The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings

Dogma and Doubt (1923)

Dogma and Doubt Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1923, 6–10. Volume thirteen of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. In this selection, Chapter II of Scepticism and Animal Faith, Santayana observed that dogma is automatic and variable, and this guarantees that conflicts run deeply through the mass of our opinions. When shocks of experience make these conflicts actual, doubt arises, skepticism grows, and criticism becomes possible. In suspecting some error about facts, skepticism presupposes facts. When facts are presupposed and the possibility of error recognized, one may become aware of the “tendencies to feign”—the dogmas and deceptions—operating in oneself. These dogmas are necessary and compulsory, but necessity of belief is not justification of belief. In response to this situation Santayana proposed to strain “his dogmas through the utmost rigours of scepticism” ( ES, 60). Even though it may not achieve truth, this extreme skepticism is at least not dishonorable. One may not eliminate these dogmas, but one can refuse to be taken in by their claims to be true. Custom does not breed understanding, but takes its place, teaching people to make their way contentedly through the world without knowing what the world is, nor what they think of it, nor what they are. When their attention is attracted to some remarkable thing, say to the rainbow, this thing is not analysed nor examined from various points of view, but all the casual resources of the fancy are called forth in conceiving it, and this total reaction of the mind precipitates a dogma; the rainbow is taken for an omen of fair weather, or for a trace left in the sky by the passage of some beautiful and elusive goddess. Such a dogma, far from being an interpenetration or identification of thought with the truth of the object, is a fresh and additional object in itself. The original passive perception remains unchanged; the thing remains unfathomed; and as its diffuse influence has by chance bred one dogma to-day, it may breed a different dogma to-morrow. We have therefore, as we progress in our acquaintance with the world, an always greater confusion. Besides the original fantastic inadequacy of our perceptions, we have now rival clarifications of them, and a new uncertainty as to whether these dogmas are relevant to the original object, or are themselves really clear, or if so, which of them is true. A prosperous dogmatism is indeed not impossible. We may have such determinate minds that the suggestions of experience always issue there in the same dogmas ; and these orthodox dogmas, perpetually revived by the stimulus of things, may become our dominant or even our sole apprehension of them. We shall really have moved to another level of mental discourse; we shall be living on ideas. In the gardens of Seville I once heard, coming through the tangle of palms and orange trees, the treble voice of a pupil in the theological seminary, crying to his playmate: “You booby! of course angels have a more perfect nature than 59 Dogma and Doubt men.” With his black and red cassock that child had put on dialectic; he was playing the game of dogma and dreaming in words, and was insensible to the scent of violets that filled the air. How long would that last? Hardly, I suspect, until the next spring; and the troubled awakening which puberty would presently bring to that little dogmatist, sooner or later overtakes all elder dogmatists in the press of the world. The more perfect the dogmatism, the more insecure. A great high topsail that can never be reefed nor furled is the first carried away by the gale. To me the opinions of mankind, taken without any contrary prejudice (since I have no rival opinions to propose) but simply contrasted with the course of nature, seem surprising fictions; and the marvel is how they can be maintained. What strange religions, what ferocious moralities, what slavish fashions, what sham interests! I can explain it all only by saying to myself that intelligence is naturally forthright; it forges ahead; it piles fiction on fiction; and the fact that the dogmatic structure, for the time being, stands and grows, passes for a proof of its rightness. Right indeed it is in one sense, as vegetation is right; it is vital; it has plasticity and warmth, and a certain indirect correspondence with its soil...