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But "doing our' part in the system of things," like "striving," sounds rather more like loyalty than trust, even if it is "with confidence" that we loyally do our part, or strive---such confidence, or trust, presumably coming first.

Wiki MarkupSo "\[w\]hat Santayana calls 'animal faith' is the confidence of every sentient creature in its environment as favorable to its efforts to live and to continue its species," while "\[f\]aith on the human level is trust that the nature of things insures the appropriateness of ideals of generosity, honesty, and esthetic refinement, or goodness, truth, and beauty, to such an extent that despite aU frustrations and vexations, despite disloyalty or crassness in our fellows, despite death itself, it is really and truly better to live, and to live in accord with these ideals, than to give up the struggle in death or in cynicism. Of this human faith \ [Hartshorne adds\] there are varieties almost beyond telling: the great religious faiths, and the various attempted philosophical substitutes for these" (163; he also speaks of "human faith," or "faith on the human level," as "trust in the environment as an adequate basis for our efforts to live in accordance with certain ideals" \ [164\]; cf. also "the mere general faith that somehow it is all right for us to live and try to to our best" \ [165\]).

Wiki Markup_But, surely, if Hartshorne's right that any concrete whatever, even a physical particle, is and must be at least "sentient," one may well question whether Santayana ever says or implies any thing to indicate that he means by "animal faith" what Hartshorne says he means by it. Moreover, would Hartshorne himself really want to use "animal faith" in such all utterly general sense? Or has he tacitly slipped back into using "sentient" in its ordinary sense to mean simply "animal," or "animate"?_{_}-\--{_}{_}Note his terminology: "the great religious faiths" and "the various attempted philosophical substitutes for these," i.e., philosophical faiths (163); "diverse faiths"; "particular form\[s\] of faith"; "the various faiths"; "faith, or life-trust" (165f; 171.).\-_\--As for his talk about the "ideal" of a certain form of behavior, I wonder whether it's more than verbally different from talking, as I'm accustomed to do, about a normative understanding of a certain form of behavior. I don't see why one couldn't say equally appropriately, for instance, that the ideal _of doing theology is to appropriate witness critically by critically interpreting its meaning and critically validating its claims to 'validity and that doing just this is what it is to do theology,_ normatively understood.

"The most basic animal and human faith is beyond need of justification. Even suicide expresses the truth that to die is, in certain cases at least, better than to live. What needs justification is not faith in general, for to think, as to live, is already to accept faith as valid. What needs justification is only the choice of which faith, which verbal and intellectual and perhaps institutional, ritualistic, and artistic form of expression and intensification we shall seek to give the faith we inevitably have. Here truly we do need justification, not merely by faith, but of faith. Is there any way to achieve this, if not by deducing the consequences of various interpretations of the content of faith, and examining the arguments for and against each? The only alternative is to put unlimited trust in our luck in having been born into the right religion, or in our capacity to make the right choice without any careful consideration of the relevant arguments" (164).

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"Faith is the religious habit of mind. That is to say, it is the attitude which we take up toward things as a whole....

Wiki Markup"Faith as a kind of knowledge or theoretical faith is the knowledge that the universe as a whole is rational. It is only because we know that this is so, that we can be certain of finding in this or that detail of it a fit and possible object of scientific study....Without an absolute confidence in the 'uniformity of nature,' or whatever name \ [the scientist\] gives to the rationality of the universe, he would never try any experiments at all" (_Faith & Reason_: 141).

"We thus possess certain pieces of knowledge about the -world which we did not acquire, and cannot criticize, by scientific methods. The knowledge in question is our knowledge of the world, not in its details, but as a whole. And not only is it not acquired by scientific thought, but it is the very foundation of such thought; for only in so far as we know, for instance, that there are laws of nature, can we reasonably devise methods for discovering them" (139).

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'The peculiarity of the cogito ergo sum is that Descartes here found a point at which reason and faith coincide. The certainty of my own existence is a matter of faith in the sense that it does not rest on argument but on direct intuition; but it is a matter of reason in the sense that it is universal and necessary and cannot be denied by any thinking being. It resembles the religious man's knowledge of God in its immediate certainty; but not every man is always religious, and faith in God may desert us. It resembles the knowledge of the Aristotelian first principles in being universal and necessary; but the Aristotelian first principles are deniable and thus lack the absolute and immediate conviction that is inseparable from the cogito" (137).unmigrated-wiki-markup

"\[For Kant\] God, freedom, and immortality, the three traditional objects of metaphysical speculation, were objects of faith, not of scientific demonstration. Not that Kant thought their reality doubtful. He did not; he regarded them as truths of which all our experience assures us. We do not demonstrate them, not because they are too uncertain, but because they are too certain: they lie too close to our minds to be proved, they are too inextricably interwoven with our experience to be argued about. To prove them is like buttoning up your own skin.

"Kant was trying to treat God, freedom, and immortality as certainties of the same kind as Descartes' cogito ergo sum: that is, as universal, necessary, and so far rational, but indemonstrable and so far matters of faith" (137).

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