About the Work
Scepticism and Animal Faith is a work of philosophy by George Santayana, published under the subtitle Introduction to a System of Philosophy. It is a sustained, closely argued inquiry into the foundations of knowledge, written in a distinctive prose that moves between rigorous analysis and lyrical reflection. The book is not a textbook or a survey; it is a personal investigation, conducted in the first person, in which the author sets out to discover what can be known with certainty and what must be accepted on trust. Its central drama is the encounter between radical doubt and the inescapable compulsion to believe—the tension named in the title.
The work belongs to the tradition of critical philosophy that runs from Descartes through Hume and Kant, but Santayana approaches the problems of knowledge with a temperament and a set of conclusions that are entirely his own. He describes his project as “one more system of philosophy,” yet immediately qualifies this by insisting that his system is “not mine, nor new”—that it merely gives accurate and circumspect form to convictions already present in the depths of the soul, principles to which any reader already appeals when he smiles. He presents himself not as a discoverer of new truths but as a clarifier of old ones, one who distrusts high guesses and sympathises with the workaday opinions of mankind.
The book is addressed to the general philosophical reader rather than to specialists. Santayana explicitly declines to place himself at the heart or origin of the universe, or to draw its periphery. He lays siege to truth only as “animal exploration and fancy may,” approaching reality from one quarter and then another, expecting it to be not simpler than his experience but far more extensive and complex. He stands in philosophy exactly where he stands in daily life: accepting the same miscellaneous witnesses, bowing to the same obvious facts, making conjectures no less instinctively, and admitting the same encircling ignorance. This stance—at once humble and defiant—shapes every page of the argument that follows.
Context
Santayana wrote Scepticism and Animal Faith as the introduction to a larger philosophical system, the Realms of Being, which he was developing in the later phase of his career. The book’s front matter lists his earlier works, including The Life of Reason in five volumes, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, The Sense of Beauty, and Character and Opinion in the United States, with its reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and academic life in America. These titles indicate the range of his interests—aesthetics, religion, poetry, and the philosophy of mind—and suggest the intellectual background against which the present work was conceived.
The book was first published in the early 1920s, with subsequent impressions following in the middle years of that decade. It appeared at a moment when philosophy in the English-speaking world was increasingly preoccupied with questions of knowledge, meaning, and the foundations of science. Santayana’s response to these preoccupations was characteristically independent. He was not a member of any school; he had studied under William James at Harvard but had developed his own naturalistic and materialist position, which set him apart from both the pragmatists and the idealists who dominated the philosophical landscape of his time.
The Preface makes clear that Santayana is aware of writing against the grain of contemporary philosophy. He notes that a philosopher today would be ridiculous who had not strained his dogmas through the utmost rigours of scepticism, and who did not approach every opinion with the courtesy and smile of the sceptic. Yet he also insists that the brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts justifies no belief in particular. The book is thus situated at a particular historical moment—one in which scepticism had become a required posture for serious philosophers—and it seeks to move beyond that posture without abandoning its insights.
Santayana’s materialism, which he describes as “apparently the only one living,” is a further mark of his independence. He does not profess to know what matter is in itself, and he waits for men of science to tell him what matter is, in so far as they can discover it. He is not surprised or troubled at the abstractness and vagueness of their ultimate conceptions, asking how our notions of things so remote from the scale and scope of our senses could be anything but schematic. This combination of materialism with a profound respect for the limits of human knowledge is one of the book’s most distinctive features.
Structure of the Book
The book unfolds as a continuous argument in twenty-seven chapters, moving from the problem of criticism through the experience of radical doubt to the discovery of essence and, finally, to the rehabilitation of belief. The early chapters establish the impossibility of a first principle of criticism and the nature of scepticism as a form of belief. Chapter I argues that criticism cannot begin without some dogmatic criterion, and Chapter II defines scepticism as a suspicion of error about facts—a suspicion that itself presupposes facts and is therefore a form of belief. Chapter III, “Wayward Scepticism,” examines the various forms doubt takes in ordinary life, from the precariousness of religious belief to the literary character of history.
The middle chapters conduct the sceptical reduction to its limit. Chapters IV and V question the reality of self-consciousness and change, arguing that the sense of a complex, changing existence involves assumptions that cannot be verified in intuition. Chapter VI, “Ultimate Scepticism,” carries doubt to the point of denying change, memory, and the reality of all facts—a position Santayana describes as false but tenable intuitively. Chapter VII, “Nothing Given Exists,” draws the conclusion that nothing present to intuition can be said to exist, and Chapter VIII finds authorities for this conclusion in Indian philosophy and transcendental idealism.
The turning point comes with Chapter IX, “The Discovery of Essence,” which identifies the indubitable residue left by scepticism: the pure essence, stripped of all adventitious significance, which is established before the mind with an immense cognitive certitude. Chapter X explores some uses of this discovery, and Chapter XI, “The Watershed of Criticism,” marks the transition from scepticism to animal faith. From this point the argument turns toward the positive: Chapters XII through XVIII examine identity and duration attributed to essences, belief in demonstration, essence and intuition, belief in experience, belief in the self, the cognitive claims of memory, and the thesis that knowledge is faith mediated by symbols.
The final chapters extend the analysis to substance, nature, and spirit. Chapters XIX and XX consider belief in substance and objections to it. Chapter XXI, “Sublimations of Animal Faith,” and Chapter XXII, “Belief in Nature,” develop the positive account of natural belief. Chapter XXIII finds evidences of animation in nature, and Chapter XXIV examines literary psychology. Chapter XXV treats the implied being of truth, Chapter XXVI the discernment of spirit, and Chapter XXVII compares Santayana’s criticism of knowledge with other such criticisms. The book thus has a clear arc: from the impossibility of criticism without dogma, through the most radical doubt, to the discovery of essence, and finally to the vindication of animal faith as the ground of all knowledge and action.
Inside the Book
The Preface: A System That Is Not One
Santayana opens by calling his book “one more system of philosophy,” yet insists it differs in spirit and pretension from what usually bears that name. His system, he says, is “not mine, nor new”: he merely articulates principles the reader already appeals to when he smiles. Beneath overt parrot beliefs lie deep convictions on which friendship might be built. He respects orthodoxy—not the orthodoxies of schools or nations, which shift from age to age, but the shrewd orthodoxy maintained everywhere by the sentiment and practice of laymen. Common sense, in its rough dogged way, is technically sounder than special schools, each of which squints and overlooks half the facts in eagerness to find the key to the whole in some detail. He distrusts high guesses and sympathizes with the old prejudices and workaday opinions of mankind: ill expressed but well grounded. Any novelty in his version aims only to give everyday beliefs a more accurate and circumspect form, obviating occasions for sophistry. He does not pretend to stand at the heart or origin of the universe, nor to draw its periphery. He lays siege to truth only as animal exploration and fancy may, from one quarter then another, expecting reality to be not simpler than his experience but far more extensive and complex. He stands in philosophy exactly where he stands in daily life, accepting the same miscellaneous witnesses, bowing to the same obvious facts, making conjectures no less instinctively, and admitting the same encircling ignorance.
His system is accordingly “no system of the universe.” The Realms of Being he speaks of are not parts of a cosmos but only kinds or categories of things he finds conspicuously different and worth distinguishing. He does not know how many things may fall under each class, nor what other realms may exist to which he has no approach. Logic, like language, is partly free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing the diversities of things; no language or logic is right by being identical with the facts it expresses, but each may be right by being faithful to them, as a translation may be faithful. He tries to think straight in such terms as are offered him, clearing his mind of cant and artificial traditions, but does not ask anyone to think in his terms if he prefers others.
His system, save in the mocking literary sense, is “not metaphysical.” It contains much criticism of metaphysics and some refinements in speculation, like the doctrine of essence, unfamiliar to the public. He does not disclaim metaphysics because he dislikes dialectic or disdains immaterial things; indeed it is of immaterial things—essence, truth, and spirit—that he speaks chiefly. But logic, mathematics, and frankly literary psychology are not metaphysical, though their subject-matter is immaterial. Metaphysics, properly so called, is dialectical physics, an attempt to determine matters of fact by logical, moral, or rhetorical constructions. It arises from a confusion of those Realms of Being he is most careful to distinguish. It is neither physical speculation nor pure logic nor honest literature, but a hybrid of the three, materializing ideal entities, turning harmonies into forces, and dissolving natural things into terms of discourse. Speculations about the natural world, like those of the Ionian philosophers, are not metaphysics but cosmology. In natural philosophy he is a decided materialist—apparently the only one living—and knows idealists are fond of calling materialism, too, metaphysics, in an angry tone, to discredit it by assimilating it to their own systems. But his materialism is not metaphysical. He does not profess to know what matter is in itself, and feels no confidence in those esprits forts who, leading lives of vice, thought the universe must be composed of dice and billiard-balls. He waits for men of science to tell him what matter is, and is not troubled by the abstractness of their ultimate conceptions: how should our notions of things so remote from the scale of our senses be anything but schematic? But whatever matter may be, he calls it—
Scepticism as a Form of Belief
The argument opens by asking whether one can criticize without a dogmatic criterion, and answers that one hardly can. Even a hypothetical criticism throws doubt on a point of fact and assumes dogmatically that fathers and children exist. Scepticism is a suspicion of error about facts, and to suspect error about facts is to share the enterprise of knowledge, in which facts are presupposed and error possible. The sceptic may be shrewd, may have pierced to a truth of nature behind current illusions; since his criticism may be true and his doubt well grounded, they are assertions, and if sincere he maintains them stoutly. Hence scepticism is a form of belief; dogma cannot be abandoned, only revised in view of some more elementary dogma not yet doubted. The sceptic may be right in every point except in fancying his criticism radical and himself altogether a sceptic.
The vital compulsion to posit and believe something even in doubting would be ignominious if the beliefs forced on us by life and intelligence were always false; then one would honour the sceptic’s hopeless effort and despise the dogmatist’s subservience to illusion. The sequel is to show that intelligence is by nature veridical and its ambition to reach truth sane and capable of satisfaction, even if each effort fails; but first the author must justify faith in many subsidiary beliefs concerning animal economy, the human mind, and the world they flourish in.
That scepticism intervenes in philosophy at all is an accident of human history, due to unhappy experience of perplexity and error. Had all gone well, assertions would be made in dogmatic innocence. Nevertheless a philosopher today would be ridiculous who had not strained his dogmas through the utmost rigours of scepticism, and who did not approach every opinion with the courtesy and smile of the sceptic. The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts justifies no belief in particular, nor assures him that not to live would not be safer and saner; to be dead and have no opinions would not be to discover truth, but if all opinions are necessarily false it would at least not sin against intellectual honour. He resolves to push scepticism as far as he logically can, even at the price of intellectual suicide.
Wayward Scepticism
Criticism surprises the soul in the arms of convention. Children insensibly accept the suggestions of sense and language, showing initiative only in wilfulness and private superstition, soon corrected by education or broken off by custom, fact, or derision. Belief settles into sullenness and apathy to a narrow circle of vague assumptions, clung to for lack of other footing—the philosophy of the common man, an old wife that gives no pleasure yet cannot be lived without, and whose character is resented when aspersions are cast on it.
The tender cuticle of this homely philosophy is religious belief: really the least vital and most arbitrary part of human opinion, the outer ring of the fortifications of prejudice, and for that reason most jealously defended, since it is there, at the least defensible point, that rage and alarm at being attacked at all are first aroused. People are not naturally sceptics; they are dogmatists angrily confident of maintaining all their habits. Integral minds, pupils of a single coherent tradition, regard their religion as certain, sublime, and the only rational basis of morality and policy. Yet religious belief is terribly precarious, partly because arbitrary (in the next tribe or century it wears a different form), partly because, when genuine, it is spontaneous and continually remodelled, like poetry, in the heart that gives it birth.
The Denial of Change and the Indian Vision of Illusion
The argument opens with a tenet held by many deep-voiced philosophers: that all change is illusion. This alone, Santayana contends, suffices to abolish existence in his sense. Such thinkers posit a changeless substance or pure Being instead of change, but a substance untouched by change—even in its distribution—could be the substance of nothing found in the world or happening in the mind. It would have no more lodgement in existence than pure Being, which is evidently only a logical term. Pure Being truly describes everything, existent or not; if anything exists, pure Being exists in it, but only as pure colour exists in all colours—never separately. In denying change, these philosophers deny all existence, though none have lived up to the doctrine; they inadvertently retain both existence and change. The reality they attribute to the absolute comes not from the idea of pure Being but from the strain of movement within themselves and the vast rumble of universal mutation that hypnotised them.
The Indians, by contrast, insisted most sincerely on the non-existence of everything given, even adjusting their moral regimen to this insight. Life is a dream, they say; all experienced events are illusions. In dreaming of nature and ourselves we are deceived, even in imagining that we exist and are deceived. Some aver there is a universal dreamer, Brahma, slumbering in all of us, who is the reality of our dreams and their negation. But since Brahma is unqualified by any illusory existence and annuls them all, there is no need to distinguish him from the state of redeemed souls or from the Nirvana into which lives flow when they happily cease, becoming aware that neither they nor anything else has ever existed.
Santayana declines, across the chasm of language and tradition, to accuse these systems of self-contradiction. Truth and reality, in the mouths of prophets, often have a eulogistic rather than scientific force; if it is better to elude existence and find safety in pure Being, there may be dramatic propriety in saying the saved view is true. He confesses little sympathy with this egotism of the redeemed: the blessed, in giving out that he does not exist in his sins because they cannot distinguish him, appear deceived. He suspects the Indians mean that the principle of his existence—sin, guilt, passion, mad will, very much what he calls animal faith—is an evil principle. Since this assertiveness is wrong morally, and its influence alone leads him to posit existence, if he were healed morally he should cease to assert existence and would have ceased to exist.
This doctrine confirms the thesis that nothing given exists: only a dark principle, transcendental to the datum, calls it up or leads him to posit its existence. His sorry self sitting in the dark, one in a pack of open-mouthed fools hungry for illusion, is responsible for the spectacle; if no one came to the theatre, the actors would flit away like ghosts, the poets starve, the scenery topple into rubbish. Every part of experience, as it comes, is illusion; its source is animal nature, blindly labouring in a blind world. The Indian, with rare sensitiveness and recollection, lived: a religious love and childish absorption in appearances led him to remember them truly, and therefore to perceive they were illusions. The poet and disinterested philosopher frees himself from belief; this infinite chaos of cruel and lovely forms is all deceptive, unsubstantial, sinking into nothing again.
Santayana disregards the vehemence with which these saintly scholastics denounce the world. He likes the theatre not because he cannot perceive the play is fiction but because he does perceive it; if he thought it fact, he should detest it. He wishes to retain the valuable testimony of the Indians to the non-existence of the obvious—more valuable because their spectacle was tropical, harder to master than the political and romantic medleys filling the European mind. Amidst the serpents and hyænas of their mental jungle, those sages sat unmoved, too holily incredulous for fear. Western philosophers seem like unhappy animals in comparison, with their fact-worship, thrift, moral intolerance, and subservience to intellectual fashion.
Transcendental Idealism and the Frailty of Idealists
Transcendentalists, like Parmenides and the Vedanta, are driven to posit a dark, omnipresent principle that generates and annuls illusion. For the transcendentalist who abhors substance, this compensatory dogma is itself a denial of existence. This absolute thought or spirit cannot exist before it imputes existence; if it did, the principle of transcendental criticism would be disproved. Instead it is merely a principle, a logic, a self-creating programme, asserting itself without ground or occasion. Existence is repugnant to this spirit, which names the absolute law or fatality that one set of appearances insists on arising. Fichte’s saying that one who truly wills must will forever may mean the dateless will creates its own universe, unalterable in that phase—though he may also have meant that education could fix the will of mankind into unalterable habit, a view contrary to his own demand for new worlds for ever.
The frailty of idealists does not invalidate idealism. The principle that existence is always imputed, never found, remains cogent. The whole school of idealism denies that anything given can exist on its own account or be anything but a theme chosen by the spirit. Nothing existent can appear, and nothing specious can exist. An apparition is a thought, its life the thinker’s in thinking it. In itself, every appearance is an illusion.
Natural history confirms this. Animal sensibility is due to their own structure. Surrounding facts condition existence and reward apt habits, but animals survive mainly by insensibility to most vibrations. They develop instinctive responses in special organs, and their intuitions express these reactions. If a stimulus is cut off, material sources may continue but are not perceived; if a stimulus reaches the brain from another source, as in dreams, the same intuition appears without the material object. Feelings express bodily habit, not external things. The immediate visionary datum is never the intended object but a pathological symptom, a description proffered by that feeling for that object, translating digestibility into taste, salubrity into freshness, distance into size, refraction into colour, immersing everything in a moral medium.
These transcripts remain symbols in function. In a healthy life they become the familiar masks of nature. When imagination works in a void, it becomes illusion in the bad sense: still taken for a symbol when it is the symbol of nothing. If regarded in themselves, these data would cease to be illusions cognitively, as no existence would be suggested; but a practical man might still call them illusions because, free from error, they would be devoid of truth. To reach existences, intent must transcend intuition and take data for what they mean, not what they are. Intuition cannot reveal or discriminate any fact; it is pure fancy. A pain, when not sorrow at an event or a sign of injury, becomes sheer horror, a wanton little hell, existing absolutely; pain at its extreme may be said to be intuition devouring itself. Thus scientific psychology confirms the criticism of knowledge and the experience of life which proclaim that the immediate objects of intuition are mere appearances and that nothing given exists as it is given.
The Discovery of Essence
The loss of faith does not banish ideas; doubt tends to keep the imagination on the stretch, lending the spectacle of things a certain immediacy, suavity, and humour.
The Watershed of Criticism
At the summit of his survey, the narrator sees two opposite valleys opening below him. On one side lies a sweeping reason for scepticism that goes far beyond particular contradictions or fanciful dogma: nothing is ever present to him except some essence, so nothing actually seen in intuition is ever there, and cannot exist bodily or exert the power of objects met in action. If intuitions are taken as knowledge of facts, all experience is illusion and life a dream. But life would not be a dream if he abstained from believing in intuitions. The evidence of data is only obviousness; data are not witnesses. Content to recognise them as pure essences, he cannot be deceived—they are like works of literary fiction, coherent but making no claim to exist on their own account. Only when he hypostatises an essence into a fact, placing it in relations not given within it, does he trust animal faith rather than evidence. He turns to an assumed world because he has organs for turning, just as he expects a future because he is wound up to go on. No manifest essence can testify to such ulterior things; they must justify themselves, and their justification—whether in the realm of truth or the realm of nature—is itself only another object of belief, never of intuition.
Adopting this conclusion of many great philosophers, that all is illusion, the narrator makes two qualifications. The first is emotional and moral: he does not mourn the fatality but prefers speculation in the realm of essence, where no practical inconvenience follows, to alleged information about hard facts; it is no disgrace to be a poet if nature made one so. The second is more austere—no exceptions. He cannot admit that some particular essence, whether water, fire, atoms, or Brahma, is the intrinsic essence of all things, so that narrowing imagination to that one intuition would intuit the heart of existence. Such names may have partial propriety but no metaphysical privilege. Nor will he accept the modern expedient of calling illusion as a whole the universe: such critics probably revert to belief in discourse, halting their scepticism, and even if human experience were vouched for, it would be arrogance to posit it as the whole of being. The doctrine of essence thus renders his scepticism invincible and complete while reconciling him to it emotionally.
Turning toward animal faith, he sees that the insecurity of alleged knowledge is almost irrelevant to the mind’s natural effort to describe natural things. Discouragement in science comes not from failure but from a false conception of success. Knowledge of existences need not be literal: it is symbolic from the start, when a sound or smell signals danger or chance to an animal, and it fulfils its moral function by remaining symbolic to the end. Religion, language, patriotism, love, and science itself speak in symbols. Sensation and thought work in a conventional medium, as literature and music do; the experience of essence is direct, the expression of natural facts through that medium indirect—yet this indirection is the very condition of expression. The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life more truly than history. The arts of expression are extensions of normal perception; the Greeks, who set astronomy and history under Muses, honoured the fact that all the Muses are witnesses to the nature of things.
Essence, Eternity, and the Grounds of Belief
Essence is the most ideal and remote thing from existence, characterised by eternity—a form of being time can neither usher in nor destroy. Yet intuition peruses eternal being in time, so while attending to an essence it seems to endure, and on reverting to it a feature seems identical. These predicates of identity and duration are not properly predicated of essence in its own realm; they are confused temporal translations of its eternity, inevitable because attention is fundamentally animal uneasiness fostered by life amid material beings. In watching an image, one feature may persist while another disappears, and the man says not only “This, and still this,” but “This, and again this with a variation.” From the standpoint of essence a variation in this is absurd: each variant is eternally itself, a different essence. Material categories—existence, substance, change—are insinuated by the animal intellect into contemplation, transforming intuition into belief. Even if the critic retracts this hypostasis, the postulate remains that he is steadily perusing the same essence; without it nothing could be said or thought, yet it can never be proved by argument, since all argument presupposes it. It must be accepted as a rule of the game, if the game is thought worth playing. Neither declaring such assumptions false because groundless nor saying experienced security justifies them is correct: happy results prove an assumption suitable, worth cultivating as an art and repeating as a good myth, but corroboration has no logical force, since if deceived once one may be deceived again.
Belief in Demonstration
The essence which is the object of intuition is probably not simple; some plurality may lurk even in a purely qualitative datum, giving foothold for discrimination. This inward complexity does not prevent essences from being unambiguous objects to name or count, as my dog is one dog despite the infinite complexity of his organism, or as Euclidean space is a single definite essence yet subject to analysis—three dimensions, necessarily infinite, without scale. These implications lie in the essence from the beginning, even if intuition is slow to disentangle them; the simplicity first given was a pregnant simplicity. Intuition is a view of essence, attention fixed upon it, not the essence itself. When I say Euclidean space has three dimensions, I count them, passing from one felt direction to another and back for verification; if the operation is to be valid, each term must stay in its place and remain itself. But this self-identity of a term to which I revert cannot be given in either the first or the second intuition; all either can yield while it endures is the nature of the datum there, with its internal terms and relations.
The Identity of Essence and Contemplation
At the vanishing-point of scepticism—also the acme of life—intuition is absorbed in its object. Philosophers capable of intense contemplation, such as Aristotle where his thought becomes internal to spirit, have asserted that essence and the contemplation of essence are ultimately identical. The intuition of essence is oblivious of itself and cognisant only of essence, to which it adds nothing; the intensity of a thunder-clap is the chief part of its essence, as are the intolerableness of pain and the transitiveness of pleasure. If nothing had preceded or followed such an essence existentially, calling its presence an intuition would falsely imply a soul with a history. Very high numbers never thought of, and forms of torment nature provides no instrument for, remain essences only, without intuition; their being is constituted by essence alone and has not attained existence. Minds absorbed in contemplating an essence therefore attribute its presence and force to its own nature, not to their invisible intuition. Thought sinking into its object rises in deliverance out of contingency and change, sublimated into an essence—no loss, but the perfect fruition of experience. Thus Aristotle could call the realm of essence a deity and its inalienable being an eternal life; cognitive life’s ideal is sacrificial, to see each thing clearly and all things together under the form of eternity. To cease living temporally is intellectually to be saved—to become eternal.
Seen from outside, however, essence and the intuition of essence can never be identical.
Memory, Foresight, and the Directness of Knowledge
Memory presents its stored items at a distance yet sees them directly, by a present glance; the object’s remoteness in the past does not lessen this directness. Foresight works the same way: one foresees one’s death as directly as one’s dinner, not more vaguely and far more certainly. Memory and prophecy do in time what perception does in space, projecting the given essence onto an object remote from the living psyche—the material agent, “me here and now”—though never remote from the mind that posits it. An interval of time or space does not make the description of a removed event less ocular and immediate: one sees a peewit in the sky as directly as a watch in the hand, remembers a childhood kilt as directly as this morning’s umbrella. Difficulty in extending knowledge’s range is physical only—near-sightedness, or memory’s mechanism breaking down or being choked with parasitic fancies in old age.
Memory can sometimes reproduce an earlier scene almost exactly, but such precise repetition would exclude memory, since the sentiment of pastness would be wanting. Neither fulness nor precision of image is necessary to memory’s truth; the nerve of recollection lies in projecting the given essence—possibly vague or purely verbal—to a precise point in the natural past. Pictorial fulness and emotional reversion are unimportant and occur most often at unimportant points. Healthy memory excludes them because the bodily reaction to the old environment is hardly possible, and because the neurogram is modified by accidents of nutrition and waste. A scent of cedar chest may carry one back vividly to earliest childhood, but the images that seem to live again are creatures of present sophisticated fancy, seen romantically, not with a child’s eyes. One may truly recover knowledge of forgotten facts but not re-enact a past experience. A miraculous identity may be felt emotionally even when two descriptions differ in every sensible term—as in metaphors, myths, oneself as body and as mind, idolatry, or transubstantiation—because the vital reaction to the two appearances is the same.
Belief in memory has already been accepted, since without it one could not take the first step from the most speechless scepticism; but since this acceptance asserts realistic knowledge, the passage pauses to consider memory’s cognitive claims, on which all human beliefs are reared. The paradox of knowing the absent is posited in the past tenses of the verb; it is the paradox of knowledge itself, since intuition of essence is not properly knowledge but imagination. A frame is indispensable: “I must stand here to point there.” Yet if the present station were explicitly perceived and the whole immediate datum equally focussed, the picture would seem flat, perspective merely painted on. In living remembrance I am self-forgetful, thinking only of the past. Recollections are essences read like characters on a page, accepted as messengers for existences they imperfectly describe. The psyche is blind in herself; imagination is her only light and language, but she is a prior principle of choice and judgement in the dark, comprehending the light and feeling whether it falls on the object she was groping toward. This felt imperfection does not obstruct memory’s directness: memory transports me to the intended scene, and may see the past’s chief features in a truer perspective than original experience placed them.
Spirit, Animal Faith, and the Problem of Knowledge
The passage distinguishes “pure spirit” from the self situated in a body. If “myself” meant pure spirit—the light of attention by which essences appear—then it would not be confined to a particular place and time. From spirit’s viewpoint, the marvel is that it must be planted in the sensorium of a living animal, take that accidental station as its point of view, and dignify one momentary phase of animal life as the “Here” and “Now.” The puzzle is how spirit, seemingly the principle of universality and justice, can station itself in each atom and prostitute its light to “desperate blindness.” The problem is not the leap of knowledge but the fatality linking spirit to a material organ, so that it is tethered to its starting-point and cannot discover the stepping-stone it stands on because its whole life is leaping away from it. The answer is that spirit, with knowledge and all its prerogatives, is intrinsically a function of animal life; if not lodged in a body, spirit would not exist at all. This solution always seems to spirit “a little disappointing and satirical.”
Spirit need not leap to know, because in its range it is omnipresent and omnimodal. Events past, future, or spatially remote are not remote from spirit; they are merely hidden or placed in a particular perspective, like landscape features hidden by hedges and turns of a road. In choosing terms to describe them the psyche creates spirit, for they are essences given in intuition; in directing her action upon remote events, she creates intent in spirit. How can intent distinguish its hidden object so that an image may be truly or falsely projected “there”? The answer: it does so “by animal presumption,” positing whatever object instinct is materially predisposed to cope with, as in hunger, love, fighting, or expectation of a future. Since intuition of essence is not knowledge, knowledge can never lie in an overt comparison of one datum with another given at the same time. An object of faith—and knowledge is one species of faith—can never, even in direct perception, come within intuition’s circle. “Intuition of things is a contradiction in terms.” Philosophers who abstain from faith and reduce themselves to intuition of the obvious renounce all knowledge and live on passive illusions, driving us back to a nihilism only silence and death could express consistently.
Belief in Substance
The object of knowledge is designated by a bodily attitude, and the aesthetic qualities attributed to it depend on which sense is affected. This diversity in signs and descriptions for a single thing is normal; contradictions reside in the implication of terms, not in sensuous diversity. The example given is the moon: one man calls it a light in the sky; another, a virgin goddess; a more observant person, the crescent; and an astronomer, an extinct and opaque spheroidal satellite reflecting sunlight. All these descriptions envisage the same object, otherwise no relevance, conflict, or progress could obtain among them. What the object is in its complete constitution will never be known by man, but that it exists in known space and time with traceable physical relations is posited from the beginning—by the child when he pointed, and by the author when he saw him point.
Physical Substance, Not Metaphysical
The substance Santayana asks us to believe in is not some metaphysical abstraction but the physical stuff of the world met in action—the wood of the tree being felled, the wind stirring its branches, the flesh and bones of the man leaping aside. Belief in substance is not imported into perception by language or philosophy; it is the soul of animal perception from the outset and the perpetual deliverance of animal experience. As attention sharpens, our descriptions may be refined: the tree, wind, and man may reveal their elements and genesis, their first aspect proving a fused, composite appearance of elaborate internal processes. These more diffused substances are simply the constituents of the original ones—just as truly the realities confronted in action, just as open to perception, and just as much substances rather than essences: objects of belief posited in action, not images given in intuition. Notions of substance are therefore subject to error and reform—one may believe earth, air, water, and fire are the substances in all things, later discover fire is a form of motion, substitute the elements of chemistry, and remain in doubt whether light, space, and ether are substances. All such opinions would be equally fantastic and devoid of truth or falsehood if there were no substance before one in the first instance that one was attempting to describe.
By substance Santayana understands what modern philosophers often call an “independent object”—an unfortunate phrase, since precisely when a substance becomes my object it ceases to be independent of me in that capacity. What is independent of knowledge is substance, in that it has a place, movement, origin, and destiny of its own, no matter what I think. This self-existence is what the name object jeopardises and what the name substance asserts. Substances are called things when found cut up into fragments that move together and are recognisable individually; things are called substances when their diffuse qualitative existence is thought of rather than their spatial limits. Flour is a substance and a loaf is a thing, but there is nothing metaphysical about flour. Aristotle’s materia prima, Spinoza’s substance, souls, and Platonic Ideas, however, are perfectly metaphysical—and Santayana will later show that these are only nominal essences, incapable of being the substance of anything.
Substance does not reduplicate natural objects but is identical with them; what it might be said to back up and render significant would be given essences. Known substances require to be posited by animal faith on occasion of intuitions, as that which these intuitions report. But there is hardly any reduplication: such representation is probably quite heterogeneous from its original, and even when some specious similarity is presumed, it is a highly selective and idealised reproduction in a wholly different medium. Nature in being discovered is not reproduced but acquires a new dimension. Matters are ludicrously reversed if one imagines a pure spirit contemplating essences could invent a body and a world of matter; the body exists first, and in reacting on its environment kindles intuitions expressive of its vicissitudes. Substance is the speaker and substance is the theme; intuition is only the act of speaking or hearing, and the given essence is the audible word. The reproach that substance must remain unconceived rests on a false ideal of knowledge: intuition of essence is not knowledge but fancy and mental sport.
Animal Faith and Its Moral Perils
Animal faith is an expression of hunger, pursuit, shock, or fear, directed upon things; it assumes the existence of alien self-developing beings independent of knowledge but capable of being affected by action. It posits substances and locates them in the field of action centred on the animal, presupposing the agent is itself a substance able to act and be affected. Spirit suffers violence in animal faith, since spirit is inherently addressed to everything impartially and ready to be omniscient and just. In children, spirit is carried away by joy and innocently happy accepting any task if the body welcomes it. Ultimately spirit may wonder why it regards all things from one body’s viewpoint, and justice and charity then seem to lie in rescinding this illegitimate pre-eminence—an effort that might abolish all interests and views.
Such moral enlightenment is dangerous to animal life and to animal faith. If spirit’s qualms prevailed altogether, as in the saint and philosopher, one would rebel against natural interests, call them vain or sinful, and initiate discipline mortifying the body—becoming happier fasting than eating, regarding one’s body as a ridiculous mechanism, feeling no sympathy, aspiring only to save spirit in others while steeled to their animal vicissitudes. Santayana suspends this moral issue and reverts to the variations animal faith may undergo. A child could not be frightened without implicitly believing in a substance at hand, nor attempt to frighten others without assuming he is a substance himself. His assurance of substance is complete, but his knowledge of it is superficial; in action he identifies himself with his body, yet when asking what he is, he may say he is his thoughts or feel he is a soul. He conceives others’ substance in the same moral terms, imagining them as souls inhabiting and using bodies. Hence the notion of spiritual substances—a self-contradictory notion, because substance is material and spirit is an entelechy, or perfection of function realised; if a candle were a living being, wax would be its substance and light its spirit. Nevertheless, in practical life one counts lights without counting candles, and one lodges power in feelings and thoughts, conceiving one’s enemy as an evil purpose. Spirit can be confused with substance only when incarnate; hence superstition, myth, metaphysics, and the materialisation of words. Natural philosophy must remove these ghosts by discovering the true movement of that living substance on which animal faith means to be directed. Gradually the wiser heads see that all substances fall together into one system called nature, and that various metaphysical substances are modes of the single familiar substance called matter. Santayana draws up a list of chief false substances, beginning with souls—essentially moral forces conceived as magically ruling animal bodies, a notion fusing three different things belonging to three distinct realms of being, the first being the psyche, a mode of matter and a true dynamic unit.
Phenomenon, Truth, Fact, and Event
The passage examines the “proper” meaning of “phenomenon” retained by positivists, who deprecate metaphysics and wish to be satisfied with the data of science. If phenomena are essences given in intuition, they are not the objects of science nor facts in nature; if they are simply things, as they were to Plato, the positivist should call them substances, not phenomena, unless he is an unwitting metaphysician believing in some unknowable substance behind things. On truth: memory presents scenes that are not substantial, yet the present “now” is fleeting, and unsubstantiality is invading the present. In perplexities we appeal to a metaphysical plenum or standard called truth, where all facts are evident and judicial. Truth is a luminous shadow or penumbra that substance casts on the field of essence; unless a substance more physical than truth existed, truth would have no nucleus. Truth is ontologically secondary; its eternity is the wake of the ship of time. The heat and haste of men asserting what they think true shows truth is an object of animal faith, not pure contemplation.
Those who appeal to fact are looking toward substance, yet fact is supposed to be obvious as well as fundamental. The immediate datum is not a fact but an essence; a triple confusion arises between the given essence, the incidental intuition of it, and the substance of the natural world.
History and Philosophy as Literature
The argument resumes with a diagnosis of a peculiar modern confusion: myth is extinct and theology discredited, yet where doubt has become unfashionable, muddle persists. History is the prime example. Partly it is a science, through archaeology, antiquarian lore, and the study of documents; but in most historians it is also a dramatic art, claiming to rehearse the ideas and feelings of dead men. Even recorded words resist interpretation, and authentic phrases, like relics, carry an odour of antiquity that may transport us only into a romantic stratum of our own being. Classic historians compose speeches for their characters under the inspiration of Clio, or explain a hero’s feelings, the spirit of the age, or the dialectic of public opinion. This is shameless fiction, valuable only for eloquence, wisdom, or incidental information; its virtue is to be well invented, not true.
Philosophy fell into the same snare when it ceased to be the art of thinking and tried to become the science of thought. Thought can be found only by being enacted; experience at large cannot be an object of investigation, being invisible, past, nowhere. One can only surmise and rehearse it imaginatively—it is an object of literary psychology. All British and German philosophy, on this view, is only literature, appealing to what a man says to himself when surveying his adventures. The universe becomes a novel of which the ego is the hero; the composition may be pedantic or jejune, yet sometimes honest and appealing, like a saint’s autobiography. But no term or conclusion has scientific value; it is good only when it is good literature.
Had the guiding interest been truly psychological, this literary character would have been frankly avowed. What kept philosophers at the task was anxiety about the validity of knowledge in physics or theology; imagining how ideas might have grown to confirm faith or scepticism, they missed the dominance of passions over fancy and the volatile nature of fancy itself. Poets and novelists are often better psychologists. The most pertinent effect was the hypostasis of an imagined experience, as if experience could go on in a void without organs or occasions, known by miracle as characters in a novel are known to their author.
Criticism of knowledge thus rests on the assumption that a man can have an experience past or never his own. Though criticism can have no first principle, the book has tried to show how, if genuinely sceptical, it may retreat to the actual datum and find an obvious essence without place, date, or inherence in any mind. From such a datum it would not be easy to pass to belief; if the leap is taken, it is at the instance of animal faith, toward vulgar and materialistic convictions. Modern critics had more romantic prepossessions—rebels saying “I find,” “I know,” or empiricists saying “Everybody finds.” Their criticism of science is pure literary psychology, gossip, story-telling; they are miraculously informed that there are many minds with conventional experience. The natural world may be theoretically resolved into a picture contained in them, removing the ground sustaining this psychology, yet belief in these minds is retained; this novelesque universe is called the region of facts, immediate experience, or radical empiricism. Literary psychology becomes a metaphysics for novelists, a fantastic system to be revisited under the name of psychologism when considering the realm of matter.
No inspection is competent to discover anything but an essence; social intuition touches only a dramatic illusion of life in others or myself, never the actual experience unfolded elsewhere. Yet this illusion, like any essence, may be a true symbol for material events. A good literary psychologist likely anticipates conduct correctly; his imagination is a symptom, a poetic by-product of fineness in instinct and perception. Slight indications of attitude or temper, more than words, suggest what persons are inclined to do. Watching a pair of lovers, one may see whether love is genuine, mutual, waxing or waning; one may make it the nucleus of a little novel, evolving language to express latent dispositions. Whether one has read their minds is improbable, yet it is infinitely probable that minds and fates were really evolving there.
The only facts observable by the psychologist are physical facts; the only events testing his theories are material events; he is thus a scientific psychologist, even if casual. Whence, then, the literary atmosphere? Besides the medium of words, there is the sympathetic echo of feelings truly felt. Scientific psychology addresses bodies and material events; literary psychology restores essences intervening in perception and re-echoes intuitions. This visionary stratum is the true immediate and imagined ultimate. Even in the simplest perceptions there is an essence only poetry can describe. Schoolroom optics experiments are initially a play of intuitions—the after-image colour, the bent stick, the vanishing spokes. For science these essences are stepping-stones to conditions; their aesthetic nature is forgotten. In the realm of matter I am a stranger on travels; the adventure is exhilarating but endless and disappointing. I may revert to immediate intuitions, yet for an intelligent being such reversion is a gran rifiuto, a collapse into lotus-eating. Here the Muses come to the rescue with dramatic and epic poetry, constructive music, and literary psychology. Knowledge of nature is presupposed; material facts become a pedestal for images of other intuitions. The poet feels emotion behind events, wrapping them in immediacy; his spirit begins to sing in chorus. Literary psychology pierces to the light behind nature’s body, like Dante issuing from the earth at the antipodes and again seeing the stars. This poetic interpretation has a double dignity, beginning with the dignity of virtual truth.
The Being of Truth
The experience of being lied about is what awakens even the empiricist to the being of truth. When falsely accused or misrepresented, one rebels against the contradiction to one’s evident self-knowledge; since a third person might decide against one, one learns that a report may fly in the face of facts. From this one sees a comprehensive standard description for every fact, partly repeated by honest reporters and contradicted by liars. Even the liar must recognise the fact to some extent, else it would not be that fact he misrepresents; and honest memory and belief are not themselves the standard, being variable and subject to error. That standard comprehensive description, which no man can wholly repeat, is the truth about a fact.
Truth is thus first clearly posited in disputation; consequently it is often felt inseparable from rival opinions, so that people say without mind and error there could be no truth. This means nothing can be correct or incorrect except a proposition or judgement about a specific fact. “Truth” is often used abstractly for correctness; then “fact” or “reality” would name the standard description. But a fact is not a description of itself; “reality,” if meaning existence, cannot designate a description, which is an essence only. Facts are transitory; when they lapse, only their essence subsists and can render a retrospective judgement true. Opinions are true or false by repeating or contradicting part of the truth about facts. This truth is in the realm of essence but more than the essence of any fact, including all the fact’s radiations—the perspective obtained by taking it as centre. Truth about any fact is infinitely extended, growing thinner with distance; it is the splash a fact makes, or the penumbra it spreads, dropping through the realm of essence. No opinion can embrace it all; nor can it be identified with the facts, which are in flux, while it is eternal.
The word truth should be reserved for the standard comprehensive description of any fact in all its relations.
Main Arguments
The central argument of the book is that scepticism, carried to its logical conclusion, does not destroy knowledge but reveals its true nature. Santayana begins by showing that criticism cannot operate without some dogmatic criterion. Even a hypothetical criticism—”if any child knew his own father he would be a wise child”—throws doubt on a point of fact and assumes dogmatically that fathers and children exist. Scepticism is defined as a suspicion of error about facts, and to suspect error about facts is to share the enterprise of knowledge, in which facts are presupposed and error is possible. Hence scepticism is a form of belief; dogma cannot be abandoned, only revised in view of some more elementary dogma not yet doubted. The sceptic may be right in every point except in fancying his criticism radical and himself altogether a sceptic.
From this starting point, Santayana pushes scepticism as far as it can logically go. He questions the reality of self-consciousness, arguing that the pressing actuality of experience does not imply a relation between subject and object, or that an ego or self is given in any actual fact. He questions the reality of change, arguing that the intuition of change excludes actual change in the given object; specious change is not actual change. He questions memory and expectation, arguing that expectation is like hunger—it opens its mouth and something usually drops in, but sometimes a surprise comes, sometimes nothing. He questions the existence of facts themselves, concluding that for all an ultimate scepticism can see, there may be no facts at all, and perhaps nothing has ever existed.
The discovery of essence provides the way out. When judgement is suspended and an image is stripped of all adventitious significance—taken neither as manifestation of a substance, nor as an idea in a mind, nor as an event in a world, but simply as colour, music, or face—an immense cognitive certitude compensates for cognitive abstention. Scepticism touches bottom; doubt rests in the absolutely indubitable. Whatever essence is found and noted is established before the mind, and no mistake is possible because there is no object of intent other than the object of intuition. The realm of essence is infinite, neutral in value, and eternal; it is the unwritten catalogue of all characters possessed by such things as happen to exist, together with characters all different things would possess if they existed.
But essence alone is not knowledge of fact. To reach existences, intent must transcend intuition and take data for what they mean, not what they are. This is the work of animal faith—the spontaneous, inevitable belief that the data of sense are signs of something ulterior. Knowledge is therefore faith mediated by symbols; it is not literal but symbolic, and its truth consists not in resemblance but in relevance and closeness of adaptation. The arts of expression would be impossible if they were not extensions of normal human perception. Science and sense, though differing in scope, are exactly alike in truth; all intuitions, in sense or thought, are theoretic renderings on some method and scale, and may describe circumstances truly.
The final movement of the argument vindicates belief in substance, in nature, and in spirit. Belief in substance is not a metaphysical error but a necessary postulate of animal life; the notion of a moving world is brought implicitly, fetched from the vegetating psyche. Belief in nature is the framework within which all particular beliefs find their place. The evidences of animation in nature—the presence of life, feeling, and purpose—are not illusions but genuine disclosures of what nature contains. And the discernment of spirit, the final chapter’s theme, is the recognition that the life of reason is a mere romance and the life of nature a mere fable, yet these pictures have psychological truth even if they have no metaphysical value.
Key Concepts
Essence. The most important concept in the book, essence is the pure datum of intuition, stripped of all existential significance. It is neither mental nor material, neither particular nor universal, neither abstract nor concrete; it is simply the character of what is found, taken as it is found. Essences are infinite in number and neutral in value; they are the unwritten catalogue of all possible characters. The discovery of essence is the sceptic’s reward: it is the one thing that cannot be doubted, because there is no object of intent other than the object of intuition.
Animal Faith. The spontaneous, pre-reflective belief that the data of sense are signs of something ulterior. Animal faith is not a reasoned conclusion but a biological necessity; it is the “intent to react” that is independent of intuition and antecedent to it. Knowledge is faith mediated by symbols; it is not literal but symbolic, and its truth consists in relevance and adaptation rather than resemblance.
Scepticism. Not a denial of all belief but a suspicion of error about facts. Scepticism is a form of belief because it presupposes facts and the possibility of error. The sceptic may be right in every point except in fancying his criticism radical and himself altogether a sceptic. Ultimate scepticism, which denies change, memory, and the reality of all facts, is false but tenable intuitively; it is precious to a spiritual mind as a sanctuary from grosser illusions.
Intuition. The direct apprehension of essence, attention fixed upon it. Intuition is not knowledge of fact; it is pure fancy, a view of essence, not that essence itself. Intuition cannot reveal or discriminate any fact; it is pure poetry if placid, and mere delirium if intense. Yet it is the only source of certitude, and its objects are eternal.
Symbol. The medium through which knowledge of existence is mediated. Symbols are not copies of things but signs of them; they are original and fantastic, like the images of sense, and their truth consists in their relevance and adaptation to the occasions that elicit them. Science and sense are alike in being symbolic; all intuitions, in sense or thought, are theoretic renderings on some method and scale.
Substance. The postulated underlying reality that persists through change and supports qualities. Belief in substance is not a metaphysical error but a necessary postulate of animal life; the notion of a moving world is brought implicitly, fetched from the vegetating psyche. Substance is not given in intuition but is posited by animal faith.
Spirit. The principle of discernment that recognises the difference between essence and existence, between the realm of truth and the realm of nature. Spirit is not a substance but a function; it is the life of reason as it surveys the realms of being and finds its home in the intuition of essence. The discernment of spirit is the final achievement of the philosophical life.
Themes
The Limits of Knowledge. The book is above all an inquiry into what can and cannot be known. Santayana argues that knowledge of existence is never literal but always symbolic, and that the demand for literal knowledge is the source of our worst difficulties. Discouragement in science comes not from failure but from a false conception of success. Our worst difficulties arise from assuming knowledge of existences ought to be literal, whereas it has no need, propensity, or fitness to be literal. This theme runs through every chapter, from the opening critique of criticism to the final discernment of spirit.
The Necessity of Belief. Against the pretension of radical scepticism, Santayana insists that belief is inescapable. The vital compulsion to posit and believe something even in doubting would be ignominious if the beliefs forced on us by life and intelligence were always false. But intelligence is by nature veridical, and its ambition to reach truth is sane and capable of satisfaction, even if each effort fails. Animal faith is not a weakness but a condition of life; it is the ground of all knowledge and action.
The Realm of Essence as Sanctuary. The discovery of essence is presented not only as a logical conclusion but as a spiritual liberation. The ultimate reaches of doubt and renunciation open into fields of endless variety and peace, as if through the gorges of death one had passed into a paradise where all things are crystallised into the image of themselves, and have lost their urgency and their venom. This theme gives the book its emotional power and connects it to the tradition of philosophical consolation.
The Critique of Metaphysics. Santayana distinguishes his own system from metaphysics, which he defines as dialectical physics—an attempt to determine matters of fact by means of logical or moral or rhetorical constructions. Metaphysics arises by a confusion of those Realms of Being which it is his special care to distinguish. His own materialism is not metaphysical; he does not profess to know what matter is in itself, and he waits for men of science to tell him what matter is, in so far as they can discover it.
The Dialogue with Indian Philosophy. Santayana finds in Indian thought a confirmation of his own conclusion that nothing given exists. The Indians insisted most sincerely and intrepidly on the non-existence of everything given, even adjusting their moral regimen to this insight. Life is a dream, they say; all experienced events are illusions. Santayana declines to accuse their systems of self-contradiction, and he wishes to retain their valuable testimony to the non-existence of the obvious. This dialogue gives the book a cross-cultural dimension rare in Western philosophy of its time.
The Vindication of the Ordinary. Despite its radical scepticism, the book ends by vindicating the workaday opinions of mankind. Common sense, in a rough dogged way, is technically sounder than special schools of philosophy, each of which squints and overlooks half the facts and half the difficulties in its eagerness to find in some detail the key to the whole. Santayana sympathises with the old prejudices and workaday opinions of mankind: ill expressed but well grounded. His system is “not mine, nor new”; it merely gives everyday beliefs a more accurate and circumspect form.
The Author’s Conclusions
Santayana concludes that scepticism, carried to its limit, does not destroy knowledge but reveals its true nature. The sceptic who pushes doubt as far as it can go discovers that the one thing that cannot be doubted is the essence—the pure datum of intuition, stripped of all existential significance. This discovery is the watershed of criticism: on one side lies the valley of scepticism, where all experience is illusion and life is a dream; on the other side lies the valley of animal faith, where belief in substance, nature, and spirit is vindicated as the necessary framework of all knowledge and action.
The book ends with a comparison between Santayana’s criticism of knowledge and other such criticisms. He has shown that knowledge is faith mediated by symbols; that it is not literal but symbolic; that its truth consists not in resemblance but in relevance and adaptation. He has shown that the realm of essence is infinite, neutral in value, and eternal; that it is the unwritten catalogue of all possible characters. He has shown that belief in substance, in nature, and in spirit is not a metaphysical error but a necessary postulate of animal life. And he has shown that the life of reason is a mere romance and the life of nature a mere fable, yet these pictures have psychological truth even if they have no metaphysical value.
The final chapter, “Comparison with Other Criticisms of Knowledge,” situates Santayana’s position in relation to the great tradition of critical philosophy. He does not claim to have refuted his predecessors; he claims only to have thought straight in such terms as are offered to him, to have cleared his mind of cant and freed it from artificial traditions. He does not ask anyone to think in his terms if he prefers others. His system is “no system of the universe”; the Realms of Being he speaks of are not parts of a cosmos, nor one great cosmos together: they are only kinds or categories of things he finds conspicuously different and worth distinguishing, at least in his own thoughts. He does not know how many things in the universe at large may fall under each class, nor what other Realms of Being may exist to which he has no approach or which he has not happened to distinguish. The book ends not with a triumphant synthesis but with a modest confession of ignorance—and with the assurance that the essence he has intuited has just the characters he finds in it, eternally.
Significance
Scepticism and Animal Faith occupies a distinctive place in twentieth-century philosophy. It is one of the few works of the period that engages seriously with the tradition of critical philosophy while also drawing on Indian thought and on the naturalistic insights of biology and psychology. Its central thesis—that knowledge is faith mediated by symbols—anticipates themes that would later become central to pragmatism, phenomenology, and the philosophy of science. Its doctrine of essence, though unfamiliar to the public when the book was written, has proved to be one of the most original contributions to the theory of knowledge in its era.
The book is also significant as a work of literature. Santayana’s prose is lucid, flexible, and often lyrical; he moves easily between technical analysis and imaginative reflection. The passages on the realm of essence, on the Indian sages, and on the arts as evidences of wisdom are among the finest philosophical writing of the period. The book’s combination of rigour and beauty has made it a favourite of readers who are drawn to philosophy as a way of life rather than as a technical discipline.
For Santayana himself, the book was the introduction to a larger system, the Realms of Being, which he developed in subsequent volumes. It sets out the principles that the later works would elaborate: the distinction between essence and existence, the doctrine of animal faith, the critique of metaphysics, and the vindication of the ordinary. It is thus both a self-contained argument and a gateway to a larger philosophical project.
Finally, the book is significant for its stance toward scepticism. Santayana does not attempt to refute the sceptic; he attempts to show that scepticism, carried to its limit, refutes itself by revealing the indubitable essence. This strategy—turning the sceptic’s own weapon against him—is one of the most elegant moves in modern philosophy. It allows Santayana to acknowledge the force of doubt while also showing that doubt cannot be the last word. The book ends with the assurance that the essence we intuit has just the characters we find in it, eternally—an assurance that no sceptic can take from us, because it is the very condition of doubt itself.
