From Animal Faith and Spiritual Life
The purpose itself arises by virtue of the ripening of certain actions, or impulses in the organism; these impulses, before the sort of action in question has been often performed or observed, come clothed only in vague feelings of uneasiness or impatience: but when the appropriate action is well-known, they come clothed in images picturing that action by anticipation: and the purpose in that case can prefigure graphically its probable or normal fulfilment. The issue is not called forth or shaped by that image in the mind: but the first images accompanying the purpose may be very like the images which perception of the result will arouse in the end: and this natural congruity in two pictures will be transformed by superstitious haste into the power of the first image—whose causes are ignored—to produce the material event which the second image reports to the same minds.
From Birth of Reason and Other Essays
If a man, dozing, brushes away a fly from his bald head, he need not have formed a clear image of that fly; yet his action shows an exact apprehension in his organism of an intrusion at that place. In more general terms, a living creature, beneath and before all imagination, is affected by the contact or even by the movement of objects, and has a propensity to react upon them.
Birth of Reason '68 at 137 ("Mind Liberating and Deceptive").
From Reason in Science
The thoughts of men are incredibly evanescent, merely the foam of their labouring natures . . . .
From Soliloquies in England
When I speak of being governed by imagination, of course I am indulging in a figure of speech, in an ellipsis; in reality we are governed by that perpetual latent process within us by which imagination itself is created. Actual imaginings—the cloud-like thoughts drifting by—are not masters over themselves nor over anything else. . . . . Imagination, when it chimes within us, apparently of itself, is no less elaborately grounded [than the chime in the night is grounded in the church tower, the composer's head, and the beadle winding things up]; it is a last symptom, a rolling echo, by which we detect and name the obscure operation that occasions it . . . .
From Scepticism and Animal Faith
The existence of things is assumed by animals in action and expectation before intuition supplies any description of what the thing is that confronts them in a certain quarter.
From Realms of Being
The enormity of our childish idealism would prove immediately fatal if we needed to have a true idea of things in order to act properly in their presence. But ideas which are ridiculous as descriptions may be adequate as signals: all animals eat and breed without any notion of calorics or eugenics: hunger and love are moral overtones quite sufficient to express for them their share in the rude economy of nature. The mind is not a fifth wheel to her coach, but her observations on the journey.
Realms '72 at 35 ("The Realm of Essence: Adventitious Aspects of Essence").
From Realms of Being
Spirit is what is called epi-phenomenal, although this word is very ill-chosen, since neither substance nor spirit is phenomenal; but the essences embodied in matter and those revealed to intuition are indeed deployed in two different media: the spiritual perspective being at each point dependent for its existence and its character upon the balance and movement of the vital process beneath. . . . . There are not, then, two parallel streams, but rather one stream which, in slipping over certain rocks or dropping into certain pools, begins to babble a wanton music; not thereby losing any part of its substance or changing its course, but unawares enriching the world with a new beauty.
Realms '72 at 134 ("The Realm of Essence: Instances of Essences").
From Realms of Being
If I want water, it is because my throat is parched; if I dream of love it is because sex is ripening within me. . . . Conscious will is a symptom, not a cause; its roots . . . are . . . material . . . .
From Realms of Being
Thus sensations and ideas always follow upon organic reactions and express their quality; and intuition merely supplies a mental term for the animal reaction already at work unconsciously. With each new strain or fresh adjustment, a new feeling darts through the organism; digestive sleep breaks into moral alertness and sharp perception; and, once initiated, these modes of sensibility may persist even in quiescent hours—for they leave neurograms or seeds of habit in the brain—and may be revived in thought and in dreams.
From Philosophy of George Santayana
[S]o that both the transitive indicativeness and the subjective animal status proper to all mind are corollaries of materialism. Yet that is not all: from the transcendental nature of mind follows also, that it cannot figure among the objects it surveys, yet is essential to their moral presence. For the realm of matter cannot admit mind into its progressive structure and movement; each trope or rhythm must be complete before sensation can arise; so that this sensation is intrinsically a result and not a cause, a comment and not an agent, an occurrence not physical but spiritual and moral. It is in an ideal synthesis impossible in a flux, in spanning relations in the realm of truth, that mounting animal passions attain this hypostatic individuality, and become feelings. Events have then given birth, in a living organism, to experience of events. My whole description of the spiritual life is thus an extension of my materialism and a consequence of it.
From Realms of Being
Perhaps it is not logically impossible that spirit should exist without a body: but in that case how should spirit come upon any particular images, interests, or categories.
Realms '72 at 565 ("The Realm of Spirit: The Nature of Spirit").
From Realms of Being
The critics will tell the public that I run hopelessly away from common sense in denying the material efficacy of spirit. Yet this is a misunderstanding, because neither the critics nor the public take the word spirit in my sense. They understand by it the self, the soul, the psyche: and nothing could be farther from me than to deny the interaction of the psyche—that is, the bodily life—with surrounding events. The continuity of these motions, outside a man, in through his senses, out through his impulses, into his actions and influence, is perfectly obvious. His senses and impulses will not be aroused without arousing his spirit; so that it is quite true that if he had been unconscious most of his actions would have been different, or rather would not have occurred at all. He would have been asleep. In sleep, it is not spirit that departs or determines to close the eyes, but the eyes that close of themselves, and shut the world out from the spirit. With eyes closed, a man will certainly not act as if his eyes were open: and when the physical cause of his lethargy or gropings is so evident, it is sheer myth to suppose the cause to be the absence of light in his mind. That light is eclipsed, as everyone can prove experimentally at any moment, because the eyes are closed. Spirit is therefore a concomitant effect of physical causes and not a separate cause descending from another world.
From Birth of Reason and Other Essays
[I]t is chiefly the impact of surrounding bodies, or troubles, needs, and impulses in his own organism, that cause ideas to appear before his mind. To these removed facts his instincts and actions then adjust themselves automatically . . . .
Birth of Reason '68 at 158 ("On the False Steps of Philosophy").
From Dominations and Powers
It is not at all true that, as Virgil says, mind agitates a lump of formless matter and mixes itself with the vast body of nature. Mind would have to become matter before it could do that. Nor is it true even in human fine arts or in eloquence that there is a previous purely mental image that the sculptor's hand or the speaker's words retrace when they are inspired.
Dominations '72 at 96 ("Ambiguity of 'Spirit' in the Arts") (citing Aeneid, VI, 727).
From Dominations and Powers
This potential revival of past perceptions really occurs . . . . Such recurrence is naturally explicable only because the same living organism endures, with its always total, though always differently focused and selective consciousness. So the feelings that were once new and central recur marginally or merely suggest themselves, whenever the original process that caused them is reawakened in the organism . . . .
From Santayana: The Later Years
[It is as if both you and John Locke] regarded the originality of mind and the human scale of sensuous images as required for the mechanical adjustment and utility of these images and minds in the midst of action. That needs clearing up: consider dreams, poetry, the syntax of language. Mind everywhere is only an illustration to the running text; it is not useful images that are created (how should they have been known to be useful, or even aposite, before they were thought of?) but useful summary reactions or affections of the organism create images, like smells, vaguely reporting to consciousness the turn of affairs and apposite because they occur then. However, this question of the epiphenomenal level and poetic function of all mind, doesn't come within your direct subject, and it is my own preoccupation with it that raises it inopportunately, like a ghost in the daytime.
Santayana '63 at 152 ("Seven: 1935") ("Letter to Daniel Cory, June 28, 1935").