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Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays by George Santayana
page 55 of 78 (70%)
to exist. Indeed, matter is now hardly needed at all; its place has been
taken by radio-activity, and by electrons which dart and whirl with such
miraculous swiftness, that occasionally, for no known reason, they can
skip from orbit to orbit without traversing the intervening positions--an
evident proof of free-will in them. Or if solids should still seem to be
material, there are astral bodies as well which are immaterial although
physical; and as to ether and electricity, they are the very substance of
spirit. All this I find announced in newspapers and even in books as the
breakdown of scientific materialism: and yet, when was materialism more
arrant and barbarous than in these announcements? Something no doubt has
broken down: but I am afraid it is rather the habit of thinking clearly
and the power to discern the difference between material and spiritual
things.

The latest revolution in science will probably not be the last. I do not
know what internal difficulties, contradictions, or ominous obscurities
may exist in the new theories, or what logical seeds of change, perhaps of
radical change, might be discovered there by a competent critic. I base my
expectation on two circumstances somewhat more external and visible to the
lay mind. One circumstance is that the new theories seem to be affected,
and partly inspired, by a particular philosophy, itself utterly insecure.
This philosophy regards the point of view as controlling or even creating
the object seen; in other words, it identifies the object with the
experience or the knowledge of it: it is essentially a subjective,
psychological, Protestant philosophy. The study of perspectives, which a
severer critic might call illusions, is one of the most interesting and
enlightening of studies, and for my own part I should be content to dwell
almost exclusively in that poetic and moral atmosphere, in the realm of
literature and of humanism. Yet I cannot help seeing that neither in logic
nor in natural genesis can perspectives be the ultimate object of science,
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