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Comparison with Other Criticisms of Knowledge Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1923, 289–309. Volume thirteen of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. This selection, Chapter XXVII of Scepticism and Animal Faith, shows how Santayana employed the history of philosophy both as an object of critique and a background to clarify his own ideas. For example, he contrasts his own skeptical project with the halting skepticism of modern philosophy. He acknowledged Hume and Kant as insightful critics of knowledge, but he thought they offered nothing to replace what they rejected, and he criticized their “attempt to conceive experience divorced from its physical ground and from its natural objects” ( ES, 119). Their rejection of old philosophical notions such as essence, substance, and spirit in the name of reason and experience concealed an elevation of ego that would later flourish in idealistic philosophies. By contrast, Santayana’s notion of animal faith counters idealism’s dissolution of nature. In his thorough-going naturalism Santayana believed he was following Spinoza, whom he thought the only genuinely modern philosopher. Descartes was the first to begin a system of philosophy with universal doubt, intended to be only provisional and methodical; but his mind was not plastic nor mystical enough to be profoundly sceptical, even histrionically. He could doubt any particular fact easily, with the shrewdness of a man of science who was also a man of the world; but this doubt was only a more penetrating use of intelligence , a sense that the alleged fact might be explained away. Descartes could not lend himself to the disintegration of reason, and never doubted his principles of explanation. For instance, in order to raise a doubt about the applicability of mathematics to existence (for their place in the realm of essence would remain the same in any case) he suggested that a malign demon might have been the adequate cause of our inability to doubt that science. He thus assumed the principle of sufficient reason, a principle for which there is no reason at all. If any idea or axiom were really a priori or spontaneous in the human mind, it would be infinitely improbable that it should apply to the facts of nature. Every genius, in this respect, is his own malign demon. Nor was this the worst; for Descartes was not content to assume that reason governs the world—a notion scandalously contrary to fact, and at bottom contrary to reason itself, which is but the grammar of human discourse and aspiration linking mere essences. He set accidental limits to his scepticism even about facts. “I think, therefore I am,” if taken as an inference is sound because analytical, only repeating in the conclusion, for the sake of emphasis, something assumed in the premise. If taken as an attestation of fact, as I suppose it was meant, it is honest and richly indicative, all its terms 117 Comparison with Other Criticisms of Knowledge being heavy with empirical connotations. What is “thinking,” what is “I,” what is “therefore,” and what is “existence”? If there were no existence there would certainly be no persons and no thinking, and it may be doubted (as I have indicated above) that anything exists at all. That any being exists that may be called “I,” so that I am not a mere essence, is a thousand times more doubtful, and is often denied by the keenest wits. The persuasion that in saying “I am” I have reached an indubitable fact, can only excite a smile in the genuine sceptic. No fact is selfevident ; and what sort of fact is this “I,” and in what sense do I “exist”? Existence does not belong to a mere datum, nor am I a datum to myself; I am a somewhat remote and extremely obscure object of belief. Doubtless what I mean by myself is an existence and even a substance; but the rudimentary phantoms that suggest that object, or that suggest the existence of anything, need to be trusted and followed out by a laborious empirical exploration, before I can make out at all what they signify. Variation alleged, strain endured, persistence assumed—notions which when taken on faith lead to the assertion of existence and of substance, if they remained merely notions would prove nothing, disclose nothing, and assert nothing. Yet such, I suppose, are the notions actually before me when I say “I am...

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