Addenda by George Santayana

Notes and Discussions ADDENDA BY GEORGE SANTAYANA The publication in the Century Philosophy Sourcebooks (edited by Justus Buchler and Sterling Lamprecht) of a volume entitled Animal Faith and Spiritual Li]e, Previously Unpublished and Uncollected Writings by George Santayana with Critical Essays on His Thought and edited by John Laehs has tempted me to dig out of my old correspondence file a few communications from Santayana that I believe I ought to share with other readers. I shall arrange them chronologically. I The verses entitled "Ditto" unfortunately require me to publish a bit of satire that I dashed off when Charles A. Strong invited me and his friend Santayana to come to his room in Rome to discuss his theory of the projection of sense data into space. He asked me to read a little something to start off the discussion. Writing before I had much time to think, I ventured to submi~ the following "Confessions of an Epistemological Neophyte on the Puzzle of Digestion and Indigestion ": Those who imagine that digestion is a simple affair, even simpler than indigestion, and that there is no mystery in the process by which external reality is incorporated, have failed to observe some of the most elementary difficulties that must be observed before digestion can be said to be intelligible. Let us begin with the more simple problems. Consider that digestion involves an organism, an organ, and a food. What is a food? Ordinarily and for common sense we might be satisfied with an enumeration of external objects that are digestible, but a moment's reflection will cause us to realize that not all of these are actually foods either in themselves or to all stomachs. In general, to come at once to the basic difficulty, it is inaccurate to say that a vegetable is a food. It is a food only under certain relations to certain organisms at certain times. Must we not, therefore conclude that foods do not exist as external objects? A food is but a relation into which certain objects enter at certain times. Properly speaking, foods exist only in the stomach. And not in iust any stomach, not in a dead one or a diseased one, but in a normal stomach. Let us postpone the difficult problem of normalcy. In place of "food" we need a word and concept for what is actually being digested, not something to be digested or something already digested but something digesting. Let us call such a being a "digest," and similarly anything rejected by the stomach an "indigest." We can now discover that what is a digest to one stomach may be an indigest to another; these are relative terms. When we speak of foods as external objects we are dealing either with abstractions or with projections of digests into space. The only concrete, empirical entities are the digests of the normal stomach. But the "normal" stomach, too, is an abstraction. If foods exist externally, they exist like the health of the stomach in a transcendental realm. To return to the empirical existance of the digests; if they exist in the stomach, they must exist not as things to be digested or things digested, but as digests digesting. Their actual, temporal existence is momentary. If and when they exist, they exist differently from objects called "foods." We might perhaps be content to explain that there is a one to one correspondence between digests and foods, were it not for the fact that stomachs sometimes make mistakes. Not all things that are judged by it to be digestible turn out to be digests, and [2s5] 286 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY sometimes the stomach tries to digest when there is no food there. In veridical digestion, we may conclude, that the correspondence is sufficient, but in cases of error, what is that about which the stomach errs? The only answer possible is that there must be a neutral datum present in the stomach, whether it judges truly or falsely. Digest-data, in other words, may turn out to be either digests or indigests, and to know which they are throws us into an ~nfinite regress known as "Royce)s God." Data then are ultimately judged...