Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/277

 George Santayana 259 That which distinguishes Santayana from all other modern philosophers is the way he combines thoroughgoing naturalism with profound appreciation of the wisdom commonly called idealism or other- worldliness. Completely free from all trace) of supernaturalism in metaphysics, he is thoroughly Greek or humanistic in his valuation of those reasonable restraints which • give order, dignity, and beauty to human life. Like Dewey, I perhaps more than Dewey, Santa5jana is a thoroughgoing! naturalist, beUeving that mind is the natural effect of bodily ' growth and organization. But unlike any other philosopher! since Aristotle, Santayana holds fast to a sharp and clear dis- I tinction between the origin and the validity of our ideals. * Though our ideals are of bodily origin they need not serve bodily needs, and above all they need no actual or sensible embodiment to justify their claims. There is no necessity for ? accepting the modern evolutionist's identification of the best : with the latest. "Modern Greece is not exactly the crown of j ancient Hellas." Other confusions between morality and physics, such as the Hegelian identification of the ideal and the real, of the desirable and the existent, are vehemently rejected as servile worship of brute power and treacherous to our ideal aspirations. Thus while naturalism is the only intelligible philosophy, the attempt of naturalists to look for all motives and sanctions in the material world always generates a pro- found melancholy from which manldnd instinctively shrinks. The sensuous optimism called Greek or the industrial optimism called American are but "thin disguises for despair," against wJiich the mind will always rebel and revert, in some form or other, to a cultus of the unseen. The explanation of this para- doxical fact Santayana finds in a Greek distinction between the form and the brute existence of things. The form and qualities of things are congenial to the mind's free activity, but "when an empirical philosophy calls us back from the irresponsible flights of the imagination to the shock of sense and tries to remind us that in this alone we touch existence, — we feel dispossessed of our nature and cramped in our life. " ' The true life of reason, j however, is not to be found in wilful idealistic dreams, but in the logical activity "which is docile to fact and illumines the actual world in which our bodies move. ' Reason in Common Sense, p. 191.