Is Reason Irrational? [1906]

History is rather severely dealt with, being regarded as a mere means to the Life of Reason. “The function of history”, we are told, “is to lend materials to politics and to poetry.” Its particularity spoils it as science, and its bondage to fact spoils it as art. Mechanics is much more highly valued, because it exhibits that universal order which Mr. Santayana prizes above anything else, and that indifference to human wishes of which he appreciates the educative effect. That the laws of things “should20 be not quite like the logic of passion, is of course a hard lesson to learn. The learning, however-not to speak of its incidental delights-is so extraordinarily good for people that only with that instruction and the blessed renunciations it brings can clearness, dignity, or virility enter their minds”. All order and all causality in the actual world is held to be mechanical. Mr. Santayana is in this sense materialistic, that he regards states of mind as always produced by states of body, never by each other; and he has no mercy for the attempt to read a teleological import into evolution.