From Animal Faith and Spiritual Life
When all things are possible, what wonder that some things should be actual? (This is my sole deduction of existence from essence.)
From Reason in Common Sense
I had no need to adopt the cosmology of Plato—a mythical and metaphysical creation, more or less playful and desperate, designed to buttress his moral philosophy. I was old enough, when I came under his influence, to discount this sort of priestcraft in thought, so familiar to Christian apologists. Experience, knowledge of my own heart, attachment to Spinoza, even the science of the day, protected me against those voluntary illusions. Indeed, to undermine them gently, by showing how unnecessary and treacherous they are in the healthy life of the spirit, was a chief part of my undertaking.
From Three Philosophical Poets
[U]nder this childish or metaphorical [Socratic] physics, there is a serious morality. After all, the use of opium is that it is a narcotic; no matter why, physically, it is one. The use of the body is the mind, whatever the origin of the body may be. . . . [Nature's] use is to serve the good—to make life, happiness, and virtue possible. . . . Observation must yield to dialectic [under the Socratic philosophy] . . . .
From Soliloquies in England
Platonic metaphysics projects into the universe the moral progress of the soul. It is like a mountain lake, in which the aspirations and passions of a civilized mind are reflected upside down and a certain tremor and intensity is added to them in that narrow frame, which they would hardly have in the upper air. This system renders the life of the soul more unified and more beautiful than it would otherwise be. Everything becomes magical, and a sort of perpetual miracle of grace; the forms which things wear to the human mind are deputed to be their substance; the uses of life become its protecting gods; the categories of logic and of morals become celestial spheres enclosing the earth. A monstrous dream, if you take it for a description of nature; but a suitable allegory by which to illustrate the progress of the inner life: because those stages, or something like them, are really the stages of moral progress for the soul.
From Scepticism and Animal Faith
Fact can never be explained, since only another fact could explain it: therefore the existence of a universe rather than no universe, or of one sort of universe rather than another, must be accepted without demur.
From Scepticism and Animal Faith
[When those who deny the existence of spirit] hear the word used, it irritates them, because they suppose it means some sort of magical power or metaphysical caloric, alleged to keep bodies alive, and to impose purposes on nature; purposes which such a prior spirit, being supernatural and immortal, could have had no reason for choosing. Such a dynamic spirit would indeed be nothing but an immaterial matter, a second physical substance distinguished from its grosser partner only in that we know nothing of it, but assign to its operation all those results which seem to us inexplicable. Belief in such a spirit is simply belief in magic; innocent enough at first when it is merely verbal and childish, but becoming perverse when defended after it has ceased to be spontaneous.
From Realms of Being
[T]he life of matter [ ] is indeed not determined exactly to reproduce its previous forms, but tumbles forward to fresh collocations; and the power in it is truly internal—not a compelling magic exercised by any fixed form, energising either out of the past or out of the future, but indeed a potentiality or propensity within the substance concerned, a part of that blind impulse and need to shift which is native to existence; and as this universal dance was groundless in the beginning, so it remains groundless at every stage and in every factor, whether the figures of it be novel or habitual. . . . . At some depth, and in terms not at all on the human scale, nature may very well be mechanical—I shall return to this question in its place; but each factor in that mechanism would remain perfectly spontaneous; for it is not the essence illustrated here that can produce the essence illustrated there. One configuration cannot even suggest another, save to an idle mind playing with the rhymes of appearance; but substance throughout continues groundlessly to shift its groundless arrangement. One inert essence after another is thereby embodied in things—essences inwardly irrelevant, and associated even in thought only when thought has been tamed and canalised by custom. The method of this transformation may contain repetitions, and to that extent it will be mechanical; but it will never become anything but a perpetual genesis of the unwarrantable out of the contingent, mediated by a material continuity impartial towards those complications.
From Realms of Being
There is a stock objection to materialism . . . . Matter, it is said, cannot explain the origin of life, of consciousness, or of morals. Matter here means the essence which some philosopher attributes, or is alleged to attribute, to matter; this essence probably suggested itself to the philosopher's imagination after much consideration of the ways of nature; it is a simple, perhaps a merely mathematical term. Now no essence can be the origin of anything: not even of another essence, much less of any fact. . . . . The incapacity of the materialist to deduce logically from the terms of his theory—such as extension, atoms, electric charges, energy, or what not—the other variegated terms in which our senses or imagination may picture the world, is therefore a matter of course . . . .
Realms '72 at 140-41 ("The Realm of Essence: Essences All Primary").
From Realms of Being
To say that matter, as it truly exists, is inert or incapable of spontaneous motion, organisation, life, or thought, would be flatly to contradict the facts: because the real matter, posited in action, and active in our bodies and in all other instruments of action, evidently possesses and involves all those vital properties.
From Realms of Being
Yet the ontological overflow, the concomitant emergence of consciousness, alone seems to arrest the wonder, not to say the wrath of philosophers; and they are so surprised at it, and so wrathful, that they are inclined to deny it, and to call it impossible. I have not myself such an intrinsic knowledge of matter as to be sure that it cannot do that which it does: nor do I see why the proudest man should be ashamed of the parents who after all produced him. I am not tempted seriously to regard consciousness as the very essence of life or even of being. On the contrary, both my personal experience and the little I know of nature at large absolutely convince me that consciousness is the most highly conditioned of existences, an overtone of psychic strains, mutations, and harmonies; nor does its origin seem more mysterious to me than that of everything else.
From Realms of Being
Philosophy has too long been pedagogical, and the best schooldays are half-holidays. If liberty has opened a window for us towards the infinite realm of essence, it has not authorized us to regard the prospect visible to us there as the truth about nature. Much less are we authorized to set up our visions as moral standards to which things ought to conform. The order of subordination is the opposite one. Nature being what she is, and we being in consequence what we are, certain special reaches of essence are obvious to our senses and intellect. Sights and sounds, pains and pleasures assail us; and our leisure is free to develop in music and language, in mathematics and religion, the moral burden of our animal existence. Nor will this play of ideas be sheer truancy. Our toys may become instruments, our sensations signs; and a part of the truth about nature and about ourselves will be necessarily revealed to us, directly or indirectly, by the mere existence and sequence of those apparitions. Directly, in emotion, perception, and dramatic sympathy, we may learn to know the human world, the world of images, morals, and literature: and indirectly, in close connection with the flow of sensation, we may learn to posit permanent objects and to pick our way among them to good purpose, as a child finds his way home.
Realms '72 at 435-36 ("The Realm of Truth: Interplay Between Truth and Logic").
From Philosophy of George Santayana
On this second point [starting from the natural world, what was the causa fiendi of immediate experience] I have not seen much new light. I am constrained merely to register as a brute fact the emergence of consciousness in animal bodies. . . . This spiritual fertility in living bodies is the most natural of things. It is unintelligible only as all existence, change, or genesis is unintelligible; but it might be better understood, that is, better assimilated to other natural miracles, if we understood better the life of matter everywhere, and that of its different aggregates.
From Philosophy of George Santayana
Existence is groundless, essentially groundless; for if I thought I saw a ground for it, I should have to look for a ground for that ground, ad infinitum. I must halt content at the quia, at the brute fact.
From Philosophy of George Santayana
[F]or a critic looking for demonstration the deepest presuppositions [of reason] are the most arbitrary. Indeed, nothing can be more arbitrary than existence . . . .
From Philosophy of George Santayana
Physics was now backed by a moral [that is, a self-sufficing, perfect and blessed] and logical [that is, a clear, definite and eternal] reason for the facts that it described: it had become metaphysics.
From Realms of Being
[The] fabulous universes [of theologians] are but reversed images of the spiritual life . . . .
From Persons and Places: The Background of My Life
What we call the laws of nature are hasty generalizations; and even if some of them actually prevailed without exception or alloy, the fact that these laws and not others (or none) were found to be dominant would itself be groundless; so that nothing could be at bottom more arbitrary than what always happens, or more fatal than what happens but once or by absolute chance.
From Dialogues in Limbo
[Socrates'] philosophy is all a play of words or logic of concepts, backed in his person by a heroic ascetic discipline, yet in itself arid and verbal, and fit to defend any fanaticism or superstition. . . . . It is a sad fate that pursues moralists and logicians, who pipe their dialectic as if they lived in Arcadia, where nothing is to be heard but the twittering of birds and the growling of bears. Civilised human life is more complicated and dense, and nothing at all is discoverable about it by playing in that way the flute or the bagpipes. On the contrary, the order of nature is disguised or reversed by dialectic. Parmenides and Plato and Anaxagoras, by tracing thin rays of identity, implication or contradiction in ideal essences, logical or moral, cast an imaginary net over the world, like the parallels and meridians that modern geographers cast over the lands and seas of the earth; good terms in which to describe positions and distances between port and port in their voyages, but irrelevant to the hills and valleys, the nights and days, the works and the wars that diversify the world for its inhabitants. If language exhausted nature and logic could control facts, a mythologising moralist no doubt would have good sport, and Socrates might successfully confine beauty to the expression of vital and moral perfection. But perfections are multiple, and the beauty of one thing is incompatible with that of another. So with the virtues of different men, or ages, or nations: and Socrates and you [Alcibiades], though thinking you still worshipped the gods of Hellas, really were forerunners of very un-Greek loves and very romantic rebellions.
From Dominations and Powers
Life and spirit are not the cause of order in the world but its result.
From Dominations and Powers
That in the heart of matter there was always a germ of spirit seems to me as much a truism as it would be to say that in a grape-seed lies the potentiality of the vine, the vine-leaves, and the grapes that actually grow out of it. "Potentiality" does not signify the pre-existence of eventual things; it signifies only the existence of the conditions which, according to the process of nature, will bring those things about. I smile at the acrobatic logic of Leibnitz, who convinced himself that little feelings and ideas must exist in every minutest particle of cosmic substance. Anaxagoras had reasoned in that way in his qualitative atomism, thinking that metamorphosis must be as impossible in nature as in the realm of essence.
From Dominations and Powers
For this reason Aristotle (who in spite of realistic observation and judgment was at bottom a disciple of Socrates and Plato) believed that all motion and change were violently imposed; that they were all not powers but dominations. Even the planets . . . were impelled thus to labour only by hopeless love of something immutable, namely, of eternal mind. This he taught although he was no poet; or rather, because he was no poet, he could believe that utility governed the world, and that nothing could exist save for the sake of something else. In this, as in the Platonic worship of essence, there was tragic wisdom; but it expresses the ultimate religion of spirit, not the primary motive power or Will in nature. It therefore inverts, by a schoolmaster's fallacy, the generative order of life and of society, as if grammars had been written first, and children manufactured afterwards, rather unsuccessfully, to learn them.
From Dominations and Powers
A literary philosopher may imagine that moral harmonies presuppose reason; yet in the generative order of nature the opposite is the case. Many a harmony must be established in the cosmos and in some animal psyche before reason dawns on any living mind.
Dominations '72 at 373 ("Representative Government II: Moral Representation in Nature").
From Santayana: The Later Years
But in any case, ["spiritual freedom"] has nothing to do with the physical question of determinism or indeterminism in the genesis of events. Even "moral freedom" has nothing to do with it. Facing the matter afresh, I should say this: Existence being contingent intrinsically, the character of any event cannot be determined logically by that of previous events: every fact then is a part of the original groundless fact of existence. Yet any degree of regularity may be discovered in the ways of nature; and only in the measure in which such regularity exists is any science or prudence possible.
Santayana '63 at 168 ("Eight: 1936") ("Letter to Daniel Cory, February 24, 1936").
From Physical Order and Moral Liberty
If spirit must be invoked to account for all these unaccountable facts [gravity, motion, time, change], spirit is evidently at the root of everything. But alas, if spirit be conceived as one more fact, its existence too is perfectly unaccountable; and its connection with other events or power to produce them is not only unaccountable but incapable of being represented in any image, spirit and nature not having any dimension in common. . . . . The appeal to spirit therefore only multiplies the insoluble problems presented by events, if we aspire in any intellectual sense to account for them.