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Introduction [The Life of Reason] Reason in Common Sense. Volume 1 of The Life of Reason: or, the Phases of Human Progress . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1905, 1–32. Volume seven of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. This introduction appeared in Reason in Common Sense, volume 1 of the five-volume The Life of Reason; or the Phases of Human Progress. Santayana began working on The Life of Reason in 1896, was reading page-proofs in autumn 1904, and saw the first four volumes published in 1905 and the fifth in 1906. He characterized it as “a sort of retrospective politics, an estimate of events in reference to the moral ideal which they embodied or betrayed” ( LR5, 58), Santayana’s moral ideal being the harmonious relation of impulses or reason. The Life of Reason is “that part of experience which perceives and pursues ideals—all conduct so controlled and all sense so interpreted as to perfect natural happiness” ( ES, 283). Reason is not instrumental or incidental to human progress: “it is the total and embodied progress itself, in which the pleasures of sense are included in so far as they can be intelligently enjoyed and pursued” ( ES, 283). John Dewey called the five-volume work “the most adequate contribution America has yet made—always excepting Emerson—to moral philosophy” ( John Dewey, The Middle Works, 1899–1924, volume 4, edited by Jo Ann Boydston [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983], 241). THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTECEDENTS Whatever forces may govern human life, if they are to be recognised by man, must betray themselves in human experience. Progress in science or religion, no less than in morals and art, is a dramatic episode in man’s career, a welcome variation in his habit and state of mind; although this variation may often regard or propitiate things external, adjustment to which may be important for his welfare. The importance of these external things, as well as their existence, he can establish only by the function and utility which a recognition of them may have in his life. The entire history of progress is a moral drama, a tale man might unfold in a great autobiography, could his myriad heads and countless scintillas of consciousness conspire, like the seventy Alexandrian sages, in a single version of the truth committed to each for interpretation. What themes would prevail in such an examination of heart? In what order and with what emphasis would they be recounted? In which of its adventures would the human race, reviewing its whole Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates. 283 Introduction [The Life of Reason] experience, acknowledge a progress and a gain? To answer these questions, as they may be answered speculatively and provisionally by an individual, is the purpose of the following work. A philosopher could hardly have a higher ambition than to make himself a mouth-piece for the memory and judgment of his race. Yet the most casual consideration of affairs already involves an attempt to do the same thing. Reflection is pregnant from the beginning with all the principles of synthesis and valuation needed in the most comprehensive criticism. So soon as man ceases to be wholly immersed in sense, he looks before and after, he regrets and desires; and the moments in which prospect or retrospect takes place constitute the reflective or representative part of his life, in contrast to the unmitigated flux of sensations in which nothing ulterior is regarded. Representation, however, can hardly remain idle and merely speculative. To the ideal function of envisaging the absent, memory and reflection will add (since they exist and constitute a new complication in being) the practical function of modifying the future. Vital impulse, however, when it is modified by reflection and veers in sympathy with judgments pronounced on the past, is properly called reason. Man’s rational life consists in those moments in which reflection not only occurs but proves efficacious. What is absent then works in the present, and values are imputed where they cannot be felt. Such representation is so far from being merely speculative that its presence alone can raise bodily change to the dignity of action. Reflection gathers experiences together and perceives their relative worth; which is as much as to say that it expresses a new attitude of will in the presence of a world better understood and turned to some purpose...

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