Part 37 (1/2)

GEORGE SANTAYANA

he gar noy enhergeia zohe

This Dover edition, first published in 1982, is an unabridged republication of volume four of _The Life of Reason; or The Phases of Human Progress_, originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons, N.Y., in 1905.

CONTENTS

REASON IN ART

CHAPTER I

THE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE

Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.--Art is plastic instinct conscious of its aims.--It is automatic.--So are the ideas it expresses.--We are said to control whatever obeys us.--Utility is a result.--The useful naturally stable.--Intelligence is docility.--Art is reason propagating itself.--Beauty an incident in rational art, inseparable from the others. Pages 3-17

CHAPTER II

RATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART

Utility is ultimately ideal.--Work wasted and chances missed.--Ideals must be interpreted, not prescribed.--The aim of industry is to live well.--Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature.--Servile arts may grow spontaneous or their products may be renounced.--Art starts from two potentialities: its material and its problem.--Each must be definite and congruous with the other.--A sophism exposed.--Industry prepares matter for the liberal arts.--Each partakes of the other. Pages 18-33

CHAPTER III

EMERGENCE OF FINE ART

Art is spontaneous action made stable by success.--It combines utility and automatism.--Automatism fundamental and irresponsible.--It is tamed by contact with the world.--The dance.--Functions of gesture.--Automatic music. Pages 34-43

CHAPTER IV

MUSIC

Music is a world apart.--It justifies itself.--It is vital and transient.--Its physical affinities.--Physiology of music.--Limits of musical sensibility.--The value of music is relative to them.--Wonders of musical structure.--Its inherent emotions.--In growing specific they remain unearthly.--They merge with common emotions, and express such as find no object in nature.--Music lends elementary feelings an intellectual communicable form.--All essences are in themselves good, even the pa.s.sions.--Each impulse calls for a possible congenial world.--Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings.--Music may do so.--Instability the soul of matter.--- Peace the triumph of spirit.--Refinement is true strength. Pages 44-67

CHAPTER V

SPEECH AND SIGNIFICATION

Sounds well fitted to be symbols.--Language has a structure independent of things.--Words, remaining identical, serve to identify things that change.--Language the dialectical garment of facts.--Words are wise men's counters.--Nominalism right in psychology and realism in logic.--Literature moves between the extremes of music and denotation.--Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may have affinity.--Syntax positively representative.--Yet it vitiates what it represents.--Difficulty in subduing a living medium.--Language foreshortens experience.--It is a perpetual mythology.--It may be apt or inapt, with equal richness.--Absolute language a possible but foolish art Pages 68-86