The Story of Philosophy (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy)

by Will Durant

Reason is no foe of the instincts, it is their successful unison; it is nature become conscious in us, illuminating its own path and goal. It “is the happy marriage of two elements—impulse and ideation—which, if wholly divorced, would reduce man to a brute or a maniac.

“Why has man’s conscience in the end invariably rebelled against naturalism and reverted in some form or other to a cultus of the unseen?” Perhaps “because the soul is akin to the eternal and ideal”; it is not content with that which is, and yearns for a better life; it is saddened by the thought of death, and clings to the hope of some power that may make it permanent amid the surrounding flux.

“I believe there is nothing immortal.. . . No doubt the spirit and energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us; and, cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moved.”13

The man of culture, then, will leave undisturbed the myths that so comfort and inspire the life of the people; and perhaps he will a little envy them their hope. But he will have no faith in another life. “The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.”25 The only immortality that will interest him is that which Spinoza describes. “He who lives in the ideal,” says Santayana, “and leaves it expressed in society or in art enjoys a double immortality.

“There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar, anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity.”