover:]
G. Santayana 3 Prescott Hall Cambridge. [Latin text, Book I. Santayana translated lines 1–49, ll. 61–101, ll. 249–64, ll. 717–23, ll. 728, ll. 731–33, ll. 921–50, ll. 1110–17. Book II: ll. 1–63, ll.
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1090–1121, ll. 1130–74. Book III: ll. 1–21. Book IV: ll. 1159–69. He also translated a large number of words or phrases throughout.] [From Volume I.] 1 Book I, ll. 803–29, marked
Try a version of this. Cf. my note to Munro’s translation. [See Munro’s translation at 6 p 19, Book I, ll. 779–822.] 2 Book II, ll. 415–17, marked
||Lucretius describes the atoms relating to the sense of smell.|| […] et cum scena croco Cilici perfusa recens est araque Panchaeos exhalat propter odores; […].1 [Santayana was moved by the passage describing the smells arising from the burning of “taetra cadavera,” foul cadavers.]
Heart-rending pungency of this image. Fancy the half-shaded theatre, the crowd, the sprinkled perfumes and the smoking altar. 1
As when the stage is sprinkled with Cilician saffron / And the altar nearby smells of Panchaean scent. 3 Book III, l. 22
||Describing snow:|| […] integit, et large diffuso lumine rident. inviolate, and bathed largely in floods of laughing light.1 1 An improvement on W. E. Leonard’s “ever, unclouded sky / O’er roofs, and laughs with far-diffused light.” (Everyman’s edition, 1921.)
4 Book IV, ll. 364–78, marked
||On how light or darkness affects the eyes.|| Example of the power to describe splendidly a common natural marvel. 5 Book IV, ll. 890–903
||Lucretius describes walking as taking place first in an image, or idol, in the mind before the body moves.|| This does not show why the resulting motion is like the idol that started it. Obviously the “idol” is the incipient motion itself. 6 Book IV, ll. 1159–69
[A part of Lucretius’s famous, or notorious, passage on women and on sexual love.]
nigra melichrus est inmunda et fetida acosmos, caesia Palladium, nervosa et lignea dorcas, parvula, pumilio, chariton mia tota merum sal, magna atque inmanis, cataplexis plenaque honoris.
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balba loqui non quit, traulizi, muta pudens est; at flagrans odiosa loquacula Lampadium fit. ischnon eromenion tum fit, cum vivere non quit, prae macie; rhadine verost iam mortua tussi. at tunida et mammosa, Ceres est ipsa ab Iaccho, simula Silena ac saturast, labeosa philema. [Santayana writes in between the lines:]
Is she swarthy, call her Olive—foul and fetid? negligée, cat-eyed? She’s a little Pallas.—dry & stringy, a Gazelle, willowy dumpy, dwarfed—one of the graces—que salero1— huge and monstrous—and fecund fate & Juno-like. tongue-tied & stammering—lisping—speechless—modest & reserved, the spit fire, odious gossip—is yet bright! maigre passionée2 when leanness wastes her. Frail, when consumptive and half-dead with cough. swollen and baggy—a luscious Rubens type. A monkey—mischief borne elf—thick-lipped, Baisée.3 1
How sexy. Slight of passion. 3 Obscene phrase; politely: replete with love-making. 2
7 Book IV ll. 1160–66, marked
Good: but oh, what Roman brutality! Cf. Plato’s more cultivated—if less quotable—list. 8 Book V, ll. 194–234, marked
Cf. with final causes elsewhere. 9 Book V, ll. 271–72
||Among Lucretius’s geological passages.|| […] convenit, inde super terras fluit agmine dulci qua via secta semel liquido pede detulit undas. [Santayana translates the motions of the waters in one word:]
Bubbling! [From Volume II.] 1 p 30, marked
[Note to Book I, ll. 41–43:]
||Lucretius was writing four years before his death; historical background.|| [Taken together, Santayana’s paraphrases, which follow, amount to a reading of Lucretius’s poem.]
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2 Book I, ll. 102–45, marked
Dangers of backsliding. 3 Book I, ll. 146–48, and ll. 159–214, marked
Ex nihilo nihil.1 1
Nothing from nothing.
4 Book I, ll. 215–64, marked
Matter indeterminable. 5 Book I, ll. 329–69, marked
The void needed. 6 Book I, ll. 483–502, marked
Atoms indestructible & solid. 7 Book I, ll. 551–76, marked
Ultimate constants are needful in any mechanism. 8 Book I, l. 599, marked
Atoms have parts that are only limits. 9 Book I, l. 635, marked
Fire not ultimate. 10 Book I, l. 645, marked
Substance must be permanent, as fire is not. 11 Book I, ll. 690–92, marked
The senses true but not final. No arbitrary choice of senses to be substance. 12 Book I, ll. 705–7, marked
Not four elements Empedocles 13 Book I, ll. 763 ff, marked
Atoms must be neutral. (To senses like ours). (To a sense that perceived them, the things we see would be only collections.) 14 Book I, l. 782, marked
Phenomenal substances results [sic]. 15 Book I, l. 803, marked
Things feed on things. 16 Book I, ll. 830–74, marked
Anaxagoras
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17 Book I, ll. 875–96, marked
Reputation of Anaxagoras. 18 Book I, ll. 897–920, marked
Sensation of new bodies is readjustment of old particles. 19 Book I, ll. 921–50, marked
Invocation Cf. 1–43. 20 Book I, ll. 958–87, marked
Infinity of nature. 21 Book I, l. 988, marked
Space infinite. 22 Book I, l. 1008, marked
Matter infinite in quantity. 23 Book I, ll. 1052–82, marked
No centre of gravity in the infinite. 24 Book I, l. 1083, marked
No natural layers of different substances. 25 Book I, ll. 1114–17, marked
Ex pelle Herculeam1 1
From the skin of Hercules. [Hercules wore a lion’s skin.]
26 Book II, ll. 62–79, marked
Flow of matter. 27 Book II, ll. 80–141, marked
Momentum and impact. The forces of nature. 28 Book II, ll. 142–64, marked
Atoms swifter than light (which is an impelled stream of them.[)] 29 Book II, ll. 184ff, marked
No natural places for things, but all find their station mechanically. 30 Book II, l. 216, marked
Declension of the atoms. 31 Book II, ll. 225ff, marked
All things equally rapid in the void.
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32 Book II, l. 251
Hence free will 33 Book II, l. 294, marked
No general condensation or dispersion of things. 34 Book II, ll. 308–32, marked
Illusion of stability. 35 Book II, ll. 333–80, marked
Things are different in reality. 36 Book II, ll. 381–97, marked
Difference in the texture of substances. 37 Book II, ll. 398–407, marked
Affinities of things to our organs due to their fine texture. 38 Book II, ll. 408–43, marked
The smooth is pleasant (unless not stimulating enough.) 39 Book II, ll. 444–77, marked
All differences are of texture. 40 Book II, ll. 478–521, marked
The kinds of atoms finite—for to increase their limiting points would increase their size in infinitum; and goods and evils might also be limitless, which really recur within certain bounds. 41 Book II, ll. 522–68, marked
Infinite number of atoms of each sort. 42 Book II, ll. 569–80, marked
Balance of life & death. (Pathos of naturalism) cf. 43 Book II, ll. 581–99, marked
Richness of the earth. 44 Book II, ll. 600–660, marked
Harmless, if comprehended, myths about the earth. 45 Book II, ll. 661–99, marked
interfusion & communication of substances. 46 Book II, ll. 700–729, marked
But each organism selects its proper food from all that is offered.
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47 Book II, ll. 730–56, marked
Colour a secondary quality. 48 Book II, ll. 757–87, marked
Colour produced by change of structure. 49 Book II, ll. 788–94, marked
The colourless can be the ground of colour as well as the differently coloured. 50 Book II, ll. 795–816, marked
Light a condition of colour 51 Book II, ll. 817–22
Colour, if it were primary, ought to be efficacious in producing the appearance of colours: but shape alone is efficacious; the supposed original colour is therefore irrelevant.—shreds are colourless: empirical proof. 52 Book II, ll. 842–64, marked
The colourless may subsist. Other secondary qualities. 53 Book II, ll. 865–85, marked
Sense a property of non-sensitive matter, in certain collocations. 54 Book II, ll. 886–930, marked
If only the sensitive could produce life, there must be life resident everywhere. 55 Book II, ll. 944–62, marked
Life which can be stopped by physical processes—as by blows—must reside in them [processes]. 56 Book II, ll. 963–72
Pleasure & pain express processes—they cannot belong to the elements of the process. 57 Book II, ll. 973–90
If elements must have sense, why not every form of thought & feeling? 58 Book II, ll. 991–1022
Heaven & earth the sources of life—but heaven & earth are material.
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59 Book II, ll. 1048–66
Plurality of worlds. 60 Book II. ll. 1067–76
Men & beasts like our [sic] in other worlds, because made of similar atoms. 61 Book II, ll. 1077–89
Everything is but one of its kind. 62 Book II, ll. 1090–1104
Infinity too much for any god to survey: or else he would desire to interfere in the parts. 63 Book II, ll. 1105–74
Worlds to feed on one another. 64 Book III, ll. 1–30
Praise of Epicurus. Cf. I, II 65 Book III, ll. 31–33
The soul and the fear of death, or rather of life after death. This the source of great evils. 66 Book III, ll. 94–135
The mind and the soul (vicious system) is a part of the body, and a comparatively independent part. (not a function or cause of all its life). 67 Book III, ll. 136–60
animus = soul: anima = animal spirits 68 Book III, ll. 161–76
Both bodily since affected by the motions of the body. 69 Book III, ll. 177–230
The soul (animus) a subtle fluid, like the flavour of wine. 70 Book III, ll. 231–57
The soul a compound of (1) aura or spiritus— (2) calor (3) aer (4) . 71 Book III, ll. 258–322
calor gives passion, spiritus nimbleness, aer placidity. 72 Book III, ll. 323–49
Life the interplay of soul & body.
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73 Book III, ll. 350–57
The body sensitive (reactive) as well as the soul. 74 Book III, ll. 359–69
Eyes not door, but seats of vision. 75 Book III, ll. 370–95
Soul not pervasive. 76 Book III, ll. 396–416
Animus the essential core of animal life, animal is diffused substance. [From Volume III.] [A prose translation. Santayana’s notes to the Latin text are mainly verbal, linguistic; but his comments on the translation tend to be editorial and critical.] 1 p 8, Book I, ll. 288–333, marked
Yet all things must consist of a bodily nature […]. Implied description of body: what can operate. 2 p 11, Book I, ll. 424–67, underlined
For whatever things are named, you will either find to be properties linked […]. conjuncta ius duobus rebus = results of combination inseparable 3 p 12, Book I, ll. 467–509, marked
[…] the hardness of gold is broken up and dissolved by heat […]. N.B. The atoms objects for understanding L. joins enthusiasm for intellect with enthusiasm for mechanical nature. 4 p 15, Book I, l. 601–4, underlined
[…] ||of the atom|| since it is in itself a part of that other; and so a first and single part and then other and other similar parts in succession fill up in close serried mass the nature of the first body; […]. The atom is a minimum of extension, its parts being only limits. Were there no minima there would be no real scale. 5 p 17, Book I, l. 695ff, marked
[…] chief of whom is Agrigentine Empedocles […] he hardly seems born of mortal stock […]. (Try a version of this)
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6 p 19, Book I, ll. 779–822
||A part of the discourse on the four elements.|| ‘But plain matter of fact clearly proves’ you say ‘that all things grow up into the air and are fed out of the earth; and unless the season at the propitious period send such abundant showers that the trees reel beneath the soaking storms of rain, and unless the sun on its part foster them and supply heat, corn trees and living things could not grow’. [ Splendid vision of the process of life, the interchange of substance, the feeding of thing on thing, the mortality of particulars, the immortality of life.] 1 1 Compare Santayana’s brief comment to this passage on the Latin text: “Things feed on things.”
7 p 20, Book I, ll. 822ff
Let us now examine the homoeomeria of Anaxagoras […]. Anaxagoras wedded the homely Maria, etc. 8 p 28, Book II, ll. 1–20
Eulogy on peace of mind. The world cannot give it, save to those who despise the world. [ Note the post-political, almost post-rational, character of this philosophy.] 9 p 33, Book II, ll. 198–237
Fire gravitates like all substance. The declension (this comes of supposing an absolute down & an original equal diffusion of atoms.) 10 p 33, Book II, ll. 238–41
No retardation in the void. Happy guess! 11 p 35, Book II, ll. 283–326, underlined
[…] power of free action has been begotten in us, since we see that nothing can come from nothing. Strange contradiction! Nothing can arise but nothing may. 12 p 43, Book II, ll. 620–64
Paganism allegory and science each in its place. 13 p 51, Book II, 1. 951
Mind is a function of body. The elements of minds, if mental, must be rational: else why not make mind as you make reason, by rearrangement of elements?
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14 p 57, Book III, ll. 1–20
Peace on earth, gods in heaven, no fabled hell. 15 p 64, Book III, ll. 284–325
Some minds hot, others cold, others calm & temperate. 16 p 66, Book III, ll. 366–70, marked
Again if our eyes are in the place of doors, in that case when the eyes are removed the mind ought it would seem to have more power of seeing things, after doors, jambs and all, have been taken out of the way. Good joke. And what some now think! 17 pp 67–77, Book III, ll. 402–866
||Concerning the soul.|| [p 67] 1. The rarest substances are the most easily dissipated. When loosed from the body, the soul is dissolved altogether. 2. It grows with the body. 3. It shares the troubles of the body even to unconsciousness. What ever suffers can die. 4. Wine affects it.
[p 68]
[p 69] 5.
Fits overcome it. 6. Greater dangers await the soul gone out of the body than assail it within. 7. It is restored with the body; an immortal thing could not be patched. What changes will some day die. 8. It retreats piece-meal; without vivifying the part it retreats to. 9. Being an organic part of the body, the soul rots if separated. 10. It has no function if disembodied.
[p 70]
11. If it continued to live, it would make the air an animate body. 12. Fainting is almost death. 13. The whole body is dissolved if the soul is withdrawn, which must have fled from the various parts. [p 71]
14. It is felt to die by inches 15. It is bred in particular organs. 16. The soul, to feel, needs the senses, and these their organs. 17. It is divisible as the body is, (being diffused in it). Its parts can live, at least for a moment. [p 72]
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18. We do not remember pre-existence; but a break in memory makes a new soul. 19. If infused at birth, it would not be sympathetic with the body.
[p 73]
20. If infused, it is transformed and digested by the body. 21. If at death, a part of the soul is left, it is divisible; if not, whence the worms? 22. If souls make bodies, why do they do any thing so foolish? [p 74]
23. And how [ having no instruments ] do they make bodies? 24. If alien it would not unite with the body when made. 25. If souls were independent, any soul might inhabit any body. 26. What is changed, can die. [ To be the sport of circumstances is as bad as to be their creature: they might change you altogether. ] 27. What grows together, is born together. [p 75]
[p 76] 28.
Souls would have to fight and race for bodies. 29. Nothing can exist without its proper habitat; so the soul not without the body, and a particular part of the body. 30. A mortal and an immortal thing cannot be yoked together. 31. The soul is full of fear for itself, and with good cause. 32. If the soul survived, it would not be our soul. Ideality is for consciousness. [p 77]
33. A body reformed would not have the same mind. 18 p 78, Book III, 11. 867–903
Illusion of experiencing death. 19 p 78, Book III, 11. 867–903
For when any one in life suggests to himself that birds and beasts will rend his body after death, he makes moan for himself: he does not separate himself from that self, nor withdraw himself fully from the body so thrown out, and fancies himself that other self and stands by and impregnates it with his own sense.
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[ This is not correct. We do not bemoan our future feeling, but the future fact in its ideality distresses us now. ] 20 p 78, Book III, 11. 867–903
With life goes the love of life. 21 p 79, Book III, 11. 930–42
If life was good be thankful: if it was precious, be glad. 22 p 81, Book III, 11. 980–1023
Hell is the soul on fire. 23 p 82, Book III, ll. 1024–1063
The greatest must die. 24 p 83, Book III, 11. 1063–end
Foolish restlessness of the ignorant. 25 p 90, Book IV, 11. 242–84
Grotesque theory of perceiving distance. 26 p 95, Book IV, 11. 454–74
No sceptic need be heard. 27 p 101, Book IV, 11. 734–38
Mental images old or spontaneous idols floating about. 28 p 102, Book IV, 11. 738–78
Since sensations are idols, ideas must be. [ Good argument. Cf. the idealistic reversal of it: since ideas are only mental, sensations are so too. ] [ In truth only the act of them is mental, the matter is material in both cases.] 29 p 103, Book IV, 11. 785–91
What again are we to say, when we see in sleep idols advance in measured tread and move their pliant limbs, when in nimble wise they put out each pliant arm in turn and represent to the eyes over and over again an action with foot that moves in time? Psychology of dreams. 30 p 107, Book IV, 11. 949–89
Dreams. This passage is disappointing in the text. 31 p 108, Book IV, 11. 990–1040.
||Dreams of urination cause the sleeper to urinate in the bed.|| De rebus veneris usque ad finem libri.1 1
Concerning matters of love, and so to the end of the book.
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32 p 116, Book V, 11. 1–29
Incomparable value of an enlightened mind. 33 p 119, Book V, 11. 113–57
[ Consider the pathetic intensity of our concern about breath and life, in contrast to “consciousness”. It is not wholly inappropriate to give the name of soul to the basis of consciousness.] 34 p 119, Book V, 11. 113–57
This too you may not possibly believe, that the holy seats of the gods exist in any parts of the world: the fine nature of the gods far withdrawn from our senses is hardly seen by the thought of the mind; and since it has ever eluded the touch and stroke of the hands, it must touch nothing which is tangible for us; for that cannot touch which does not admit of being touched in turn. [The gods of Democritus (like those of James) are fine material influences. ] 35 p 120, Book V, 11. 157–97
The gods too good and happy to be creators. 36 p 121, Book V, 11. 198–240
The world not made for man. 37 p 126, Book V, 11. 404–47
Natural origin of nature. 38 p 129, Book V, 11. 533–71
Earth the natural nucleus of the cosmos. 39 p 133, Book V, 11. 694–735
The moon may reflect the sun; or revolve, one half being ignited; or be made up every night afresh in a regular series of forms. Why decide? [No marginalia in Book VI.]