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Indispensable Properties of Substance The Realm of Matter: Book Second of Realms of Being. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1930, 10–25. Volume sixteen of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. In this selection, Chapter II of The Realm of Matter, Santayana distinguished five properties of substance. First, substance is external to the thought of it that is prompted by animal faith. This entails that transitions in nature are distinct from transitions in thought. Thought moves from one object to another by faith only. Second, since substance is posited in the actions of the animal, it must be external to the agent and in parts; else there could be no interaction. Third, substance changes perpetually and constitutes time, but this perpetual change does not exclude permanence. If change were total, there could be no transformation and no existence. Change and succession require a medium for external relations among the things changing and succeeding one another. Fourth, substance is unequally distributed, because it must be discriminated among various agents who interact and effect changes. It cannot be homogeneous and undivided. Fifth, substance lies in a common field of action. Substantial objects recognized by an agent must have an effect, direct or indirect, on the action of the agent; and these dynamic relations unify the field of action and make up a cosmos. 1. Since substance is posited, and not given in intuition, as essences may be given, substance is external to the thought which posits it. 2. Since it is posited in action, or in readiness for action, the substance posited is external not merely to the positing thought (as a different thought would be) but is external to the physical agent which is the organ of that action, as well as of that thought. In other words, Substance has parts and constitutes a physical space. Conversely, the substantial agent in action and thought is external to the surrounding portions of substance with which it can interact. All the parts of substance are external to one another. 3. Since substance is engaged in action, and action involves change, substance is in flux and constitutes a physical time. Changes are perpetually occurring in the relations of its parts, if not also in their intrinsic characters. 4. Since the agents in action and reaction are distinct in position and variable in character, and since they induce changes in one another, substance is unequally distributed. It diversifies the field of action, or physical time and space. 5. Since there is no occasion for positing any substance save as an agent in the field of action, all recognisable substance must lie in the same field in which the organism of the observer occupies a relative centre. Therefore, wherever it works and solicits recognition, substance composes a relative cosmos. A mutual externality, or Auseinandersein—an alternation of centres such as moment and moment, thing and thing, place and place, person and person—is A world in which action is to occur must be external, spatial, and temporal, possessing variety and unity. The Essential Santayana 180 characteristic of existence. Each centre is equally actual and equally central, yet each is dependent on its neighbours for its position and on its predecessors for its genesis. The existential interval from one centre to another is bridged naturally by generation or motion—by a transition actually taking place from one moment, place, or character to another, in such a manner that the former moment, place, or character is abandoned and lost. The same interval may still be bridged cognitively by faith or intent, cognition being a substitute for a transition which cannot be executed materially, because the remote term of it is past or not next in the order of genesis or transformation. But this interval can never be bridged by synthesis in intuition. Synthesis in intuition destroys the existential status of the terms which it unites, since it excludes any alternation or derivation between them. It unites at best the essences of some natural things into an ideal picture. On the other hand the conjunction of existences in nature must always remain successive, external, and unsynthesised. Nature shows no absolute limits and no privileged partitions; whereas the richest intuition, the most divine omniscience , is imprisoned in the essence which it beholds. It cannot break through into existence unless it loses itself and submits to transition; and the foretaste or aftertaste of such transition, present in feeling, must posit something eventual...

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