of Volume One ***

REASON IN SOCIETY

Volume Two of "The Life of Reason"

GEORGE SANTAYANA

he gar noy enhergeia zohe

This Dover edition, first published in 1980, is an unabridged
republication of volume two of _The Life of Reason; or The Phases of
Human Progress_, originally published by Charles Scribner's Sons, N.Y.,
in 1905.

CONTENTS

BOOK II.--REASON IN SOCIETY

CHAPTER I

LOVE

Fluid existences have none but ideal goals.--Nutrition and
reproduction.--Priority of the latter.--Love celebrates the initial
triumph of form and is deeply ideal.--Difficulty in describing
love.--One-sided or inverted theories about it.--Sexual functions its
basis.--Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty.--Glory of
animal love.--Its degradation when instincts become numerous and
competitive.--Moral censure provoked.--The heart alienated from the
world.--Childish ideals.--Their light all focussed on the object of
love.--Three environments for love.--Subjectivity of the
passion.--Machinery regulating choice.--The choice
unstable.--Instinctive essence of love.--Its ideality.--Its universal
scope.--Its euthanasia. Pages 3-34

CHAPTER II

THE FAMILY

The family arises spontaneously.--It harmonises natural
interests.--Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth.--The
naturally dull achieve intelligence.--It is more blessed to save than to
create.--Parental instinct regards childhood only.--Handing on the torch
of life.--Adventitious functions assumed by the family.--Inertia in
human nature.--Family tyrannies.--Difficulty in abstracting from the
family.--Possibility of substitutes.--Plato's heroic
communism.--Opposite modern tendencies.--Individualism in a sense
rational.--The family tamed.--Possible readjustments and
reversions.--The ideal includes generation.--Inner values already lodged
in this function.--Outward beneficence might be secured by experiment
Pages 35-59

CHAPTER III

INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR

Patriarchal economy.--Origin of the state.--Three uses of
civilisation.--Its rationality contingent.--Sources of wealth.--Excess
of it possible.--Irrational industry.--Its jovial and ingenious
side.--Its tyranny.--An impossible remedy.--Basis of government.--How
rationality accrues.--Ferocious but useful despotisms.--Occasional
advantage of being conquered.--Origin of free governments.--Their
democratic tendencies.--Imperial peace.--Nominal and real status of