Get started

WorkGeorge Santayana

The Realm of Essence

The first stone of Santayana's late system: everything the mind can picture, stripped of any claim to exist.

by George Santayana239 passages held

  • English, the original language, and your language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
First published
(aged 64)
Original language
English

Report a rights issue

Overview

The system Santayana had promised in 1923, in Scepticism and Animal Faith, came as four books over thirteen years; this, the first, appeared in 1927. Its subject is what he called essence: any character that can be present to a mind — a color, a shape, a melody, a number, the meaning of a word — considered purely as what it is. Essences, the book argues, are infinite in number and timeless, and they neither exist nor cause anything; existence and power belong to matter, the subject of the second book. The distinction is aimed at Plato, whose Forms looked much the same but were meant to be more real than the things of this world and to govern them. Santayana kept the forms and took away their authority: an essence is no more valuable, and no more real, for being eternal, and the realm of essence is indifferent to whether anything in it is ever embodied. He came at the same inheritance from Plato that same year in a shorter book, Platonism and the Spiritual Life. What the distinction buys is a clean division of labor. Minds contemplate essences; bodies do the living; and knowledge, as the 1923 book had argued, is an animal's faith that some essence before its mind describes something that exists. The Realm of Matter followed in 1930, The Realm of Truth in 1937 and The Realm of Spirit in 1940, and in 1942 the four were gathered in a single volume, Realms of Being.

Key concepts

What counts as an ‘essence’ in The Realm of Essence?

Any character that can be present to a mind, considered purely as what it is: a colour, a shape, a melody, a number, the meaning of a word. Essences are infinite in number and timeless, and they neither exist nor cause anything; existence and power belong to matter. An essence is no more real or valuable for being eternal, and the realm is indifferent to whether any of it is ever embodied.

Can an essence be complex, like a whole landscape?

Yes. Santayana argues that complexity in an essence is not material: it is not separate, self-existent elements lying side by side, but the complexity of a form whose parts stand in internal relations to the whole, so that the unity and its contrasting parts are all pure essences. Every landscape as actually seen, rather than as vaguely supposed to exist like a stage-setting, is an eternal essence.

What is ‘pure Being’, and is it God?

Pure Being is the essence present in every essence, the positive being in all of them; because it excludes each one’s special form, it also partakes of non-being in an eminent degree. Santayana rejects the gibe that it equals nothing. A religion of pure Being is possible, Brahmanism being one, but human religion has another side: prudence and piety require studying the ways of nature and cleaving to the good.

If essences cause nothing, what makes one thing follow another?

Substance, which Santayana describes as shifting its arrangement without ground. No essence can produce another: one configuration cannot even suggest the next, except to an idle mind playing with the rhymes of appearance. Nature may be mechanical at some depth, but each factor in it remains spontaneous, and one inert essence after another is simply embodied in things as matter moves on.

Can two minds ever know they are thinking of the same essence?

Not with certainty. A mind possesses the essence before it, but it cannot know that this is the very essence intended by another intuition, numerically different and historically remote. That is why Santayana calls the whole historical study of ideas, of which romantic idealism is so fond, irrelevant to ideas: the learned illusion of living again the life of the dead may fascinate, but it tells a mind nothing about the essence now before it.

Themes of the book

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

Every Character, None of It Existing

What is a colour, a melody or the meaning of a word, taken purely as what it is? An essence, Santayana answers: timeless, infinite in number, and neither existing nor causing anything.

Existence, for Santayana, is the flux of matter, where things happen, change and push one another about. Essences are the characters those events might wear, and every possible character is one, whether anything ever wears it or not. Each is exactly itself — which is why identity and logic belong here — and together they form a realm with no order of rank, no preference and no power. Nothing in it needs to be thought, and nothing in it is the worse for being unthought.

  • essence
  • existence
  • pure being
  • infinity
  • possibility
  • universals
  • identity
  • ontology
  • logic
  • dialectic
  • matter

Enter a dialogue

Plato’s Forms Kept, Their Authority Removed

Are the eternal forms more real than the things of this world, and do they govern them? Santayana keeps the forms and answers no to both.

Plato’s Forms looked much like essences, but they were meant to be more real than their instances and to rule them from above. Santayana strips them of that office. An essence is no more valuable, and no more real, for being eternal; the realm of essence is indifferent to whether any of it is ever embodied. Power belongs to matter, the subject of the second book of the system, and a value belongs to whatever creature finds something good. The result is a Platonism without an idealist cosmology.

  • idealism
  • metaphysics
  • causation
  • materialism
  • substance
  • universals
  • nature

Enter a dialogue

Intuition: What a Mind Actually Beholds

If bodies do the living, what is left for minds? Contemplation of essence, Santayana answers, and knowledge whenever that contemplation is trusted as a sign of something that exists.

Every perception, image and word puts some essence before the mind, and intuition is simply that presence. On its own it knows nothing about the world, which is its innocence and its freedom: the aesthetic and contemplative life rests on it. Knowledge begins only when an animal, moved by its psyche, takes the essence as describing something that exists, as the 1923 book had argued. The division of labour is clean: the psyche acts, spirit beholds, and neither can do the other’s work.

  • intuition
  • contemplation
  • spirit
  • psyche
  • consciousness
  • perception
  • imagination
  • aesthetics
  • language
  • knowledge
  • truth
  • epistemology

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
239
distinct concepts
276
by passages held, corpus-wide
#310

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: “essence” and “existence”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
essenceexistence37
essencemetaphysics25
essenceknowledge19
essenceintuition16
essenceperception16
essenceidentity14
essencelanguage12
existencemetaphysics10
knowledgeperception10
languageperception7
existenceidentity5
knowledgelanguage5
existenceintuition4
intuitionlanguage4
existenceknowledge3
identitylanguage3
intuitionknowledge3
knowledgemetaphysics3
existencelanguage2
identityintuition2
identitymetaphysics2
intuitionmetaphysics2
intuitionperception2
existenceperception1
identityknowledge1
identityperception1
languagemetaphysics1
metaphysicsperception1

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

    Announced by its subtitle as the doorway to the late system, it sets out the two terms that the four Realms of Being then build on: essence and animal faith.

     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 you are here EN
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works