Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

It may be remarked in passing that this quotation illustrates Santayana’s admirable clarity of thought, a characteristic which he shares with the men of genius of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Now the exact point where Santayana differs from the organic philosophy in his implicit assumption that ‘intuitions themselves’ cannot be among the ‘data of intuition,’ that is to say, the data of other intuitions. This possibility is what Santayana denies and the organic philosophy asserts. In this respect Santayana is voicing the position which, implicitly or explicitly, pervades modern philosophy. He is only distinguished by his clarity of thought. If Santayana’s position be granted, there is a phenomenal veil, a primitive credulity associated with action and valuation, and a mysterious symbolism from the veil to the realities behind the veil. The only difference between such philosophers lies in their reading of the symbolism, some read more and some less. There can be no decision between them, since there are no rational principles which penetrate from the veil to the dark background of reality.

The organic philosophy denies this doctrine because, first, it is contrary to naive experience; secondly, ‘memory’ is a very special instance of an antecedent act of experience becoming a datum of intuition for another act of experience; thirdly, the rejected doctrine is derived from the misconception of Locke, already noted previously (cf. Part II, Ch. I, Sect. VI), that logical simplicity can be identified with priority in the concrescent process. Locke, in his first two Books, attempts to build up experience from the basic elements of simple ‘ideas’ of sensation. These simple ideas are practically Santayana’s ‘intuitions of essences.’ Santayana explicitlyp. 217 repudiates the misconception, but in so doing he knocks away one of the supports of his doctrine. A fourth reason for the rejection of the doctrine is that the way is thereby opened for a rational scheme of cosmology in which a final reality is identified with acts of experience.

CHAPTER VI

FROM DESCARTES TO KANT

SECTION I

A comparison of different ways in which Descartes and Locke respectively conceived the scope of their investigations at once discloses the very important shift which Locke introduced into the tradition of philosophic thought. Descartes asked the fundamental metaphysical question, What is it to be an actual entity? He found three kinds of actual entities, namely, cogitating minds, extended bodies, and God. His word for an actual entity was ‘substance.’ The fundamental proposition, whereby the analysis of actuality could be achieved, took the form of predicating a quality of the substance in question. A quality was either an accident or an essential attribute. In the Cartesian philosophy there was room for three distinct kinds of change: one was the change of accidents of an enduring substance; another was the origination of an individual substance; and the third was the cessation of the existence of an enduring substance. Any individual belonging to either of the first two kinds of substances did not require any other individual of either of these kinds in order to exist. But it did require the concurrence of God. Thus the essential attributes of a mind were its dependence on God and its cogitations; and the essential attributes of a body were its dependence on God and its extension. Descartes does not apply the term ‘attribute’ to the ‘dependence on God’; but it is an essential element in his philosophy. It is quite obvious that the accidental relationships between diverse individual substances form a great difficulty for Descartes. If they are to be included in his scheme of the actual

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world, they must be qualities of a substance. Thus a relationship is the correlation of a pair of qualities one belonging exclusively to one individual, and the other exclusively to the other individual. The correlation itself must be referred to God as one of his accidental qualities. This is exactly Descartes’ procedure in his theory of representative ideas. In this theory, the perceived individual has one quality; the perceiving individual has another, quality which is the ‘idea’ representing this quality; God is aware of the correlation; and the perceiver’s knowledge of God guarantees for him the veracity of his idea. It is unnecessary to criticize this very artificial account of what common sense believes to be our direct knowledge of other actual entities. But it is the only account consistent with the metaphysical materials provided by Descartes, combined with his assumption of a multiplicity of actual entities. In this assumption of a multiplicity of actual entities the philosophy of organism follows Descartes. It is however obvious that there are only two ways out of Descartes’ difficulties; one way is to have recourse to some form of monism; the other way is to reconstruct Descartes’ metaphysical machinery.

But Descartes asserts one principle which is the basis of all philosophy: he holds that the whole pyramid of knowledge is based upon the immediate operation of knowing which is either an essential (for Descartes), or a contributory, element in the composition of an immediate actual entity. This is also a first principle for the philosophy of organism. But Descartes allowed the subject-predicate form of proposition, and the philosophical tradition derived from it, to dictate his subsequent metaphysical development. For his philosophy, ‘actuality’ meant ‘to be a substance with inhering qualities.’ For the philosophy of organism, the percipient occasion 1s its own standard of actuality. If in its knowledge other actual entities appear, it can only be because they conform to its standard of actuality. There can only be

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