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Post-Rational Morality Reason in Science. Volume 5 of The Life of Reason: or, the Phases of Human Progress. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1906, 262– 300. Volume seven of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. In this selection, Chapter X of Reason in Science, Santayana considered morality in a fragmented society that has abandoned the Life of Reason as a vain pursuit. This rejection comes not from prejudice or ignorance, as in prerational morality, but rather from despair at the transience of existence and the conclusion that all is vanity. Thinkers then regard the Life of Reason as merely one end among many and seek a substitute for happiness in a natural ideal raised to supernatural significance: they seek a principle of universal harmony . Epicureanism took pleasure for the supreme standard of harmony, Stoicism took conformity to laws of nature (and Islam refined it in practice), and a post-rational pantheism took mystical union with the infinite (and Christianity combined it with a Hebrew desire for a promised land). Santayana thought that no post-rational system could entirely escape naturalism. As long as a system involves some degree of living, complete nihilism is held at bay and faith in the fundamental traits of a natural world retained. In consequence, the values of a post-rational system will reflect a basic faith in the natural world. When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind. One by his irony, another by his frank idealism, and the third by his preponderating interest in history and analysis, showed clearly enough how little they dared to hope. They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph on their country. They were publishing the principles of what had been its life, gathering piously its broken ideals, and interpreting its momentary achievement . The spirit of liberty and co-operation was already dead. The private citizen, debauched by the largesses and petty quarrels of his city, had become indolent and mean-spirited. He had begun to question the utility of religion, of patriotism, and of justice. Having allowed the organ for the ideal to atrophy in his soul, he could dream of finding some sullen sort of happiness in unreason. He felt that the austere glories of his country, as a Spartan regimen might have preserved them, would not benefit that baser part of him which alone remained. Political virtue seemed a useless tax on his material profit and freedom. The tedium and distrust proper to a disintegrated society began to drive him to artificial excitements and superstitions. Democracy had learned to regard as enemies the few in whom public interest was still represented, the few whose nobler temper and traditions still coincided with the general good. These last patriots were gradually banished or exterminated, and with them died the spirit that rational ethics had expressed. Philosophers were no longer suffered to have illusions about the state. Human activity on the public stage had shaken off all allegiance to art or reason. The biographer of reason might well be tempted to ignore the subsequent Socratic ethics retrospective. The Essential Santayana 436 attitudes into which moral life fell in the West, since they all embodied a more or less complete despair, and, having abandoned the effort to express the will honestly and dialectically, they could support no moral science. The point was merely to console or deceive the soul with some substitute for happiness. Life is older and more persistent than reason, and the failure of a first experiment in rationality does not deprive mankind of that mental and moral vegetation which they possessed for ages in a wild state before the advent of civilisation. They merely revert to their uncivil condition and espouse whatever imaginative ideal comes to hand, by which some semblance of meaning and beauty may be given to existence without the labour of building this meaning and beauty systematically out of its positive elements. Not to study these imaginative ideals, partial and arbitrary as they are, would be to miss one of the most instructive points of view from which the Life of Reason may be surveyed: the point of view of its satirists. For moral ideals may follow upon philosophy, just as they may precede it. When they follow, at least so long as they are consciously embraced in view of reason’s failure, they have a quite particular value. Aversion to rational...

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