The Unknowable

Santayana's Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford, which takes the Victorian evolutionist's famous mystery and gives it a plainer name.

by George Santayana32 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1923(aged 60)
Original language: English

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Overview

Herbert Spencer, the Victorian philosopher of evolution, began his First Principles in 1862 with a part called "The Unknowable": a reality behind all appearances that science and religion could both acknowledge and neither could know. Oxford invited Santayana to give the lecture in Spencer's name in 1923, and on 24 October, five months after Scepticism and Animal Faith appeared, he took Spencer's heading for his subject. He sided with Spencer against philosophers who admit nothing but appearances: some power really does work behind what we perceive. But he read the name generously: Spencer, he argued, had never meant his Unknowable to be strictly unknowable. Its real name was substance, and Spencer had believed in it just as Santayana did, by an animal faith that no amount of criticism tries to get behind. The Clarendon Press printed the lecture that year as a pamphlet of fifty-six pages, and in 1936 it was collected in Obiter Scripta, a volume of Santayana's lectures and essays edited by Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz.

Key concepts

What was Herbert Spencer’s ‘Unknowable’?

The subject of the first part of Spencer’s First Principles, begun in 1862: a reality behind all appearances that science and religion could both acknowledge and neither could know. By 1923, Santayana told his Oxford audience, fashion had completely deserted Spencer. He opened the lecture as a small act of piety, offering a grain of incense to Spencer’s shade and placing himself, with qualifications, in Spencer’s camp.

What does Santayana mean by ‘substance’ in this lecture?

The power whose secret operation, in infinite modes, kindles experience. On this view all phenomena, and all the minds observing them, are secondary facts rather than the only realities: experience is incidental to animal life and passion, which are incidental in turn to the general flux of substance. Santayana holds that Spencer believed in it too, by animal faith, and that substance was the real name of his Unknowable.

Why does Santayana think calling substance unknowable is a mistake?

Because it confuses knowledge with intuition. If knowledge meant an intuition with no element of faith, a mere inspection of the obvious, then all substance would indeed be unknowable, but so would every fact assumed in daily life. Belief in substance, Santayana argues, is inevitable in daily life, which is the right place for philosophy, and is vindicated by the adequate and harmonious view of existence it gives.

What are the ‘venerable symbols’ Santayana speaks of: matter, God, nature?

The great ideas human imagination has attributed to substance after long experience and puzzled reflection: matter, God, the natural world, persons and passions. They are signs, not portraits. Their truth and precision vary with how articulately they are drawn, since the more articulate a symbol, the truer or the falser it becomes, and with the range of substantive being to which they are applied.

Why does Santayana prefer Spencer’s evolution to Hegel’s or Bergson’s?

Because Spencer left the work to nature. The evolution still in vogue, Santayana says, was Hegel’s or Bergson’s, which imposes development on nature by some magic or dialectical force, as if matter were helpless. Spencer, innocent of such devices, gathered reports from every quarter and let them settle in his system like geological strata. It is a great advantage, Santayana adds, for a philosophy to be substantially true.

Themes of the book

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

Spencer’s Unknowable, Given Its Plainer Name

Is there a reality behind appearances that no one can know? Yes to the reality, Santayana tells Spencer’s audience, and no to the unknowability: its name is substance.

Herbert Spencer had offered his Unknowable as the power behind all appearances that science and religion could both acknowledge and neither could know. Santayana sides with him against philosophers who admit nothing but appearances: some power really does work behind what we perceive. But he reads Spencer generously. The Unknowable was never meant to be strictly unknowable, he argues; Spencer believed in it the way any creature does, by an animal faith that no criticism tries to get behind, and knew it well enough through its effects to live by it.

realism
substance
knowledge
epistemology
agnosticism
skepticism
animal faith
evolution
metaphysics
idealism
reality
perception
symbolism
science and religion
religion
piety

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 32
distinct concepts: 74
by passages held, corpus-wide: #717

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: “agnosticism” and “epistemology”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 31 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
agnosticism	epistemology	5
epistemology	metaphysics	4
epistemology	realism	4
epistemology	knowledge	3
epistemology	skepticism	3
knowledge	realism	3
realism	skepticism	3
realism	substance	3
agnosticism	knowledge	2
agnosticism	metaphysics	2
agnosticism	skepticism	2
idealism	knowledge	2
idealism	substance	2
knowledge	substance	2
metaphysics	realism	2
metaphysics	substance	2
skepticism	substance	2
agnosticism	idealism	1
agnosticism	substance	1
epistemology	substance	1
idealism	realism	1
idealism	skepticism	1
knowledge	metaphysics	1
metaphysics	skepticism	1

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.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
1923 The Unknowable you are here EN
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
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
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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