Epilogue on My Host the World

by GEORGE SANTAYANA

1

PERSON’S and places people the world; they individuate its parts; and I have devoted my leisure hours to recording some of them that remain alive in my memory. Mine are insignificant recollections: for even when the themes happen to have some importance as persons and places in the great world, it is not at all in that capacity that I prize and describe them. I keep only some old miniature or some little perspective that caught my eye in passing, when the persons perhaps were young and the places empty and not dressed up to receive visitors, as are museums, libraries, ballrooms, and dinner tables. Those were free glimpses of the world that I could love and could carry away. They were my consolations.

Yet the very contrast between these glimpses, all picturesque and aerial, and the vast obscure inexorable world from which they came Forced me gradually to form some notion of that material world also. We were a blue-sea family: our world was thill of colonial officials and great merchants, from the beginning I learned to think of the earth as a globe with its surface chiefly salt water, a barren treacherous and intractable waste for mankind, yet tempting and beautiful and swarming with primitive animals not possible to tame or humanize but sometimes good to eat. In fine, I opened my eyes on the world with the conviction that it was inhuman; not meant for man, but habitable by him, and possible to exploit, with prudence, in innumerable ways — a conviction that everything ever since has confirmed.

One peculiarity was common to all possible satisfactions: they brought something perfect, consummate, final. The sea, after no mailer what storms, returned to its equilibrium and placidity; its gamut was definite. Voyages all led to some port. The vastness and violence of nature, in challenging and often decimating mankind, by no means tend to dehumanize it. The quality of attainable good may change, and also the conditions for attaining it; but the way is always open, at the right time, for the right sort of animal and for the right sort of mind. Arts have their dates; and the great question is not what age you live in or what art you pursue, but what perfection you can achieve in that art under those circumstances.

The great master of sympathy with nature, in my education, was Lucretius. Romantic poets and philosophers, when they talk of nature, mean only landscape or other impressions due to aerial perspectives, sensuous harmonies of color or form, or vital intoxications, such as those of riding, seafaring, or mountain-climbing. Nature is loved for heightening self-consciousness and prized for ministering to human comfort and luxury, but is otherwise ignored as contemptible, dead, or nonexistent. Or when their temper is hardy and pugnacious, people may require nature as a buffer on which to rain their mighty blows and carve their important initials. Where human strength comes from or what ends human existence might serve, they neither know nor care.

The spirit in me felt itself cast upon this social and political world somewhat like Robinson Crusoe upon his island. We were both creatures of the same Great Nature; and my world, in its geography and astronomy, like Robinson Crusoe’s island, had much more massive and ancient foundations than the small utterly insecure waif that had been wrecked upon it. In its social and political structure, however, my world was more like Crusoe’s energetic person; for my island was densely inhabited; an ugly town, a stinted family, a common school; and the most troublesome and inescapable of its denizens was the particular body in which my spirit found itself rooted; so rooted that it became doubltul whether that body with its feelings and actions was not my true self, rather than this invisible spirit which they oppressed. I seemed to be both; and yet this compulsive and self-tormenting creature called “Me” was more odious and cruel to the “I” within than were the sea and sky, the woods and mountains, or the very cities and crowds of people that this animal Me moved among: for the spirit in me was happy and free ranging through that world, but troubled and captive in its close biological integument.

This is the double conflict, the social opposition and the moral agony, that spirit suffers by being incarnate; and yet if it were not incarnate it could not be individual, with a station in space and time, a language and special perspectives over nature and history. Indeed, if not incarnate, spirit could not exist at all or be the inner light and perpetual witness of life in its dramatic vicissitudes.

If it be the fate of all spirit to live in a special body and a special age, and yet, for its vocation and proper life, to be addressed from that center to all life and to all being, I can understand why I have been more sensible to this plight and to this mission than were most of my contemporaries. For by chance I was a foreigner where I was educated; and although the new language and customs interested me and gave me no serious trouble, yet speculatively and emotionally, especially in regard to religion, the world around me was utterly undigestible.

The times also were moving rapidly and exultingly, towards what for me was chaos and universal triviality. At first these discords sounded like distant thunder. Externally they were not yet violent; the world smiled in my eyes as I came to manhood, and the beauties and dignity of the past made the present unimportant. And as the feeling of being a stranger and an exile by nature as well as by accident grew upon me in time, it came to be almost a point of pride; some people may have thought it an affectation. It was not that; I have always admired the normal child of his age and country. My case was humanly unfortunate and involved many defects; yet it opened to me another vocation, not better (I admit no absolute standards) but more speculative, freer, juster, and for me happier.

2

I HAD always dreamt of travel, and it was oftenest in the voluntary, interested, appreciative role of the traveler that I felt myself most honest in my dealings with my environment. The world was My Host; I was a temporary guest in his busy and animated establishment. We met as strangers; yet each had generic and well-grounded ideas of what could be expected of the other. First impressions made these expectations more precise; the inn was habitable; the guest was presumably solvent. We might prove mutually useful. My Host and I could become friends, diplomatically; but we were not akin in either our interests or our powers.

The normal economy of an innkeeper, though incidentally and in a measure it supplies the wants of his guests, knows nothing of their private moral economy. Their tastes in wines, in service, or in music may entirely outrun or contradict his longestablished practice, which he will impose on his guests with all the authority of a landlord; and there may not be another inn in the place, or only worse ones. The guest has no right to demand what is not provided. He must be thankful for any little concessions that may be made to his personal tastes, if he is tactful and moderate in his requirements, pays his bills promptly, and gives decent tips.

Such at least was the case in the nineteenth century when the world made itself pleasant to the traveler; and not to rich travelers only but to the most modest, and even to the very poor in their little purchases and popular feasts. Personal freedom produced a certain dignity and good humor even in bargaining; lor to buy and sell, to patronize a shop or a boardinghouse, was an act of kindness; and bills, at least in civilly commercial England, were always receipted “with thanks. Having lived a peaceful independent life, free from hardship or misfortune, I have found it easy to conform externally with the mechanism of society. Matter has been kind to me, and I am a lover of matter. Not only esthetically but dynamically, as felt by Lucretius, nature to me is a welcome presence; and modern progress in mechanical invention and industrial luxury has excited joyously my materialistic imagination, as it did prophetically that of Bacon.

Moreover, I inherited from my father a bond with matter which Bacon and Lucretius probably did not feel: the love of employing leisure in small mechanical occupations. I should never have read and written so much if the physical side of these employments had not been congenial to me and rich in a quiet happiness. Any common surroundings and any commonplace people pleased me well enough; it was only when sugary rapture was demanded about them or by them, as happened almost everywhere in my youth, that my stomach rose in radical protest. Then I discovered how much the human world of my time had become the enemy of spirit and therefore of its own light and peace.

How had this happened? Not at all as lovers of antiquity or of the Middle Ages seem to think, because of mechanical inventions or natural sciences or loss of Christian faith. These transformations might all have occurred in the normal growth of society. Variety in cultures is not due to aberrations any more than is the variety of animal species. But there may be aberration in any species or any culture when it becomes virions; that is, when it forms habits destructive of its health and of its ability to prosper in its environment.

Now modern sciences and inventions are not vicious in this sense; on the contrary, they bring notable additions to human virtù. And I think that the Renaissance, with the historical learning and humanism which it fostered, was also a groat gain for human happiness and self-knowledge. Of this the surface of the modern world during my youth gave continual evidence, in spite of an undercurrent of unrest and disaffection sometimes heard rumbling below. My Host’s establishment made a brave appearance; and I was particularly conscious of many new facilities of travel, breadth of information, and cosmopolitan convenience and luxury. Though there was no longer any dignity in manners, or much distinction in costume, fashion had not lost all its charm. In literature and the fine arts lalent could give pleasure by its expertness, if not by its taste or savor. I have described how in Boston and in England I sometimes sipped the rim of the plutocratic cup; and this was a real pleasure, because beneath the delicacy of the material feast there was a lot of shrewd experience in that society, and of placid kindness.

There was also another cosmopolitan circle, less select and less worldly, but no less entertaining and no less subject to fashion and to ironical gossip, the intellectuals, into whose company I was sometimes drawn. I was officially one of them, yet they felt in their bones that I might be secretly a traitor,

“Ah, yes,” cried a distinguished Jesuit recently when I was casually mentioned, “he is the poetical atheist.” And an Italian professor, also a Catholic but tinged with German idealism, remarked of me: “The trouble with him is that he has never succeeded in outgrowing materialism.” Finally a faithful die-hard of British psychologism, asked why I was overlooked among contemporary philosophers, replied: “Because he has no originality. Everything in him is drawn from Plato and Leibniz.”

This critical band is democratic in that it recognizes no official authority and lets fluid public opinion carry the day; yet it is, on principle, in each man, private and independent in judgment. Few, however, have much lime to read originals or to study facts. Leaders and busy bodies must obey their momentum. A personal react ion on what other people say is socially sufficient; it will do for the press; and it will corroborate the critic’s opinion in his own eyes.

I cannot overcome a settled distrust of merely intellectual accomplishment, militant in the void.

I prefer common virtues and current beliefs, even if intellectually prejudiced and simple, when the great generative order of nature has bred them, and lent them its weight and honesty. For I do not rebel in the least at political and moral mutations when this same generative order brings them about spontaneously; for it is then on the side of change that clear intelligence discerns the lesser danger and the wider interests. I should have loved the Gracchi; but not the belated Cato or the belated Brutus. All four were martyrs; but the first two spoke for the poor, for the suffering half of the people, oppressed by a shortsighted power that neglected its responsibilities; while the last two were conceited ideologues, jealous of their traditional rights, and utterly blind to destiny.

It I were not too old and could venture to write in French, I should compose a short history of Les Faux Fast de la Philosophic; by which title I should not refer to innocent errors, with which all human speculation must be infected, nor to the symbolic or mythological form of the wisest wisdom, hut only to militant heresies and self-contradictions due to willful conceit, individual or tribal, verbal or moral — and there is little in European philosophy that is not infected with these unnecessary errors. Let the reader compose his own catalogue of these blind alleys explored by the ancients and by the moderns; I will limit myself to the first and principal faux pas that the world has seemed to me to have taken in my time.

3

THE contemporary world has turned its hack on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably. The two great wars of the twentieth century were adveni tires in enthusiastic unreason. They were inspired by unnecessary and impracticable ambitions; and the “League" and the “United Nations feebly set up by the victors were so irrationally conceived that they at once reduced their victory to a stalemate. What is required for living rationally? I think the conditions may be reduced to two: first, self-knowedge, the Socratic key to wisdom; and second, sufficient knowledge of the world to perceive what alternatives are open to you and which of them are favorable to your true interests.

Now the contemporary world has plenty of knowledge of nature for its purposes, but its purposes show a positively insane abandonment of its true interests. You may say that the proletariat knows its interests perfectly; they are to work less and to earn more. Those are indeed its interests so long as it remains a proletariat; but to be a proletariat is an inhuman condition. Proletarians are human beings, and their lirst interest is to have a home, a family, a chosen trade and freedom in practicing it. And more particularly a man’s true interest may exceptionally he not to have those things, but to wander alone like the rhinoceros; or perhaps to have a very special kind of home, family, and occupation. There must be freedom of movement and vocation. There must be Lebensraum for the spirit.

There have always been beggars and paupers in the world, because there is bound to be a margin of the unfit — too bad or too good — to keep in step with any well-organized society: but that the great body of mankind should sink into a proletariat has been an unhappy effect of the monstrous growth of cities, made possible by the concentration of trade and the multiplication of industries, mechanized and swelling into monopolies.

The natural state of mankind, before foreign conquerors dominate it or native ideologues reform it, is full of incidental evils; prophets have ample cause for special denunciations and warnings; yet there is, as in all animal economy, a certain nucleus of self-preserving instincts and habits, a normal constitution of society. Nature with its gods is their landlord of whose fields and woods they are local and temporary tenants; and with this invincible power they make prudent and farseeing covenants. They know what is for their good and by what arts it might be secured. They live by agriculture, the hunting and breeding of animals, and swell domestic arts as their climate and taste lead them to cultivate; and when a quarrel arises among them, or with strangers, they battle to preserve or to restore their free life, without more ambitious intentions. They are materially and morally rooted in the earth, bred in one land and one city. They are civilized. Wandering nations, with nothing of their own and working havoc wherever they go, are barbarions. Such “Barbarians” were the proletariat of antiquity. When they occupied some civilized region without exterminating the natives, and established in the old strongholds a permanent foreign domination, they became halfcivilized themselves, without shedding altogether the predatory and adventurous practices of their ancestors. This is the compound origin and nature of modern Western governments.

Varied, picturesque, and romantic mixtures of civilization beneath and barbarism above have filled the history of Christendom, and produced beautiful transient arts, in which there were too little wisdom and too much fancy and fashion: think of Gothic architecture, or of manners, dress, poetry, and philosophy from the Middle Ages to our day. Civilization had become more enterprising, plastic, and irresponsible, while barbarism seemed to retreat into sports, and into legal extravagances in thought and action. Intellectual chaos and political folly could thus come to coexist strangely with an irresistible dominance of mechanical industry. The science that served this industrial progress by no means brought moral enlightenment. It merely enlarged acquaintance with phenomena and enabled clever inventors to construct all sorts of useful or superfluous machines. At first perhaps it was expected that science would make all mankind both rich and free from material cares (two contradictory hopes) and would at the same time enlighten them at last about the nature of things, including their own nature, so that adequate practical wisdom would be secured together with fabulous material wellbeing.

This is the dream of the moderns, on which I found My Host boastfully running his establishment. He expected his guests also to act accordingly and to befuddle and jollify one another, so that all should convince themselves that they were perfectly happy and should advertise their Host’s business wherever they went. Such forced enterprise, forced confidence, and forced satisfaction would never have sprung from domestic arts or common knowledge spontaneously extended. It was all artificial and strained, marking the inhuman domination of some militant class or sect. This society lacked altogether that essential trait of rational living; to have a clear, sanctioned, ultimate aim. The cry was for vacant freedom and indeterminate progress: Vorwärts! Aranti! Onward! Full speed ahead! without asking whether directly before you was not a bottomless pit.

This has been the peculiar malady of my own times. I saw the outbreak of it in my boyhood, and I have lived to see what seem clear symptoms of its end. The great merchants of my parents’ youth had known nothing of it on their blue-sea voyages round Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope. Their good hope had been to amass a great fortune in fifteen or twenty years, and return home to bring up a blooming family in splendor and peace. They foresaw an orderly diffused wellbeing spreading out from them over all mankind. The fountains of happiness were ready to flow in every heart and mind if only people were suffered to have their own way materially and socially. That the masses would crowd out, exclude, indoctrinate, enslave, and destroy one anot her could not cross their genial and innocent minds, as they skimmed those immense oceans in their tight, strictly disciplined, white-sailed little craft.

Alas! The healthy growth of science and commerce had been crossed, long before the rise of the great merchants, by an insidious moral and political revolution. From the earliest times there have been militant spirits not content with inevitable changes and with occasional wars between neighboring states, not usually wars of conquest or eternal hatred, but collisions in readjusting the political equilibrium between nations when their actual relations were no longer the same. Indeed, the tragic causes of conflict and ruin in civilizations are fundamentally internal to each society. A whole city or state may sometimes be destroyed, like Carthage: but history, then, comes to an end for that particular society, and the others continue their course as if their vanished rival had never existed. This course may he cut short, however, by internal disruption and suicidal revolutions.

Every generation is born as ignorant and willful as the first man; and when tradition has lost its obvious fitness or numinous authority, eager minds will revert without knowing it to every false hope and blind alley that tempted their predecessors long since buried under layer upon layer of ruins. And these eager minds may easily become leaders; for society is never perfect; grievances and misfortunes perpetually breed rebellion in the oppressed heart; and the eloquent imagination of youth and of. indignation will find the right words to blow the discontent, always smoldering, into sudden flame. Often things as they are become intolerable; there must be insurrection at any cost, as when the established order is not only casually oppressive but ideally perverse and due to some previous epidemic of militant madness become constitutional. Against that domination, established in willful indiflerence to the true good of man and to his possibilities, any political nostrum, proposed with the same rashness, will be accepted with the same faith. Thus the blind in extirpating the mad may plant a new madness.

4

THAT this is the present state of the world everyone can see by looking about him or reading the newspapers; but I think that the elements in this crisis have been working in the body politic for ages; ever since the Reformation, not to say since the age of the Greek Sophists and of Socrates. For the virulent cause of this long fever is subjectivism, egotism, conceit of mind. Not that culture of the conscience and even the logical refinements of dialectic are anything but good for the mind itself and for moral self-knowledge, which is one of the two conditions that I have assigned to political sanity; but the same logical arts are fatal if they are used to construct, by way of a moral fable, an anthropomorphic picture of the universe given out. for scientific truth and imposed on mankind by propaganda, by threats, and by persecution. And this militant method of reforming mankind by misrepresenting their capacities and their place in the universe is no merely ancient or medieval delusion. It is the official and intolerant method of our most zealous contemporary prophets and reformers. Barbarism has adopted the weapons of flattery and prophecy. Merciless irrational ambition has borrowed the language of brotherly love.

The very fact, however, that these evils have deep roots and have long existed without destroying Western civilization, and even have stimulated its contrary virtues and confused arts — this very fact seems to me to counsel calmness in contemplating the future. Those who look for a panacea will not find it. Those who advise resignation to a life of industrial slavery (because spiritual virtues may be cultivated by a slave, like Epictetus, more easily perhaps than by rich men) are surrendering the political future to an artificial militant. regime that cannot last unaltered for a decade anywhere, and could hardly last a day if by military force it were ever made universal. The fanaticism of all parties must be allowed to burn down to ashes, like a fire out of control, if it survives, it will be only because it will have humanized ilself, reduced its dogmas to harmless metaphors, and sunk down a taproot, to feed it, into the dark damp depths of mother earth. The economy of nature includes all particular movements, combines and transforms them all, but never diverts its wider processes, to render them obedient to the prescriptions of human rhetoric. Things have their day, and their beauties in that day. It would be preposterous to expect any one civilization to last forever.

Had it happened in my time (as by chance it did happen) that my landlord should give me nolice that he was about to pull down his roof over my head, I might have been a little troubled for a moment; but presently I should have begun to look for other lodgings not without a certain curious pleasure, and probably should have found some (as I did, and better ones) in which to end my days. So, I am confident, wall the traveling Spirit, do— this ever renewed witness, victim, and judge of existence, divine yet born of woman. Obediently it will learn other affections in other places, unite other friends, and divide other peoples; and the failure of overexact hopes and overweening ambitions will not prevent spirit from continually turning the passing virtues and sorrows of nature into glimpses of eternal truth.