George Santayana

“ It is not a question of correctness in opinion or conduct, since for the idealist there can be no external standard of truth, existence, or excellence on which such correctness could depend. Ideas are so much real experience and have no further subject-matter. Thought is simply more or less rich, elaborate, or vehement, like a musical composition, and more or less consistent with itself. It is all a question of depth and fulness of experience, obtained by hacking one’s way through this visionary and bewitched existence, the secret purpose of which is to serve the self in its development. ”

“ It was quite candid in men like Spinoza and Emerson, whose attachment to positive religion had insensibly given way to a half-mystical, half-intellectual satisfaction with the natural world, as their eloquent imagination conceived it. But whether candid or disingenuous, this habit has the advantage of oiling the wheels of progress with a sacred unction. In facilitating change it blurs the consciousness of change, and leads people to associate with their new opinions sentiments which are logically incompatible with them. ”

“ If it should seem that God came nearest to us, and dwelt within us, in the form of vital energy, if freedom should turn out really to mean personality, if immortality, in the end, should prove identical with the endlessness of human progress, and if these new thoughts should satisfy and encourage us as the evanescent ideas of God, freedom, and immortality satisfied and encouraged our fathers, why should we not use these consecrated names for our new conceptions, and thus indicate the continuity of religion amid the flux of science? ”

“ It is of the essence of Protestantism and of German philosophy that religion should gradually drop its supernatural personages and comforting private hopes and be absorbed in the duty of living manfully and conscientiously the conventional life of this world. Not the whole life of the world, however, since gay religions and many other gay things are excluded, or admitted only as childish toys. Positive religion, in fact, disappears, as well as the frivolous sort of worldliness, and there remains only a consecrated worldliness that is deliberate and imposed as a duty. ”

“ Faith for the Germans must be a primitive and groundless assurance, not knowledge credibly transmitted by others whose experience may have been greater than our own. Even philosophy is not conceived as a reasonable adjustment to what may have been discovered to be the constitution of the world ”

“ Protestantism was not a reformation by accident, because it happened to find the church corrupt; it is a reformation essentially, in that every individual must reinterpret the Bible and the practices of the church in his own spirit. If he accepted them without renewing them in the light of his personal religious experience, he would never have what Protestantism thinks living religion. German philosophy has inherited this characteristic; it is not a cumulative science that can be transmitted ready made. ”

“ In no other country has so large, so industrious, and (amid its rude polemics) so cooperative a set of professors devoted itself to all sorts of learning. But as the original motive was to save one’s soul, an apologetic and scholastic manner has often survived: the issue is prejudged and egotism has appeared even in science. For favourable as Protestantism is to investigation and learning, it is almost incompatible with clearness of thought and fundamental freedom of attitude. ”

“ Of course, it is usual, as a concession to the weaker brethren, to assume that experience, in the end, will seem to satisfy these demands, and that we shall win our bets and our wars; but the point of principle, borrowed by German philosophy from Protestantism, is that the authority of faith is intrinsic and absolute, while any external corroboration of it is problematical and not essential to the Tightness of the assumptions that faith makes. ”

“ And they actually remain primitive in spirit, spontaneous and tentative, even in the midst of the most cumbrous erudition, as a composition of Dürer’s, where flesh, fish, and fowl crowd every corner, still remains primitive, puzzled, and oppressed. Such a naive but overloaded mind is lost in admiration of its own depth and richness ”

“ The distinction between Mary and Martha is not a German distinction: in Germany the rapt idealist is busy about many things, so that his action is apt to be heady and his contemplation perturbed. Only the principle is expected to be spiritual, the illustrations must all be material and mundane. ”

“ It will never reduce all things, including the mind, to loose and intractable appearances, as might a free idealism. It will employ its scepticism to turn all things into ideas, in order to chain them the more tightly to the moral interests of the thinker. ”

“ It is essentially a reform, a revision of traditional knowledge, which each neophyte must make for himself, under pain of rendering only lip-service to transcendental truth, and remaining at heart unregenerate. ”

“ Each new idealist in each of his books, often in every lecture and every chapter, must run back to refute again the same homely opponents—materialism, naturalism, dualism, or whatever he may call them. ”

“ From the same tenet of Fichte and Hegel we may also learn that in the plan of the world, as this revealed philosophy conceives it, the principal figures are not individuals, like the Creator, the Redeemer, and one’s own soul, but nations and institutions. ”

“ It may reduce nature and God to figments of the mind; but throughout its criticism of all matters of fact it will remain deeply persuaded that the questioning and striving spirit within is indefeasible and divine. ”

“ Hence a piece of Biblical or Homeric criticism, a history of Rome or of Germany often becomes a little system of egotistical philosophy, posited and defended with all the parental zeal and all the increasing conviction with which a prophet defends his supernatural inspirations. ”

“ The other—the lessons of experience—they have rejected. To which element the name of religion should still be given, if it is given to either, is a matter of indifference. The important thing is that, call it religion or irreligion, we should know what we are clinging to. ”

“ His chief business is to be converted; he must refute for himself the natural views with which he and all other men have begun life. And still these views—like the temptations of Satan—inevitably form themselves afresh in each generation, and even in the philosopher, between one spell of introspective thought and another, so that he always has to recapitulate his saving arguments from the beginning. ”

“ These moral interests, human and pathetic as they may seem to the outsider, it will exalt immeasurably, pronouncing them to be groundless and immutable; and it will never tolerate the suspicion that all things might not minister to them. ”

“ It could never have been formed by free observation of life and nature, like the philosophy of Greece or of the Renaissance. It is Protestant theology rationalised. The element of religious faith, in the Protestant sense of the word faith, is essential to it. ”