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WorkGeorge Santayana

Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy

Doubt pushed further than Descartes pushed it, until only a creature's practical trust in the world is left to build on.

by George Santayana353 passages held

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First published
(aged 60)
Original language
English

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Overview

Descartes doubted everything he could and came to rest on the certainty of his own thinking. In this book Santayana pushed the same doubt further and found no resting place at all. Honest doubt, he argued, cannot keep even a thinking self, a past or a world; it is left with whatever appearance is present at this moment, and an appearance, taken alone, proves nothing about what exists. He called what is given in this way an essence. Nobody lives in that condition. An animal that hunts is already trusting that there is prey, a world around it and a future in which to eat, and that trust — animal faith — is where all knowledge actually starts. Knowledge, on this view, is belief guided by signs, never certainty, and philosophy begins in the middle of life rather than at some first principle beyond doubt. The position had been gathering for years: in 1920 Santayana had contributed "Three Proofs of Realism" to Essays in Critical Realism, a joint volume by American philosophers who held that the mind knows an independent world through its own ideas. Scribner's published the book in May 1923, a month after a volume of his selected poems, and Dover Publications reissued it in 1955, three years after his death. Its subtitle had announced a system still to come, and the system came as the four books of Realms of Being, from The Realm of Essence in 1927 to The Realm of Spirit in 1940.

Key concepts

What is ‘the solipsism of the present moment’?

The point where honest doubt comes to rest: nothing is left but the appearance present now, with no self, no past and no world behind it. Santayana denies that the position is self-contradictory; a creature living under a hard shell or in free flight might hold it quite naturally. Men find it untenable because their lives are social and laborious, and doubt leaves them defenceless before oncoming events.

What does Santayana mean by ‘existence’, and why is it never given?

Being that is in flux, determined by external relations and jostled by irrelevant events. No datum contains that, so the sceptic’s final position stands: nothing given exists. Even the sceptic’s own intuition is an existing event only for someone who afterwards posits it, and every such positing can be suspended, reversed or mistaken. All alleged knowledge of matters of fact, Santayana concludes, is faith only.

How is intuition different from knowledge in this book?

Intuition beholds whatever is present; knowledge reaches objects that pre-exist and are compulsory. Santayana says knowledge positively excludes intuitive possession of its object. Intuition lies beneath it, as vegetative life lies beneath animal life, and may return above it when all one has learned turns into a playful phantom. A poet or philosopher may prefer intuition to knowledge, but in doing so he prefers ignorance.

What does ‘animal faith’ name, as this book introduces it?

The vital compulsion to posit and believe something, even in the act of doubting. An animal that hunts already trusts that there is prey, a world around it and a future in which to eat, and no argument put that trust there. Santayana makes it the ground of all knowledge of existence, which is therefore belief guided by signs. Such faith would be ignominious, he adds, only if what it forced on us were always false.

Why does Santayana call absolute idealists sceptics?

Because their method is scepticism, whatever their temper. Their reasons are that criticism proves actual thinking the only reality, that existence is merely imputed, and that truth is coherence among views with no objects: in their phrase, a fact is a concept. Taken for what it means, Santayana says, that amounts to saying there are no facts. He pushes the same criticism further and refuses to crown thought as the residue.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Doubt Carried Past Where Descartes Stopped

If doubt is pushed as far as it honestly goes, what survives it? Not a thinking self, Santayana argues, nor a past, nor a world: only whatever appears at this moment.

Descartes stopped at the certainty of his own thinking; Santayana finds that certainty as open to doubt as anything else. A self is a thing that persists, memory claims a past that is no longer here, and change requires a time the present moment cannot contain. Pressed consistently, scepticism ends in the solipsism of the present moment, and the book does press it that far. The point is not to live there, which nobody does, but to show how little of what anyone believes rests on proof.

  • skepticism
  • knowledge
  • self
  • memory
  • time
  • experience
  • existence
  • consciousness
  • empiricism
  • idealism

Enter a dialogue

What Is Given Proves Nothing: Essence

An appearance is certainly present, but does its presence prove that anything exists? Santayana answers no, and gives the bare given a name: essence.

What doubt cannot remove is a character before the mind, a colour, a shape, a tone, taken simply as what it is. Santayana calls it an essence and insists on its poverty: it is not a thing, not an event, not evidence of anything beyond itself. Intuition of essence is certain precisely because it claims nothing about the world. The distinction clears the ground for the late system, where The Realm of Essence gives this term a full book of its own.

  • essence
  • intuition
  • appearance and reality
  • perception
  • existence
  • spirit
  • language
  • truth

Enter a dialogue

Animal Faith: Knowledge That Starts in the Hunt

If nothing can be proved, where does knowledge begin? In the trust of an animal that hunts, which already believes in prey, a world around it and a future in which to eat.

Knowledge, on this view, is belief guided by signs, never certainty, and philosophy begins in the middle of life rather than at some first principle beyond doubt. Animal faith posits substance, a world that acts on the body and that the body acts on, and treats appearances as signs of it. Santayana does not claim to prove that world; he claims only that no one who acts disbelieves it. The realism he had argued in Essays in Critical Realism here becomes the doorway to the four Realms of Being.

  • animal faith
  • belief
  • substance
  • nature
  • embodiment
  • materialism
  • naturalism
  • realism
  • change
  • epistemology
  • metaphysics

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
353
distinct concepts
370
by passages held, corpus-wide
#212

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “existence” and “skepticism”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 75 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
existenceskepticism20
epistemologyskepticism19
animal faithperception18
animal faithknowledge16
intuitionskepticism16
animal faithskepticism15
animal faithepistemology12
essenceintuition12
knowledgeskepticism12
animal faithintuition11
essenceskepticism11
existenceintuition11
intuitionknowledge11
perceptionskepticism11
animal faithessence10
epistemologyperception10
essenceperception9
existenceperception9
epistemologyintuition7
epistemologyknowledge7
knowledgeperception7
essenceexistence6
essenceknowledge6
epistemologyessence5
animal faithexistence4
intuitionperception4
epistemologyexistence2
existenceknowledge1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1896 The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory

    The earliest of Santayana's prose books, following a volume of sonnets, and the one he later dismissed most bluntly; the psychological method it relies on is one his later philosophy moved away from.

     EN
  2. 1900 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

    Essays that carry the approach of The Sense of Beauty over from art to religion, and first set out the reading of religion as imaginative truth that The Life of Reason would develop at length.

     EN
  3. 1905 The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress

    His chief work from the Harvard years and the fullest statement of his moral philosophy; the Realms of Being, published two decades later, supply the account of knowledge and existence that lies beneath it.

     EN
  4. 1910 Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe

    Lecture-hall criticism from his last Harvard years, testing on three poets the claim of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion that poetry at its height is philosophy made vivid.

     EN
  5. 1913 Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion

    A companion to Character and Opinion in the United States, which returns to the American subject of its closing essay; the rest of the book weighs the philosophies then in fashion, from Bergson to Russell.

     EN
  6. 1915 Egotism in German Philosophy

    Written in Oxford during the First World War, it turns Santayana's long quarrel with idealism into a charge against a national tradition; the realism behind it gets its full statement in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
  7. 1920 Character and Opinion in the United States

    The American sequel to "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" in Winds of Doctrine, and the fullest record Santayana left of his Harvard teachers before his memoirs.

     EN
  8. 1922 Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies

    The short pieces of the English years, standing between the wartime Egotism in German Philosophy and the system that begins the next year with Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
  9. 1923 Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy you are here EN
  10. 1923 The Unknowable

    One short lecture, given in the year Scepticism and Animal Faith appeared, that carries the book's theory of knowledge into an argument with Herbert Spencer.

     EN
  11. 1925 Dialogues in Limbo

    His philosophy in dialogue form, published in the years between the introduction to his late system and its first volume.

     EN
  12. 1927 Platonism and the Spiritual Life

    Published seven months before the system's first volume, a first sketch of the spiritual life that The Realm of Spirit would treat at length in 1940.

     EN
  13. 1927 The Realm of Essence

    Here the late system proper begins: the first of the four Realms of Being, giving full treatment to the vocabulary introduced in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
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