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Facts Arbitrary, Logic Ideal The Realm of Truth: Book Third of Realms of Being. London: Constable and Co. Ltd.; Toronto: Macmillan Company, 1937; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938, 11–19. Volume sixteen of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. In this selection, Chapter II of The Realm of Truth, Santayana denied that fact is necessary . The capacity of spirit to contemplate an infinity of essences is the capacity to go beyond the apparent limitations of material facts in imagination. The infinite Realm of Essence reveals that there is no limit to the forms matter may embody, and it is the contingency of the flux of matter that determines which essences are in fact embodied. While there is logical necessity, it is not truth in Santayana’s view, truth being “the complete ideal description of existence” ( ES, 222). Logic traces a system of essences; it expresses truth when in fact those essences are embodied in matter. It is a mistake to set up logic over the facts of nature: “Logic is a child of fact, as spirit in general is a child of the psyche” ( ES, 221). And just as spirit enriches the life of the conscious creature so does logic. And like grammar, rhetoric, and music it “humanizes the world” and can reveal the realm of essence ( ES, 223). That one philosopher should profess to have proved some metaphysical tenet, and that another philosopher should profess to have refuted it, might leave the reader cold. It is not in those regions that he ordinarily feels sure of the truth. Are there no truths obviously necessary to common sense? If I have mislaid my keys, mustn’t they be somewhere? If a child is born, mustn’t he have had a father? Must is a curious word, pregnant for the satirist: it seems to redouble the certainty of a fact, while really admitting that the fact is only conjectured. The necessity asserted foolishly parades the helplessness of the mind to imagine anything different. Yet this helplessness, on which dogmatism rests, is shameful, and is secretly felt to be shameful. Spirit was born precisely to escape such limitations, to see the contingency and finitude of every fact, and to imagine as many alternatives and extensions as possible, some of which may be true, and may put that casual fact in its true setting. Truth is groped after, not imposed, by the presumptions of the intellect: and if these presumptions often are true, the reason is that they are based upon and adjusted to the actual order of nature, which is thoroughly unnecessary, and most miraculous when most regular. This blessed regularity, logically unforeseeable, is indeed the basis of human safety, wisdom, and science; it teaches us what must happen under particular circumstances ; but accommodation to the truth in these regions leaves the mind, when not mechanized, full of wonder at the truth. The mechanized mind, that cannot wonder at the commonplace, is apt to carry its mechanical presumptions over into logic, as if necessity there too were simply truth to fact. A large part of the confidence felt in numerical and geometrical measurements is an emotional confidence. It comes from a sense of Physical necessity is conditional on an order of nature itself not necessary. 221 Facts Arbitrary, Logic Ideal what would surely happen to bodies having those numerical or geometrical properties . We seldom stop to consider narrowly the logical relations between defined essences, as pure mathematics would require us to do; but we rely on common knowledge of the world become in ourselves an irresistible mode of imagination; and this precipitation of ideas in ourselves we call necessity in the object. Anything else would be “impossible”: that is to say, impossible for us to believe. Interest in fact, or confident judgment about fact, here overcomes or confuses interest in essence. Yet wonder at the commonplace—at the stars or a flower or a word— comes to almost everybody at certain moments: because these things are too improbable in themselves and too inexplicably juxtaposed for a spirit whose natural field is the perspicuous. A rationalistic reader might still ask: “Is there no truth within your realm of essence? Are not unity and distinctness present in all essences, and is it not true to say so? And all that you yourself have written, here and elsewhere , about essence, is it not true?” No, I reply, it is not true, nor meant to be true. It is a grammatical...

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