From The Letters of George Santayana I am writing a brand new system of philosophy to be called 'Three Realms of Being'not the mineral vegetable and animal, but something far more metaphysical, namely Essence, Matter and Consciousness. — #312 1911 From Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy The truth, however nobly it may loom before the scientific intellect, is ontologically something secondary. — #313 1923 From The Realm of Essence: Book First of Realms of Being Man seldom has leisure to dwell on essences. Unless they are significant of facts in the realm of matter, controlling his destiny. I therefore give a special name to this tragic segment of the realm of essence and call it the Realm of Truth.
Santayana wrote of the novel that. The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel is a 1935 novel by the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana, set largely in the fictional town of Great. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump once proclaimed, “To tweet or not to tweet.
— #294 1927 From The Letters of George Santayana Of course, a materialist doesn't make any bones of a complex organ having a simple function, (a trope, or something in the realm of truth) and thinks it natural, that that function should be raised to an actual unity in sensation or consciousness. The point in weighing your system is whether this actual entelechy, consciousness, would be better understood if we supposed the organ to be composed sentient elements. — #314 1934 From The Letters of George Santayana Feeling for me is an instance of consciousness, not a basis for consciousness; the basis being large-scale biological processes, having a moral or dramatic character in material life that I make the ground of consciousness or spirit. Tropes, belonging to the Realm of Truth, intervene between unconscious organic processes and moral or intellectual awakenings. In a word, my notion of the relation of mind to body remains Aristotelian, as it has always been.
Spirit is the second (actualized) entelechy of natural organic life in an animal. — #315 1935 From The Letters of George Santayana For the moment I have dropped back from my work on the Realm of Spirit to the Realm of Truth, finding that I needed to work out the relation of truth to determination of events, especially of futures, before I could make clear the sort of 'freedom' that is inherent in spirit. Perhaps the two books will be finished together, if they are ever finished. — #316 1935 From The Realm of Truth: Book Third of Realms of Being We have seen that the truth, as I take the word, is subservient to existence: it is ontologically secondary and true of something else. — #330 1938 From The Realm of Truth: Book Third of Realms of Being Now as truth, although in itself only a field of essence. — #331 1938 From The Realm of Truth: Book Third of Realms of Being Within the fanatical defence of vested illusions there may be a sacrificial respect for things beyond us, whatever those secret realities may be; and the martyr that on earth is ready to die for some false opinion may be judged in heaven to have died for the truth.
The very absurdity of a tenet, or its groundlessness, at least proves that imagination is at work, and groping for an issue from animal darkness. At least the category of truth has been set up. Appearances, innocent and perfectly real in themselves, have begun to be questioned and discounted as deceptive; and this not merely against the blank background of a posited substance, known only as a force, but in contrast to a possible and more adequate description of that substance and of the manner in which it produces appearances. Intelligence has begun the pursuit of truth. — #332 1938 From The Realm of Truth: Book Third of Realms of Being Matter in any one of its moments and in any one of its atoms offers no foothold for consciousness: but let certain tropes and cycles be established in the movement of matter, let certain kinds of matter cohere and pulse together in an organism, and behold, consciousness has arisen. Now tropes, cycles, organisms, and pulsations, with all the laws of nature, are units proper to the realm of truth; units that bridge the flux of existence and are suspended over it, as truth and spirit also are suspended.
— #333 1938 From The Philosophy of George Santayana Materialism by no means implies that nothing exists save matter. Democritus admitted the void to an equal reality, with all the relations and events that motion in the void would involve: he thereby admitted what I call the realm of truth.
— #334 1940 From The Philosophy of George Santayana Under the form of truth change and motion become visible; in precipitation, in self-abolishing flux from instant to instant, they are perfectly invisible and unconscious of themselves. — #335 1940 From The Realm of Spirit: Book Fourth of Realms of Being This simple dissolution of superstition yields three of my realms of being: matter.; essence.; and spirit. There remains the realm of truth.
— #336 1940 From The Realm of Spirit: Book Fourth of Realms of Being. My analysis transposes the doctrine of the Trinity into terms of pure ontology and moral dialectic. Power the realm of matter is signified by the First Person of the Trinity, the Father. Power could not possibly produce anything unless it borrowed some form from the realm of essence. By the intervention of irrational power.
The infinity of essence is determined to a particular complex or series of forms. This complex or series of forms exemplified in the universe composes the truth about it. It is the Logos, comparable with the heaven of Platonic Ideas, with the God of Aristotle, and with νους, the second hypostasis in the trinity of Plotinus.
This Logos is just as much God as is the Father, since power or substance cannot exist without form. But form also cannot exist without substance and power to extricate it from infinity and render it actual; so that the Father and the Son are not two separable existents, but two incommensurable and equally original features of existence itself.
Now love and pursuit of the Good. Also arise on occasion. And this third dimension of reality is spirit. Christian theology has been much less curious and penetrating in regard to the Holy Ghost than in regard to the Father and the Son. — #338 1940 From The Letters of George Santayana But religions have always appealed to me as myths more or less expressing the fortunes of spirit in the world that generates it, as in theology the Holy Ghost 'proceeds' from the Father (Matter) and from the Son (Form) but suffers a good deal (as Christ did by being incarnate). — #340 1952 From Physical Order and Moral Liberty: Previously Unpublished Essays of George Santayana But nature is more than substance; it is a system of movements, forms, and transformations, which have their specific being in the realm of truth. This realm is non-natural in one respect; it is eternal.
— #342 1969 Number of quotations (including supressed): 20. Professor's Thoughts Santayana's categories, his realms, are developed in large part through comparison and contrast with each other. His development of the realms would be dismissed as unsuitable by any earnest analytic philosopher; for Jorge launches into talk about matter, spirit, truth, etc., without the expected definitions at all. Indeed, his starting point and guide is the scandalously imprecise common sense notion we all have of these categories. Clarification only comes gradually, and often it comes by contrast of changing matter vs. Eternal essence, of objective matter vs.
Subjective spirit. There is something to be said for this approach. The definitions offered by analytic philosophers, and especially empiricists, seem often to lead further away from their definienda, in direct proportion to their complexity. There is something to be said for one who refuses to stray away from, for example, truth or spirit as commonly understood, towards things unrecognizable as such. Of course, Santayana does permit refinements and clarifications which are not envisaged in common sense speech.
However, I find that he sticks to the subject at hand better than many others; a revision should be an improvement in a familiar way of seeing something, and not a divergence from this. His method consists largely of juxtaposing the various realms and other categories. In light of this, a category will be important and a candidate for the gang-of-four, if its contrastive interplay with the other three is significant in the development of those, and important to the philosophical life.
This is amply true of truth, and I give one example, the contrast between the frenzied realm of changing existences and the placid realm of truth, where nothing ever changes. (This sort of contrast arises also with arbitrary essences, but in the case of an essence which is a truth, this is an essence of consequence.) Santayana likes to distinguish between carrying out an action and the contemplation of it. The former is an often unconscious performance by the psyche, whereas the latter is spiritual and the only source of ultimate spiritual good. If the contemplation of this essence attains a sufficiently detached viewpoint, it will approach the contemplation of truth.
As Spinoza says, it is the truth about our actions and selves which alone will survive us, and which can give us our solace, that of tying ourselves to the only part of us which is eternal the truth. Small consolation for many, but its importance grows to the extent that one candidly discards as illusory other more personal candidates for survival. Angus Kerr-Lawson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Waterloo (1996-11-15).