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The Being Proper to Essences The Realm of Essence: Book First of Realms of Being. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1927, 18–25. Volume sixteen of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. This selection, Chapter II of The Realm of Essence, gives an account of essences and their realm. “The principle of essence,” wrote Santayana, “is identity” ( ES, 168). By this he means that the entire being of an essence lies in its character or in its being just what it is. This makes essence universal: it always is what it is irrespective of the time or place it might be exemplified in matter or intuition. It is what it is if it is never exemplified, and all essences are of equal worth whether exemplified or not. The multitude of essences infinitely exceeds what can be intuited by spirit and what nature can exhibit. The Realm of Essence is, according to Santayana, the basis of knowledge. An essence is the character of any existing thing such that the existing thing is what it is and no other. Hence, the existing object can be distinguished, noted, and known. Essences are inert; they are not the cause of any material objects. Rather they come to be exemplified through the contingent flux of matter taking one form and then another. Essence, being non-existent, is impervious to the contingency of matter and hence is eternal. The principle of essence, we have seen, is identity: the being of each essence is entirely exhausted by its definition; I do not mean its definition in words, but the character which distinguishes it from any other essence. Every essence is perfectly individual. There can be no question in the realm of essence of mistaken identity, vagueness, shiftiness, or self-contradiction. These doubts arise in respect to natural existences or the meanings or purposes of living minds: but in every doubt or equivocation both alternatives are genuine essences; and in groping and making up my mind I merely hesitate between essences, not knowing on which to arrest my attention. There is no possibility of flux or ambiguity within any of the alternatives which might be chosen at each step. This inalienable individuality of each essence renders it a universal; for being perfectly self-contained and real only by virtue of its intrinsic character, it contains no reference to any setting in space or time, and stands in no adventitious relations to anything. Therefore without forfeiting its absolute identity it may be repeated or reviewed any number of times. Such embodiments or views of it, like the copies of a book or the acts of reading of it, will be facts or events in nature (which is a net of external relations); but the copies would not be copies of the same book, nor the readings readings of it, unless (and in so far as) the same essence reappeared in them all. Physical obstacles to exact repetitions or reproductions do not affect the essential universality of every essence, even if by chance it occurs only once, or never occurs at all; because, in virtue of its perfect identity and individuality, it cannot fall out of Each essence is by being identical and individual. Also universal. 169 The Being Proper to Essences the catalogue of essences, where it fills its particular place. If I try to delete it, I reinstate it, since in deleting that I have recognised and defined it anew, bearing witness to its possessing the whole being which it can claim as an essence. There accordingly it stands, waiting to be embodied or noticed, if nature or attention ever choose to halt at that point or to traverse it. Every essence in its own realm is just as central, just as normal, and just as complete as any other: it is therefore always just as open to exemplification or to thought, without the addition or subtraction of one iota of its being. Time and space may claim and repeat it as often or as seldom as they will: that is their own affair. The flux is free to have such plasticity as it has, and to miss all that it misses; and it is free to be as monotonous as it likes, if it finds it easier to fall again and again into the same form, rather than to run away into perpetual and unreturning novelties. The realm of essence is the scale of measurement, the continuum of...

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