overheard in seville.2.1984

7/27/2019 Overheard in Seville.2.1984

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Overheard in Seville

SantayanaNo. 2Fall 1984


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George Santayana in 1950"I am so g lad tha t you are dres sed inform al ly . F or I am always , as you see , in my pajamas ,"s a id S an tayana to I rv ing S inger in A ugus t 1950 . S ee page 27 be low . The pho tog raph i sr e p r i n t e d f r o m t h e 1951 ed i t ion o f The Philosophy of George San taya na, edi ted by Paul A.S ch i lpp , by pe rmis s ion o f Th e O pe n C our t P ub l i s h ing Com pany , L a S a ll e , I l lino is . Copyr igh t1940 a n d 1951 by The L ib ra ry o f L iv ing P h i lo s opher s , I nc .


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Santayana and Panpsychi smSantayana was certainly not a panpsychist. How ever, I believe that the reare panpsychist tendencies in his work. T h e aim of this paper is toexplore these.

It is necessary first to explain what is being understood by'panpsychism '. I take it as th e view that th er e is a principle by which thephysical world could be exhaustively divided (conceptually) into what wemay conveniently call basic units each of which has some kind ofsentience, though there will be physical individuals, composed of thesesentient ones as standing in certain relations, which will not necessarily besentien t. O n th e version of this view most relevant he re, these units willnot merely be sentient, but their sentience will constitute their 'realessence*, while the real essence of the relations between them will be insome m an ne r psychical. For some versions of this view, the basic unitsmay be continuants, for others they will be momentary (probably notinstantaneous) events, though the units of one moment of time maygenerate those of the next in a manner which constitutes each such eventa phase in the 'life' of a continuant. Although mentality constitutes thereal essence of the ultimate units of the physical world and of their interrelations, according to this view, that is not something directly implied byou r ordin ary physical descriptions. Th ese will either be of physicalindividuals in terms of how they appear to consciousnesses such as ours,or in terms of their structural properties, these latter in fact beingabstract aspects of properties which, in their full concreteness, arepsychical, most obviously in the sense of being groups of psychicalindividuals related in some psychical manner. Among physicaldescriptions is here understood formulations of the laws of nature, and itwill be an essential part of the kind of panpsychism of interest here thatit accepts the best efforts of scientists to arrive at these at face value,witho ut any specially philosophical dou bts abo ut them . T h e questionarises as to the status of 'consciousnesses such as ours' on this view.There a re three likely answers. (1) Th ey m ight be especially high gradeexamples of the basic units; (2) they might be in some manner generatedby states of affairs consisting in basic units standing in those relations toeach other which, at the physical level, constitute the existence of awaking mammalian brain, and might, when generated, act back on thesystem of basic units, i.e. on th e bra in; (3) they might be thu s gene rated,but no t so as to act back in any way. Of these the second implies that thelaws of nature as they apply outside brains are interfered with withinthem, the third implies that there is no such interference, and the first iscompatible either with there being special laws, or some breakdown ofphysical law, within brains or with nothing of this sort being so. T h ethird option is a kind of panpsychist version of epiphenomenalism.1

1 These alternatives are treated more fully in chapter 4 of my The Vindication of Absolute


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2 OVE RHE ARD IN SEVILLETo embrace panpsychism in this sense is to accept one of thepropositions distinctive of idealism, namely that the mental is pervasive inth e universe, an d inde ed constitutive of its real essence. But panpsychismcan remain essentially unidealist in rejecting any view according to whicheither the world is my idea, or the world is somehow all included in asingle absolute consciousness, or the world is one in which value conceptshave explanatory significance.Santayana certainly rejected idealism, but it seems that his mainhostility to idealism lay in his total rejection of any view at all like one ofthe thre e just l isted. I think that he also - at least throughout most of hisphilosophical career - rejected a panpsychism which was not idealist.However, I think, first, that the system propounded in Realms of Being

hovers on the brink of i t , and that there are indications that at an earliertime he was quite sympathetic to its claims.These indications are th e notes for lectures given at Harvard in1909-1910, edited by Daniel Cory under the t i t le 'System in Lectures' .2 Ihave in mind primarily the following passage:

Any act, piece of experience, or event lived through is, in its immediacy,neutral in respect to what is called subjectivity and objectivity, psychic andmaterial being. It possesses qualities belonging to both these spheres: oftenthe inherent qualities (or essence) of it are material, but the status andmovement of it are psychic. When, however, the order of nature or genesis,and the Realm of Matter, have been discerned, it becomes obvious that muchin facts and events is irrelevant to that order, attached to it onlyadventitiously, and not a part of the Realm of Matter. This residuum is alsocalled feeling, imagination, mind, appearance, thought, etc. It isimponderable, untraceable in space, intermittent, irrevocable and (bydefinition and by initial contact with m atter) inefficacious. Th e quantity of itis accordingly undiscoverable. It is representable only dramatically.Wherever a represented situation evokes the imagination of it, it is believedto exist or to have existed. It constitutes the Realm of Con sciousness.

One way of taking this somewhat puzzling and ambiguous passage is assaying that the phases of our consciousness are physical events, in ourbrains, considered in an aspect of them in which they are imponderableand which is irrelevant from the point of view of investigating theircausal efficacy, and that this aspect of them is only representabledramatically, which means something like imaginable empathically. Thatis very much the status which, in at least one version of it, would beascribed to them by a panpsychism which embraced the first of the threeviews I said a panpsy chist mig ht take ab ou t ou r consciousness. Now it fitsin well with such a thesis about our consciousness to say that all ultimatephysical events have an aspect of that sort, though most such events areIdealism, published by Edinburgh University Press, 198S. See also Chapter 3, 'The Vindicationof Panpsychism*. How ever much Santayana disliked absolute idealism my own version of itowes a great deal to his thought.

2 Review of Metaphysics, Vol. X, N o. 4, June 1957.


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SANTA YAN A AND PANPSYCHISM 3not representable thus by us dramatically, or in any way known to us inthis aspect, and so do not get counted in as part of the realm ofconsciou sness. It is tr u e tha t this is no t entailed by wh at Santayana sayshe re , but it is at least suggested. M oreover, th ere ar e earlier passages inthe lectures where there is some suggestion that Santayana may havethought something of this sort quite probable. Thus he says: 'Ourscientific calculations, in no matter what terms, may give us a trueassurance on these points (laws, order or method) while the inner texture ofthe sensible remains unknown.* (p. 656) This, as Cory points out in anote, may mean that Santayana was half inclined to think that the innertexture of material substance was (apart from its sensory presentation tous) inherently 'sensible', and he draws our attention to an earlier passage(p . 642) where Santayana says that 'substance need not be non-sensible.'If 'sensible' means 'akin to the elements of our sense experience' one getssom ething very close to Jam es's doc trine of pur e experience as thesubstance of things. Jam es, of course, held that this pure experience wasonly properly mental when organized in a certain way, and Santayanamight have agreed that such an inner sensible core of substance wouldnot be mental in any proper sense. H ow eve r, if it is essentially of thesame generic nature as what, when organized in a certain way, becomesth e me ntal, we have som ething very close to panpsychism. So it seemsthat at this time Santayana may have thought that a view at least veryclose to panpsychism might well be true.Still, I am not mainly concerned to claim that Santayana would everhave seen himself as sympathetic to a doctrine which could be called'panpsychism*. My concern is rather to show that in the mature doctrineof Realms of Bein g there are suggestions about what the core nature of thephysical world is which come rath er close to i t. H ere , however, thepanpychism in question is one which embraces the third optionconcerning consciousnesses like ours . I must note emphatically here, toavoid misunderstanding, that my use of psychical is not one whichSantayana favours. T h e psyche, as he und erstan ds it, is som ething to bespecified primarily in physical term s. O ne w ould have to stick to suchwords as 'mental' , and speak of panmentalism, to put what I am saying inhis most favoured terminology, but since the expression 'panpsychism' isthe usual one (and used by Santayana himself) for the theory I amspeaking of, I cannot easily stick to Santayana's strong linguisticpreference here.

The basis for my claim lies in his treatment of na tu ral moments andtheir relation to moments of spirit. It is presumably beyond dispute thatSantayana here holds that the physical world in the last resort consists ininnumerable natural moments, each of which exemplifies some essence,and which is related to other natural moments by lateral tensions andrelations of forward thrust, the latter l inking the natural moments of onemoment of time to those at the next in such a way that the later can bedescribed as being the substance of the earlier ones transformed . T h ephysical world thus composed is presented to us by way of essences which


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SANTA YAN A AND PANPSYCHISM 5one looks at the sea, one normally engages in the pathetic fallacy andthinks of it as feeling restless as one does oneself when one tossessleeplessly in a be d. Clearly it is th at k ind of restlessness, a quality lyingat the heart of it, which Santayana attributes to the natural moments, andin spite of his disclaimer it is hard to see what this can be exceptsom ethin g very similar to a feeling of un res t. M ore generally, it seems tome that the intrinsic efficacy he ascribes to natural moments is somethingwe can only conceive on the analogy of our own effortful striving. Yetthere is an oddity here for the efficacy we must conceive of on this basisis regarded by Santayana as only an apparent characteristic of our ownconsciousness, for the propulsive efficacy which seems to belong to ourconsciousness is an illusion. T h at is what makes Santayana anepiphenomenalist. Santayana's explanation of this curious situation is thatspirit, since it is derived from matter, has features which give one a senseof the causal push of what is going on in physical nature but that it doesno t really belo ng w ithin tha t causal system. Even if we do no t cavil atthat, it surely remains the case that natural moments are conceived ashaving considerable kinship to moments of spirit.

Suppose we allow that natural moments as described by Santayanahave some kinship to mental events or moments of spirit, does that makehim a panpsychist? T h e answer is affected by the extent to which weapproach the question from a realist, or a more nominalist, view of genericuniversals or essences. Suppo se we take it tha t general terms have anextension determined not by the presence or absence of some quitedefinite essence, but by a degree of resemblance holding between thequite specific essences involved in the different items to which they areapplied. T h en the question wheth er such a gen eral term as 'psychical' or'experiential ' applies to natural moments will be the question whetherthey are sufficiently like (in virtue of the specific essences involved)moments of spirit to be called, along with them, by some such expression.In that case there will be positions which are not clearly panpsychist ornot, inasmuch as they say that there is quite a degree of such affinity, butalso quite a degree of contrast. If we look at the matter in thisnominalist way, one would be likely to say that Santayana's relation topanpsychism was of this sort. On the other hand, if we think that we candistinguish a quite definite, even if generic, universal or essence which isappropriately labelled by one of these expressions, then it will be a yes orno question whether it is present not just in our consciousness but also ineach na tural m om ent. It seems to me tha t if we look at it thus,Santayana must be thought of as coming rather close to a panpsychistview, granted the mentalistic overtones of his description of naturalm om ents. T h e only way of his escaping this, I think, would be for him tosay that though there is a generic essence common to moments of spiritand to natural moments, this is not appropriately labelled as 'psychicality',but is either the essence of pure being or that of existence (probablychiefly the latter, for it involves a kind of restless itch to be on to thenext thing for Santayana, and I take it that it implies, without being


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6 O V E R H E A R D I N S E V IL L Eimplied by, bein g). Actually, her e again, on e migh t see it as partly amatter of preference whether the v iew Santayana was taking waspanpsychist or not, for one might think that if there is a genuine essenceof this sort then the panpsychist is simply one who insists that theultim ate eve nts con stitutin g th e physical world all possess it in jus t th esame way as do so-called mental events, and Santayana only disagrees asto whether this is a helpful way of drawing attention to its pervasivepresence .

Whatever we decide here, it would remain true at the least thatSantayana's view was quite close to a panpsychist on e. Th at bein g so, Iwant now to consider some of the reasons why Santayana would evidentlynot have been happy to accept that.

First , even if Santayana acknowledged that there is somethingsignif icantly in common between moments of spirit and natural moments ,he might have thought that to use any term like 'psychical' to refer to itwould almost certainly suggest a view tending towards an idealismincorporat ing one or more of the other e lements I ment ioned above.

Second, he might have thought rightly that the typical path topanpsychism lies through thinking that we derive our sense of being fromour acquaintance with our ow n consciousn ess . Santayana, how ever, heldthat what we are immediately acquainted with, or, in his language, whatwe intuit, are given essences, not spirit, and, in fact, we are notacquainted with moments of spirit .Third, he might have thought that it would be odd to call naturalmoments psychical and allow them eff icacy while thinking it dist inctive ofmoments of spirit that they were not eff icacious.

We can ignore the f irst reason, as it concerns presentation rather thanstrict doc trine. As regards the second rea son, I have com e to think thatSantayana is wrong in holding that we are not acquainted with them om ents of our ow n consciousness . Ho we ver, Santayana had strongmo tivations to hold this view. For on e thing it is essential to the doctr inethat nothing given exists and therefore to Santayana's treatment ofscepticism. Gran ted this , ther e really wou ld have be en some dissonancewithin Santayana's system if he had accepted both that nothing givenexists and that we get our clue to the fundamental nature of realitythrough acquaintance with our own experience . O ne of these twoprobably had to give way, and it was the panpsychism, anywayobje ctiona ble for its idealist feel, whic h did so. Personally I think that itshould have been the other which gave way, especially as despite himself Ithink Santayana is gett ing his clue to the nature of natural momentsthrough his sense of what his own f low of consciousness is l ike.

As for the third reason, I do not think that a panpsychism whichallows eff icacy to the experiences which l ie at the heart of the ult imateunits of the physical , but denies them to the higher level experienceswhich arise out of these and constitute the consciousness of animals, is inany simple way self contradictory, but it is a somewhat strange view.Why should experience lose eff icacy as it reaches this presumably more


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SANTA YAN A AND PANPSYCHISM 7complex and richly end ow ed level? So gra nte d that Santayana was anepiphenomenalist he had reason to be uneasy at, if not an absolutecommitment to rejecting, panpsychism.

That raises the question of why Santayana was an epiphenomenalist.The explanat ion, whether it is a justification or no t, would seem toinclud e the following factors. First, Santayana does seem to have had avery strong sense of being carried along by factors below the level ofconsciousness, and of consciousness as simply a report of what was alreadysettled. Clearly, on any reasonab le view, especially a post-Freu dian on e,this has some general truth to it, but hardly enough to deny anyind ep en de nt efficacy to consciousness. A second reason is tha t Santayanawas deeply committed to a naturalistic account of things, and he took thisas implying that the reign of the laws of nature must be supreme, andthat the human brain was neither the seat of a breakdown of these oreven th e locus of special em erg en t laws. A third reason is tha tepiphenomenalism helps focus attention on what Santayana thought thetrue glory of spirit, its bringing into focus the realm of essence, and awayfrom the pragmatism which demanded that consciousness must proveitself, if it was worth anything, by its grounding of our action.(Santayana's commitment here sometimes sits uneasily with his view thatgiven essences are our clue to what needs to be done.)There is something very compelling about an epiphenomenalism

which says to the scientist engaged in brain research, (today, we mightadd, or artificial intelligence) that there is nothing going on in thephysical world which he cannot expect to explain without reference toconsciousness, but that nonetheless consciousness is there as the seat of allvalue. So I am quite sympathetic to Santayana's epiphenomen alism. Icannot, however, think it sufficiently well grounded to be a reason forrejecting panpsychism, and anyway it is not out of the question, as wehave seen, for panpsychism to accept it.One may wonder why Santayana came to reject decisively thepanpsychism, or at least panexperientialism, of which there seem to behints in 'System in Lectures'. For this might have allowed him to stick tothe view that the brain was not the seat of any kind of breakdown ofstandard natural law, while allowing consciousness to have efficacy. (Thisis one of the appeals of identity theories of the mind and these, in theirmore intelligible versions, such as that of Feigl, are, to all intents andpurposes, panpsychist.) One reason is Santayana's deep commitment toepiphen om enalism , as jus t described. But he may have seen the greatdifficulties which belong to this view, when it comes to understanding justwhich events in the brain are, in their inner being, our consciousness.

Since all the evidence is that consciousness depends on a pattern ofexcitations in the brain, the idea that it is the inner being of some oneultimate physical unit is hard to make sense of in detail. It is much moreplausible to take it that even granted each of these does have a form ofsentience as its inner nature, our sentience is an upshot of a wholecomp lex of interacting such units. As such I do not personally think it


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8 O V E R H E A R D I N S E V I L LEimpossib le that i t should st i l l be the in i tself of a physical real i ty on asomewhat d i f fe ren t leve l , bu t th is cou ld on ly be c la imed i f we arep rep a red to accep t so me h y p o th eses ab o u t th e p h y s ica l wo r ld wh ichwo u ld h av e brought panpsych ism in to conf l ic t wi th var ious theses aboutp h y s ica l ex p lan a t io n wh ich San tay an a wo u ld d o u b t l e s s h av e th o u g h tessen t ia l to a na tura l i s t ic v iew of th ings .

In conc lus ion , I wo uld say th is . Views ab ou t consc iousness and itsre la t ion to the physica l may be d iv ided in to th ree types .

(1 ) Views which are so reduct ive tha t , in e f fec t , the most obv iousfea ture s o f consc iousness a r e los t s igh t o f. Pres um ably no ph i los op herwould pu t h is own v iews in th is ca tegory , bu t some do , in fac t , be long toit.

(2 ) Views which , wi th a reasonable co n cep t io n o f wh a t co n sc io u sn essis , t h in k th a t a t an y th in g b e lo w th e l ev e l o f d esc r ip t io n in th e mo s tu t te r ly abs t rac t way , i t i s un ique .

(3 ) Views which think our s t reams of consc iousness a re one spec ia lcase o f the occur rence o f the to ta l i ty o f the p rocesses in the wor ld , a l l o fwhich h av e a f a ir am o u n t th a t is i n t e r e s t in g in co m m o n . T h e se v iewsmay ( a ) t h in k th a t wh a t i s i n co mmo n can n o t ap p ro p r i a t e ly b e ca l l ed b yany such psycholog ica l words as ' exper ience* or ' f ee l ing ' and (b) thosewh ich d o th in k th i s .

San tayan a ' s v iew of consc iousness is cer ta in ly no t o f type (1 ) . I th o v e r s so me w h ere b e twee n (2 ) an d (3a ) . T o me i t s eems th a t t h ed i f fe rence be tw een (3a) an d (3b) i s la rge ly a m at te r o f the m oo d in whichon e looks a t rea l i ty , an d tha t the re i s n o shar p d i f fe rence . I t fo llows thaton the (3a) s ide o f h is thought San tayana i s no t fa r from p an p sy ch i sm .

T . L . S . S p r i g g eE d i n b u r g h U n i v e r s i t y


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Spirit's Primary Natureis to be Secondary

Timo th y Sp r ig g e f in d s a k in sh ip b e tween mo men t s o f sp i r i t an d naturalm o m en ts in San tay an a ' s p h i lo so p h y . H e a rg u e s th a t t h is k in sh ip is o n e o fsen t ience o r consc iousness , and tha t here San tayana comes c lose to apanp sych is t pos i t io n . Th a t th er e is a k insh ip , I en t i re ly agre e , an d sha lltry t o ex p la in th e n a tu r e o f th e l i n k in t h e l a t e r part o f this p a p e r .H o w ev er i t is q u i t e m is t ak en to infer tha t sen t ience fo rms a par t o f th isl ink .

T h e re is a d i s t r e s s in g t en d en c y fo r r ead e r s o f Santayana to ques t ionth e r e so lu ten ess o f h i s ma te r i a l i sm an d an t i -me tap h y s ica l s t an ce , p e rh ap sbecause he in t roduces such ideas as essence and sp i r i t , p la ton ism andt r an scen d en ta l cen t r e s . Sp r ig g e d o es n o t g iv e th i s r ead in g to San tay an a ;in the above , as in h is book on San tayana , 1 h e ack n o wled g es San tay an a ' sep ip h en o men a l v e r s io n o f ma te r i a l i sm an d r e j ec t io n o f p an p sy ch i sm . Ye ti t ap p ea r s th a t Sp r ig g e sh o ws so me " tendenc ies " t o ward s th e r ead in g , an dat t imes "hovers o n th e b r in k o f it," to appea l to some of h is own phrases .These tendencies o f Spr igge , I shou ld l ike to show, do no t re f lec t s imi la rt en d en c ie s o n th e p a r t o f San tay an a himself.

Th e o n to lo g ica l ca t eg o r i e s o f San tay an a ' s ma tu re p h i lo so p h y co me tod o min a te a l l p h ases o f h i s t h in k in g , an d g iv e r i se to a r emark ab ly self-consis ten t sys tem, as Spr igge a f f i rms. 2 In te rms of these sys temat icca tegor ies , I a rgue tha t a panpsych is t pos i t ion i s not* merely false, butcomes c lose to be ing se l f -con t rad ic to ry . Whi le i t i s imposs ib le to be surewhat tendencies lu rk a t the back of San tayana ' s mind , the va l id i ty o f suchan a rg u men t in d ica te s th a t t en d en c ie s to p an p sy ch i sm d o n o t f ig u re inth e sys t em h e fina lly en u n c ia t e s . T h e a rg u m en t r e s t s o n San tay an a ' saccount o f sp i r i t ; fo r sen t ience be longs to the rea lm of sp i r i t , and Spr iggeof fers a def in i t ion o f panpsych ism in te rms of sen t ience .W h a t ev e r co n s t i tu t e s ex i s t en ce m u s t b e su b s tan t ia l - i t mu s t b e t h eso u rce o f th a t mo v em en t a n d ch an g e wh ich is ch a rac te r i s t i c o f ex i st en ce .O n t he o th er h an d , sp i r i t is by i t s very na tu re ine r t and cosmolog ica l lysuperf icial . "The ineff icacy of spirit [ i s ] inheren t in i t s na tu re ." 3 It isseco n d a ry in r e sp ec t t o mo v emen t an d ex i s t en ce ( a l th o u g h n o t in i t smora l s ign i f icance) , a t whatever leve l i t may appear ,

.. the nature of spirit is not, like that of matter, to be a principle ofexistence and movement, but on the contrary a principle of enjoyment,1 Timothy. L. S. Sprigge, S a n t a y a n a , An Examination of His Philosophy, (Routledge andKegan Paul, London, 1974).2 See for example page 3 of Sprigge, op. cit.3 See page 835 of George Santayana, Realms of Being, One-volume edition, (Scribner*s,New York, 1942). Subsequent pag e num bers will refer to this text.


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10 O V E R H E A R D I N S E V I L L Econtemplation, description, and belief; so that while spirit manifests its ownnature no less freely than matter does, it does so by freely regarding andcommenting on something else, either matter or essence: its primary nature isto be secondary .. [355]

These , and a hos t o f s imi la r s t a temen ts , a re in tended to show tha t sp i r i tin hu m an s is inef fi cacious an d ep ip hen om en a l . Because San tayana c la imsto espouse common sense , and because he knows tha t h i s accoun t o f mindr u n s c o u n t e r t o c o m m o n s e n s e , h e f r e q u e n t l y r e t u r n s t o t h i s t h e m e . H i sdominan t a rgument , e spec ia l ly in the l a te r works , appea l s to the na tu re o fspir i t , where sp ir i t i s taken qui te general ly ; sp i r i t a t whatever level i sinef f icacious . Of course th is a lso enta i ls that i t cannot provide the bas icun i t s o f ex i s tence . Thus h i s a rgument tha t the human sp i r i t mus t beep i ph eno m ena l is a t th e s am e t ime an a r gu m en t tha t sp i r it in gener a lcan no t be subs tan t ia l ; i t is an a rg um en t aga ins t panpsych ism . San taya na ' soppos i t ion to panpsych ism ha s th e s ame found a t ion as h i s we ll -knowns u p p o r t f o r e p i p h e n o m e n a l i s m .

I f ind th i s founda t ion more s ecure and deep ly roo ted than doesSpr igge , who sees c lea r ly the connec t ions of e p i p h e n o m e n a l i s m t o o t h e raspec t s o f San ta yana ' s th ou gh t , bu t who does no t t r ac e it s roo t s to ther a d i c a l i m p o r t a n c e o f t h e r e a l m s of b e i n g . F o r e p i p h e n o m e n a l i s m followsimmedia te ly f rom Santayana's analysis of wh at spir i t is , an d of wh at asubs tance mus t be .

Santayana g ives a more expl ic i t re ject ion of panpsychism in h isd i scus sion o f th e Rea lm of* M at te r . [375-377 ] T h e r e he considers t h e"logical possibil i ty" of an en t i r e ly panpsych is t un iver se made up o f"psychic mor ta r no l e s s than psych ic s to n es . " His f inding is that , by v i r tueof the s ta t i c and i so la ted na tu re o f each moment o f consc iousnes s , the rehas to be a p h y s i c a l m a t t e r b e n e a t h t h e s e m o m e n t s i n o r d e r t o g e n e r a t echange and con t inu i ty . Once aga in , the ve ry na tu re o f sp i r i t r ender s i tunf i t as a fou nd at io n for th e cosm os .

In the above , I am cons ide r ing panpsych ism in the ve r s ion o f fe red bySpr igge , w i th the bas ic un i t s o f the wor ld no t mere ly s en t ien t , bu t hav ingsen t ience as the i r r ea l e s sence . However San tayana a l so r e jec t s weakerver s ions , in wh ich the s en t ience mere ly accompan ies bas ic un i t s wh ich a reo therwise cons t i tu ted ; sp i r i t can only ar ise a t the level of organisms . "Fori t i s contrary to the nature of sp ir i t to ar ise in dead or inorganic th ings :"[134] "It can ar ise only in an animal psyche." [596] " . . i t crownssome inpulse , ra ises i t to actual uni ty and to ta l i ty , and being that f ru i t ionof i t , cou ld no t a r i s e un t i l tha t o rgan had matu red . " [562]

San tayana d id no t l ack exposure to panpsych is t though t : a s tuden t o fRoyce , he took lec tu res f rom Pau lsen , and wro te a d is se r ta t ion on Lo tze .O ne o f the d r iv ing fo rces beh i nd panpsych ism is th e conv ic tion tha tm at te r , a s in te rp r e te d by mate r ia l i s t s c ience , is no t adeq ua te to exp la inmind o r sp i r i t . Whi tehead , fo r in s tance , cou ld not be l ieve tha t thepar t ic les pos i ted by phys ic is ts were u l t imate uni ts of being . This k ind ofmo t iva t ion i s l a rge ly absen t f rom San tayan a , who never ques t ions th e


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SPIRIT 'S PRIMARY NATURE 11capacity of matter to generate the complexities of mind. He does notidentify matter with the latest posit of the physicists, however, and iscritical of anti-materialist arguments which rely on such identifications.[186] By being less eager to hypostasize our present notion of matter,we are more able to appreciate the true fertility of nature.

He does introduce the notion of Will into his philosophy, meaning"the observable endeavour in things of any sort to develop a specific formand to preserv e it." [607] No dou bt this was in part a response to thesame considerations which motivated Whitehead. More important toSantayana, however, was his treatment of freedom, the psyche, and spirit.There Will plays a part similar to the conatus or endeavour of Spinoza. Inthe psyche of every animal, a part of universal Will is manifested. Theterm is used metaphorically, (although it is "less metaphorical than it mayseem" [607]), and he introduces it in The Realm of Spirit, not in the earlierThe Realm of Matter. The passages which suggest panpsychism to Spriggeare, I believe, references to Will. We should note, therefore, that Will isnot conscious; Santayana "scrupulously" uses a lower case "w" to refer toconscious will.

Sprigge is mainly concerned with Santayana's later works, and mycriticism will not consider the earlier and less precise System in Lectures. Iquestion Sprigge's contention there also; but different arguments wouldbe required. Santayana's use of the term "sensible" there is highlyambiguous, as Sprigge says. This is especially apparent when consideredin the light of the final category of spirit, upon which my argument rests.

Principally it is the doctrine of natural moments* [280ff] whichsuggests to Sprigge a leaning towards panpsychism. He believes thatnatural moments, which are Santayana's ultimate units of existence, arepatterned on the intensive mental entities called moments of spirit; and tothe extent that this is correct, the resulting cosmology must take onfeatures of panpsychism. It is especially the "forward thrust" and "lateraltensions" of natural moments which, for Sprigge, suggest "pulses ofexperience or feelings." I shall turn to these shortly. However the genesisof the basic notion of a natural moment itself is well enough explained asSantayana's solution to the classical problem of change. How can realchange be represented in terms of static essences? - for nothing otherthan the intuition of eternal essences is available. Two fairly obvious andwidely accepted approaches to this problem are rejected. He firstdismisses any single representation which incorporates essences realized attw o different times, and synthesizes the flow from earlier to later. Anysuch synthesis, he alleges, must fail as a description of the real flux."Actual succession is a sub stitution, not a perspective." [272] A secondpopular approach is merely to consider the different essences realized atdifferent instants distributed in a mathematical time. Certainly thisappeals only to fixed essences. However once again he finds that thereality of change is lost; a pure time, through which flux moves, has to beseen as a prior medium, a substance, quite detached from the flux itself:


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S P I R I T ' S P R I M A R Y N A T U R E 13are meant to s igna l th is inheren t ins tab i l i ty , and to loca te i t p roper ly .

E v e n i f n a t u r a l m o m e n t s a r e n o t patterned o n mo men t s o f sp i r i t ,Sprigge i s co r r ec t t o o b se rv e a k in sh ip b e tween th e two ; h e a l so n o te sS a n t a y a n a ' s account o f w h e r e t h e analogy l ies . T h e fo rw ard ten s ion of an a tu r a l mo men t sy mb o l i ze s an u n re s t , an d th e f ee l in g o f u n re s t f o u n d insp i r i t , because i t i s genera ted by such a tens ion in mat te r , must bear ar ea l an a lo g y to th e u n fe l t u n re s t o f t h a t t en s io n . To Sp r ig g e , t h i s acco u n ti s s o m e w h a t o d d , in t h a t t h e f e l t u n re s t i n th e spirit is ineffectual , a nd tothat ex te n t , t h e an a lo g y wi th n a tu r a l m o m en t s is f aul ty . Ho w ev e r fo rSan tayan a a ll kno w ledg e dep en ds on n on- l i te ra l ana log ies , which is to sayanalog ies tha t a re usefu l in some ways , and hopelessly misleading ino t h e r s . P e r h a p s t h e o d d n e s s noted here is a g en e ra l f ea tu r e o fSan tay an a ' s ep ip h en o men a l i sm ( a s Sp r ig g e seems to su g g es t ) , an d in d eedp e r m e a t e s h i s w h o l e e p i s t e m o l o g y .

A s s u m e , t h e n , t h a t t h e r e i s "some k in sh ip to men ta l ev en t s" o n th ep a r t o f n a tu r a l mo men t s . Hav in g q u es t io n ed San tay an a ' s o wn acco u n t oft h e k i n s h i p , Sprigge o f f e r s an a rg u men t l ead in g f ro m th i s a s su mp t io n to ap an p sy ch i s t pos i t ion , [ see p ag e 5 ab o v e ] Th i s v e ry g en e ra l a rg u m en ttu rns on gener ic un iversa ls o r essences , and the ques t ion which of these i ssh a red b y th e two k in d s o f mo m en t s . A t ju s t t h i s p o in t , h o wev e r , h emig h t b e t t e r ap p ea l t o h i s ad mi rab ly c l ea r d e f in i t io n o f p an p sy ch i sm,wh ich h in g es o n sen t i en ce . Th e q u es t io n wo u ld th en b eco me wh e th e r o rn o t sentience is c o m m o n t o b o t h n a t u r a l m o m e n t s a n d m o m e n t s o f sp i ri t.Bu t a c l a im th a t n a tu r a l m o m en t s a r e sen t i en t is o n e n o t su p p o r t ed b yth e t ex t . T h e fo llo win g p assag e vindicates Spr igge ' s f ind ing of an ana logyb e t w e e n m o m e n t s o f e x i s t e n c e a n d m o m e n t s of spirit; yet it alsov ind ica tes my c la im tha t consc iousness i s no t a par t o f the ana logy:

To assert that the substance of anything, much less of the whole world,was psychic, and to call it mind-stuff, would be inadmissible if we meant thatm inu te bu t conscious spirits were th e stuff of it: we have jus t seen th emanifest impossibility of that. But the phrase becomes legitimate andsignificant if it serves only to remind us that physical, like spiritual, existencemust be intensive, centred in each of its parts, and capable of inner change aswell as of collateral reduplication.5

T hi s las t sen ten ce i s typ ica l o f the passages Sp r igge i s ques t ion ing . I ts e e m s t o m e t h a t Santayana i s he re re f er r ing to Wil l, an d I have no t b eenab le to f ind any passages which make me doubt th is supposi t ion . As no tedear l ie r , Wil l i s qu i te c lear ly no n-se n t ie n t , non -consc iou s . I ha rp on th isp o in t b ecau se , a s th e above passage ind ica tes , San tayana ob jec ts to the useof psycholog ica l te rms in the descr ip t ion of na ture i f these invo lveco n sc io u sn ess ; but i f consciousness is excluded, h e b e c o m e s m o r epermiss ive . Such a resu l t i s to be expec ted f rom h is on to logy . He g ives tospirit an ex t r eme ly n a r ro w in te rp re t a t io n , an d r e j ec t s an y p an p sy ch i s t

See page 379. The comma following "intensive" is missing in the one-volume edition ofRB.


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14 OVER HEAR D IN SEVILLEworld containing spiritual units of existence, or so I have argued.However the narrow interpretation of spirit permits matter to fill a largerconc eptual space. Acco rdingly, he displays a com plem entary indifferenceto those forms of panpsychism which use terms from psychology, butexplicitly renounce consciousness as a part of them. So long as suchtheories provide for real change, they can be seen as viable, if misguided,accounts of the world; they are "vanishing" forms of panpsychism, andalmost merit the designation "materialist."

When the elements of the psychic universe are admitted to be unconscious,the distinction from materialism becomes verbal. [378]There is no doubt that Santayana considers making comparisons

between some aspects of our experience and the reality outside. The issueraised by Sprigge concerns the nature of this extrapolation; which aspectsare genuinely comparable? Santayana is highly suspicious of analogieswhose attraction rests on the clarity of some intuition of essence. Thelucidity of a concept, for instance a mathematical time scale, can lure amind (often a logical mind inclined to philosophy) to impose thisstructure on the world. Rather than the clear intuitions at the surface ofexperience, a better indication of the nature of things might be expectedfrom deeper, less distinct stirrings in the soul (such as a sense ofrestlessness). These will be better signs of Will in us, or of animal faith,since they emanate from deeper levels of the psyche.Thus we should "discount" many of the inferences we are tempted tomake about the world experienced, by comparison with aspects of thatexperience. Our guide must be the common sense world given to us byanimal faith, whose existence we can doubt only at times, if at all. Thatwe are forced to this philosophically embarrassing position is the result ofhis sceptical analysis of knowledge; but his conclusion is that, on questionsof knowledge, we must start by accepting the world of our animal faith.In seeking the relation between some aspect of experience and reality,then, the existing world is the starting point, and we ask how theexperience best fits in with our beliefs about that world. In his critique ofempiricism, Santayana attacks the opposite inclination to infer somethingabout the world from an aspect of experience, and to permit the clarityof some intuition to lead us to question some deep or inevitable belief.Accordingly to the question of what sort of consciousness might beexpected to spring from animal activity, Santayana's answer is thatsomething original and unique can be expected - option 2 at the end ofSprigge's paper, without the option 3a. Santayana believes that theemergence of transcendental centres of experience in nature is aremarkable event which adds something wholly novel to a pre-existing,non-sentient realm of matter.

Angus Kerr-LawsonUniversity of Waterloo


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George SantayanaThe following selection is taken from George Santayana, to appear in 1985 inthe Twayne United States Authors Series; it is printed by permission ofTwayne Publishers, a division of G. K. Hall and Co.

T h e S e c o n d World War found Santayana old but philosophically stillvigo rou s in Italy. Cut off from funds and from his intellectual outlets inthe U nite d States , he retired to the safety of a conven t in Ro m e. T ho ug hthere was considerable interest in the expatriate sage after the arrival inRome of Allied forces , he never regained much philosophical influence inAm erica. Since his death th ere has be en a slow increase of interest in hiswork. Many of his better kn ow n books are now available in paperback.Graduate students are, once again, writ ing dissertations on the technicalaspects of his philosop hy. A n increasing num ber of undergradu atecourses utilize his major, and in some cases his posthumously publishedworks. Most important of all , man y thoughtful laymen read his writ ingsfor their intrinsic beauty as well as the moral enlightenment they convey.

Santayana's intellectual heritage is genu inely cosmo politan. His worksshow a com pl ete mastery of th e philoso phic al classics. But his readin gwas far mo re extensive than even this . H e was thorough ly acquaintedwith the great works of literature of both East and West. He readvoluminously in four or five languages and kept abreast of the bestscholarly work of his day. He studied the great works of religion inpainstaking detail: his The Realm of Spirit shows extensive familiarity withBuddhist and Hindu sources and he turned himself into an expert on theBible in preparation for his The Idea of Christ in the Gospels. He was wellaware of the scientif ic developments of his day and formed his philosophyin such a way as to make no claim concerning the physical structure ofman or the world. H e tho ugh t it the function of science to determinethe facts about nature as best such facts may be known by man;philosophy and religion were to yield to empirical investigationconcerning facts* even though they retained their supremacy in the moralsphere .

In spite of his acquaintance with the broad outline of science,Santayana gladly proclaimed himself "an ignorant man, almost a poet."This is no overstatement or false humility. The heart of science is in itsdetails, and Santayana never had any interest in the narrow specifics ofthe physical orde r. H e thoug ht that scientif ic views wou ld com e and gowith the passage of t ime. H e lacked the mathematical backgroun d toc o m p r e h e n d them and the sustaining interest in minutiae to permit himto get absorbe d in them . His belief in the autono my of sciencefunctioned l ike a double edged s word. On the one hand, it served tocontrol the excesses of philosophers in trying to compete with science onthe basis of m ere speculation or moral dem and s. O n the othe r han d,however, it placed sharp limits on the scope of science, restricting its valid


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16 OVERHEARD IN SEVILLEapplication to the sphere of na ture alon e. By ceding matter to science,Santayana felt liberated from having to attend to the details of either.He felt he could concentrate on the investigation of the moral life.

This relative inattention to detail also shows itself in Santayana'strea tm en t of philosophical them es. In his opinion, philosophy is no t thescience of careful argument but the art of vision. His attempt was tofocus on what he called "the large facts," the main rhythms andrequirements of nature as they impact on human life and personality.T h er e are few explicit argu m ents in his philosophical works. It is notthat he paid no hee d to carefulness and precision in tho ug ht. On th econtrary, his philosophical system has a remarkable unity and coherence.It is just that h e tho ug ht arg um ents were like the beams that hold up ahouse; while essential to a sound structure, they are not to be displayed asdecoration o r as th e furniture of room s. As a result, only the conclusionsof his arguments appear in his books. T h e argu m ents themselves can bereconstructed, but in his view their only value is utilitarian.

Santayana's philosophical heritage fully reflects his own commitmentto philosophy as articulate vision. As a graduate student and in lateryears, he studied the argum ents of othe rs carefully. It is rep orte d thatwhen an impertinent priest attempted to bring Santayana back into thefold by arguments of a Thomist persuasion, the old philosopher quotedhim th e details of the view from Aq uinas in Latin. Much as he was athome with arguments, he felt no temptation to follow those whodeveloped the ir philosophy in lockstep with the march of reasoning. Hefelt that arguments could rage forever on each contested principle orview. N o philosophical position could ever be supp orted to thesatisfaction of each opposing camp. In the end , everything would ha ngon ou r basic principles and personal com mitm ents. It is not that thesecannot be criticized; on the contrary, they must be if one's philosophy isto escape the fate of "dreaming in words." But any such critique mustitself presuppose some ultimate principles as yet uncriticized. He argues inthe first chapter of Scepticism an d Animal Faith that there is no indubitablestarting po int, no first princip le of criticism. As a result, the re can be nocertainty and no agreement in philosophy.

It is better, Santayana thinks, if philosophers own up to the truenature of their enterprise and abandon all pretense of scientific precision,evidential adequacy or universal tru th. T h e task of the think er is to"clean the windows of his soul," to evoke the most general of essences formo ral enligh tme nt. T h e chief issue, he says in the eloquen t Preface toScepticism a n d Animal Faith, is "the relation of man and of his spirit to theuniverse." Given the variety in hu m an n atu re and the imm ensity of thetopic, it is no accident that philosophers fail to agree and fall shy ofultimate truth. The truth itself will depend at least partly on the soulwhose windows we mu st clean. If we take this simple notion to hea rt, allmoral knowledge at once stands revealed as relative and philosophybecomes a mode of self-expression.

These convictions justify Santayana, at least in his own eyes, in


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GEORGESANTAYANA 17painting with a bro ad bru sh. His treatm ent of philosophical topics mayappear sketchy at times; this, he thinks, is due not to lack of care on hispart but to the fact that on certain subjects the human mind is not in aposition to know muc h. In his "Apologia Pro Mente Sua" in the Libraryof Living Philosophers volume devoted to his thought, he says that indecades of thought he has not had much enlightenment on the difficultsubject of the relation of the mind to the body. On th e issue of theultimate nature of matter (as an ontological, not a scientific category), heloudly declares that no enlightenment is possible: this ultimate principleof existence is like the whirlwind whose effects we see but whose innernature is inaccessible to mind.

As a result of his conviction that arguments fail to convince anddetails are inaccessible or fail to satisfy, many of Santayana's worksconstitute descriptions and re-desc riptions of his system as a wh ole. T h eaccoun ts are rema rkably consistent thro ug ho ut. T h e variations in hisexpression of the same ideas are rarely at odds with one another; on thecon trary, they are helpful in un dersta ndin g his real intent. But on th ewhole, later statements tend frequently to be but alternatives to theearlier ones withou t constituting any real advance. Th is, once again,may be justified by San tayana's belief tha t philosophy com municates no tby disclosing facts bu t by evok ing visions. In this light, we may think ofthe alternative descriptions of his system as varied stimuli intended toengage a variety of minds.This feature of Santayana's philosophy, no less than many others,brings to min d his similarity to Plato . Plato's deep est doctrin e was alsothat philosophical enlightenment could not be taught but only evoked.His impatience with the poets was perhaps a family feud; he himselfbecame a poet the moment he moved past mundane arguments andneared the ult imate. Plato's conviction that we have only myths to conveythe deep lessons literal language cannot bare appears to have beengeneralized by Santayana into a view of all language and thoug ht. Forhim, language, a human creation, functions as an instrument in theservice of cogn ition an d, in the en d, of life. It nev er captures the essenceof its object. Language is always symbolic; its adequacy is measured byhow well it expresses the thoughts of the speaker or how well it enablesus to grasp and use the object it reveals. A description, then , is not like aflashlight which discloses the corner of a room the way it is . It is closer toth e vision of the jaun dice d m an, in which the internal state of the agentand his instrument are inseparably reflected in the object.Santayana also agrees with Plato that there are real forms orstructures without which nothing cculd exist. Plato thou ght of theseforms as the prototypes of natural kinds and attributes: there was a formof man and a form of dog and a form of oak tree, as well as forms forjustice , wisdom and virtu e. Th ese forms or universals existed, in Plato'sopinion, both as structures and as standards for the objects in oureveryday world. Ordinary objects could exist only by "participating in" orborro win g the ir na tur e from these etern al, unch ang ing essences. Yet, at


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18 O V E R H E A R D I N SEVILLEthe same time, existing entities always fell short of fully manifesting thenature of the perfect forms. T h e measure of the faithfulness with whicha changing thing displayed its proper form was at once the measure of itsperfection . T h e aim of each thing inhabit ing this twilight world of ourswas to become more nearly what it can and ought to be, viz. a perfectthing of its kind or a full embodiment of its form.

Plato thou ght of these forms as general in nature. Th er e was onlyone form o f ma n. Each of us participated in this form to a greate r orlesser exten t. T h e mo re nearly we approx imated to this ideal of what aman should be, to true hum anity, the mo re perfect we would be. T h estandards existed eternally and altogether independently of the world orof our minds. If anything , they served as necessary condit ions of theexisten ce of ourselves and of the things around us. But nothing we coulddo would affect them; they were simply forms available for shaping theworld, if only the world would adopt them for the purpose.

Santayana studied Plato and Aristotle intensively for a year atCam bridge, wh en he took a year of leave in 1897 . H e was deeplyimpressed by Plato's treatment of universals but at the same time foundhimself repelled by the moral absolutism into whose service Plato, thesocial reform er, pressed them. W hy should we suppose, Santayana askedhimself, that forms are restricted to a small number, each endowed withmoral prerogatives? In Plato's dialogue, Parmenides, the young Socrates isdepicted as balking at the thought that there might be forms for hair anddirt and mud.' Why, Santayana demanded to know, should we not saythat every actual and every conceivable property and relation and thinghas a corresp ond ing form or essence? An d, most importantly, why shouldwe suppose that there is only one form of humanity, implying that thereis but on e m anne r in which h um an life may be perfected?

T h e d emoc ratic pluralism Santayana learned from William Jam essho w ed itself quickly at this crucial jun ctu re in his ph ilosophica ldeve lopm ent. H e could not mak e himself believe that all hum an psycheswere of one sort , that everyone worthy of the name would have to shareidentical hum an values . H e found hints even in Plato that hum an lifemight find fulfillment in a variety of different ways. In th e Republic,Plato distinguished three classes of individuals; members of each pursuedhappiness in their own divergent ways. Persons of'desire found fulfillmentin the production, consumption and accumulation of worldly goods;persons of courage sought excitement in action and adventure; persons ofwisdom gained their satisfaction in knowledge and the attendant well-ordered l ife. Of course, what Plato gave with one hand he took away withthe other: he thought that these types of human beings were themselvesaligned in order of ult imate perfection. The person of philosophicalwisdom constituted the closest approximation to what a human beingshould be; the consumer was a poor, distorted actualization of humanpoten tiality. Santayana cou ld no t in go od con scien ce belie ve this. It isnot that he had a high regard for the man who spent his l ife scratchinghis itches or consum ing bey ond his need s. But he did have a vivid moral


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GEORGE SANTAYA NA 19imagination and this enabled him to place himself in the shoes of otherswho lived by alien values.This empathy for alien souls, without a personal identification withtheir goals, enabled him to appraise oth ers m ore justly than a ferventmoralist. If the essence of humanity is what makes us human, is there noessence that makes us individually who we are? If forms are to beconceived as features or characteristics, no matter how complex, each ofus must have a uniq ue essence. Each person m ust, the n, be a perfectexemplification of himself, and if he changes, then a perfect replica ofthe new essence he assumes.This single move from the generic essence of mankind to specificessences for individuals radicalizes Santayana's philosophy. For themoment each of us is acknowledged as fully embodying an essence, formscease to function as standa rds of perfection. No thing can serve as astandard if we cannot fail to live up to it; since in at least one sense wecannot fail to be who we are, our form will structure us withoutprov iding a guide for action or a goal to reach. O n a mo re carefulanalysis of the moral life later on, Santayana reintroduces an account ofhow our natures demand certain actions and of how individual moralfailure is possible. But the rejection of Plato's claim tha t forms ar egeneric at once prepares the ground for Santayana's moral relativism.

It also op ens the d oo r to an actual infinity of essences. If eachcharacteristic or feature of every existent is an essence^ there is literallyno en d to the essences th er e are . We can see how essences must beinfinite in nu m be r in a variety of ways. If each n um be r is an essence,evidently essences mu st be infinitely n um ero us. Similarly, even if the reare only a finite number of things in the world, each can be seen to havean infinite number of properties in the following way. No item isidentical with any one of its features, / The item is, of course, also notidentical with the pro pe rty of not being identical with / Th is generatesanother property and so on, ad infini tum. Another way to get to the ideathat essences must be infinite may start by viewing the entire history ofthe world as a monstrously complex essence. Each change in this complexessence, no matter how minute, generates a different total essence. Sinceessences differ if any of their constituents or the order of theirconstituents differ, the most insignificant imagined change of the leastm olecule makes for a different total world-essence. T h er e is no limit tothe changes that are conceivable in this way, and each of them yields aslightly different possible world.

Santayana's indebtedn ess to Plato, the n, is extensive. It is byreflecting on the Platonic realm of forms that Santayana came up withtwo of his most characteristic and most remarkable philosophical views.The infinite realm of essence is conceived by him as enjoying the sameontolo gical status as Plato 's realm of forms. Each essence is eternally andchangelessly self-identical. Each serves as a possible cha racte r ofexistence, but has a sort of being which is independent of nature and ofm ind. An d Santayana's moral relativism is clearly conne cted to his


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20 OVERHEARD IN SEVILLErejection of Plato's view that as a result of generic forms, existence fallsinto natural species. The proliferation of human natures opens the doorto individualism which is as radical as any found in the annals ofphilosophy.Santayana's debt to Aristotle is no less evident than the Platonic tracesin his thought . The entire tone of Santayana's moral philosophy isAristotelian. The sharp contrast between moral and intellectual virtuerecurs in Santayana in the form of the distinction between the life ofreason and the spiritual life. The Greek notion of reason as moderat ingand harmonizing the passions is prominently present in Santayana'saccount of the moral life. And the topics treated in Aristotle's greatNicomachean Ethics not only recur in a number of Santayana's books, butvirtually each discussion of them reflects Aristotle's arguments orconclusions.Aristotle's influence is most pronounced, however, in the basiccategories in terms of which Santayana chose to think. For one,Santayana was satisfied that individual existents were composites ofmatter and form. The form, of course, was an essence selected forembodiment from among an infinity of alternatives. The matter wasconceived by him as the sheer thrust of existence, "the insane emphasis"that accrued to certain essences. Since no essence could render itself oranother existent, essences could not account for the raw energy orselective force of the material com ponent. M atter, for Santayana, had nointrinsic properties at all; at any rate , no conceivable property of it couldaccount for the role it plays in the world. Viewed in this light,Santayana's matter closely resembles Aristotle's prime matter or purepotentiality. I say that the two notions closely resemble one anotherinstead of being identical because Aristotle thought of the potential assomehow passive, while Santayana maintains that matter is the sole sourceof existence and activity. T his last disag reem ent is of central importancefor Santayana's metaphysics: it is what makes him a materialist who deniesany efficacy to essence and to mind. Apart from this difference, however,Santayana agrees wth Aristotle that matter in its purity is the facelesscounterpart of form.

Santayana also borrows from Aristotle the concept of activity.Activity in this sense is contrasted with process and differs widely fromwhat we normally understand by the word "action." In its simplestsignification it is something we do for its own sake. Since in such caseswe aim simply at what we do, there is no distinction between the meansand the end we intend, between the doing and the deed that isaccomplished. Such activity represents something that is self-contained,something that aims at no product beyond itself. It is on this model thatSantayana conceived of mind. Consciousness, he thought , is a dead-end inthe causal processes of nature. It is an activity in Aristotle's sense, thesecond actuality of a natura l body. Th is flowering of human organicprocesses is both an end-product without further issue and an end-in-itself, and as such intrinsically valuable.


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GEORGE SANTAYAN A 21This conception of mind suggests that Santayana's ultimate view ofnature was framed not in the terms of modern science but in those ofpotentialities actualized. He thought of existence simply as actualized

potentiality and defined matter as the "indefinite potentiality of allthings." There is evidence that he believed causation itself was but aprocess that converts potentialities into act, albeit in a way thatnecessarily remains hidden to the mind.Reflection on this approach to a philosophy of nature might suggesttha t Santayana failed to profit from th e advances of m od ern science. In asense, this is absolutely true. In one place he remarks that in his youththere was widespread belief in "sovereign laws" of nature and in theultim ate adequ acy of science to discover them . All of this seems to havefallen apart later, following the contributions of Einstein and Heisenbergto physical theory, combined perhaps with a better understanding of thenature of the scientific enterprise. In Santayana's work there is littlerefere nc e to the findings of science. T h e scientists in whom he shows aninterest, such as Freud, deal largely with psychological matters, matterswhich are of importance to Santayana because of their bearing on thena tu re of m an. Physical theo ry interes ts him very little: he thinks it toofar from the central task of philosophy, which is an exploration of thenature of the good life.But there is an even deeper reason for Santayana's return to what we

may think are pre-scientific categories. In the end, science has notsucceeded and cannot succeed in revealing to us the mystery of existence.We can learn more and more about the physical structures that surroundus and such knowledge is superbly useful for the manipulation of theenvironment. But it never penetrates below the level of conjunctions andlaw-like regu larities. T h e bafflement of the prim itive man at existenceitself, at seeing anything come into being or recede into nothingness,stays with us in spite of everything science tells us about the world.Scientists attempt to show how one type of event causes another byinterposing another sort of event between the two; ingesting a poison issupposed to cause dea th by imm obilizing the muscles or th e lungs. Butwhat such an account misses is the ultimate mystery that surrounds thegen eration of anythin g. No matte r how many types of events areinterposed between the cause and the effect, the problem of how one cango from the first event to the very next, no matter how close or howsimilar to it, rem ains unsolved. How can any thing ever give rise toanything else? Though science may provide us with an exhaustive accountof the details of change, the ordinary man and the philosopher will endno less baffled by the metaphysical problem of how life and death,coming into being and passing away, how change itself is possible.

The categories of potentiality and actuality are thought by Santayanato be less alien to the average mind than the language of laws andfunctions employ ed in th e sciences. Th ese catego ries, frankly inte rpr ete d, forever rem ind us that we do not understand. They are adequate tosummarize the patterns and tendencies of human nature and the human


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22 OVER HEAR D IN SEVILLEworld. Beyond that, they do and preten d to do nothing . Th is lack ofpretense is itself a boon; at least we avoid the temptation of supposingthat we can be omniscient or that science will meet all human needs andeliminate the symbolic life of the mind, religion and philosophy.Santayana's return to Aristotelian categories, then, is not an attempt todeny th e usefulness or th e validity of science. It is, on th e contra ry, th eresult of an effort to put science in its proper, human context so that wemay celebrate it without illusions and live without becoming its dupes.

This notion of the ultimate metaphysical inadequacy of scienceremind s one of the attitud e of Scho penh auer. In differentiating thephysical world of space, time and causal connection from the underlying,primordial world of will, Schopenhauer explicitly limited science to theExploration of the laws of phe nom ena. T h e ultimately real world of willWas one to which each of us could have internal access. It m ade for allthe change that occurred in the physical world but could itself never becaptured by any extern al m ethod of investigation. Santayana himselfflirted with using th e term "will" and "p rimal will" to designate theultimate generative principle of all thing s. Th is is not an unattractivedesignation; t he word "will" suggests jus t t he sort of u npred ictable,creative energy that seems to underlie the world. But Santayana clearlydisagrees with Schopenhauer on the issue of access to this force; thoughhe thinks that it runs through our bodies, he is convinced that we canhave no cognitive contact with it at all. And there is a furtherdisagreement if will is taken too literally or in too mentalistic a way. ForSantayana thinks there is little reason to believe that this primordialenerg y resem bles any thing conscious or men tal. It is grega rious inhurrying from form to form, but it has no purpose, no intelligence, no

John LachsVanderbilt University


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R e p o r t on the 1983 Annua l Meet i ngThe Santayana Society celebrated the one hundred and twentieth birthday ofGeorge Santayana at its December 1983 meet ing in the Sheraton-Boston hote l .

Hilary Putnam of Harvard Univers i ty opened the program, with greetingsfrom his col leagues of Santayana's university. Next, Francis Sparshott of VictoriaCol lege , Univers i ty of T o r o n t o r e a d a birthday poem. These are printed below.

Then Wil l iam G. Holzberger of Bucknell University discussed the history of his four-volumeedit ion of Santayana letters. The project was initiated by Daniel Cory, whohad previously publishedselected editions of Santayana letters in 1955 and1 9 6 3 . Appreciat ing thecare and thoroughness ofHolzberger's The CompletePoems of George Santayana,Cory requested Holzber-ger's aid in col lect ing,edit ing, and publishing anedit ion of letters thatwould be as comple te asposs ible . When Cory diedin 1 9 7 2 , the full task wasundertaken by Holzberger . Through ex tens iveresearch, over 2000 lettershave been located andprepared for publication.In addit ion, there areexplanatory notes for theletters , that provide valuable source material as wellas identifications of persons and issues. Th e University of Illinois Press hasagreed to publish the edition of le tters . Holzbergerc losed his address withquotes from numerousletters illustrating the artistry of Santayana as amaster writer.

H e r m a n J. Saatkamp, Jr., of the University of Tampa, gave a brief responsebased on Santayana's own account of three stages of his thought: (1) materialism -no longer wavering between alternate v iews of the world, (2) the forms of theg o o d are divergent - enabl ing one to overcome moral and ideal provincialism, and

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