3) “The Plain Sense of Things”

“II. Dogma and Doubt”

The announced intention of Scepticism and Animal Faith, “[to] distinguish the edge of truth from the might of imagination” (x), is linked in the second chapter with the sceptic’s attempt to distinguish facts from the gratuitous and mental contributions of beliefs. Santayana is concerned in this chapter with discovering how far he can go in dispensing with belief. In his corresponding poem, Stevens likewise means to discover the extent to which he can abandon imagination to arrive at (as his title indicates) “The Plain Sense of Things”:

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

Stevens admits that it is difficult to describe this state where the imagination is absent. He offers a number of tentative images meant to convey this absence, and their very plurality signals the poet’s reluctance to hazard any imaginative assertion that would evade the plain sense of things:

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

In truth, Santayana concedes, the sceptic can only go so far. When the sceptic casts doubt on the statement “If any child knew his father he would be a wise child,”¹ doubt falls on some point other than the axiomatic belief in the existence of fathers and children (8). Scepticism retains, in other words, a residual belief in facts: “[Belief] cannot be abandoned; it can only be revised in view of some more elementary [belief] which it has not yet occurred to the sceptic to doubt” (9).

Stevens makes the same concession as his poem continues:

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

Though their vocabularies differ, the philosopher and the poet make the same point. In his effort to “distinguish the edge of truth from the might of imagination,” Santayana endorses the sceptic’s endeavor to separate beliefs from facts and dismiss those gratuitous mental additions; but that enterprise can only go so far because belief “cannot be abandoned,” only revised to some more elementary form. Likewise for Stevens, the effort to reach “the plain sense of things,” to dispense with the imagination, can only go so far because the imagination is always present in a residual way and even “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.”

This inability to completely abandon beliefs does not mean the sceptic should throw up his hands in despair and abandon the enterprise. He must do the best he can. The mind is driven to seek the truth, the philosopher says, and “even if each of its efforts fails,” the mind must press forward while accepting the inevitable: “the brute necessity” of some beliefs (10).

Stevens’ words echo Santayana’s. The desire in Stevens’ poem is to achieve “the plain sense of things,” but the inability to completely abandon the imagination makes it seem as if “a fantastic effort has failed” because “the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined.” But some degree of imagination is always, to use Santayana’s words, a “brute necessity.” “All this / Had to be imagined,” Stevens concedes, “as an inevitable knowledge, / Required, as a necessity requires.”

Notes.

1. Santayana chooses an example that, we might note, recalls the father-hunting of Stevens’ previous poem, “The Irish Cliffs of Moher.”

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