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Dramatic Truth 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, 59–66. Volume sixteen of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. This selection, Chapter VII of The Realm of Truth, makes a place for myth and drama in the Realm of Truth. While the flux of matter is not itself dramatic, it can be read in dramatic terms when intuition is directed by passion. Passion is a material force often running deeper than consciousness of it. Dramatic readings of existence may distort facts, but they express something about the forces guiding human action and experience. Dramatic enlightenment of this sort could be wearying with its partialities and bias, but without dramatic intuition thought would be paralyzed and lack direction. To eliminate the passions that give rise to mythical or dramatic readings of nature would yield an echo or index, “a part of the world” rather than “a part of the truth about the world” ( ES, 234). In other words, such a report would mirror existence but exclude mind or spirit. Mind is born out of the the exemplification of essence in matter, that is, out of the being of truth; but truth is discoverable only by mind. And some material passion must direct intuition toward truth. The dramatic moral climate in which our lives are passed is not other than the climate of matter but only a passionate experience of the same. Society does not present two separable worlds, one the world of men’s bodies and another less earthly one, that of men’s minds. A world of mere minds, a heaven with its legions of invisible and bodiless angels, if conceived at all, exacts no belief from the sceptic. I am as far as possible a sceptic, and a world of that sort does not figure in my philosophy. On the other hand, a world of mindless automata, like the bêtes-machines of Descartes, is a violently artificial object, conceived in purely mathematical and mechanical terms, although the terms in which that object is actually perceived are primarily sensuous and dramatic. The object is a body with the motions perceived or expected in that body; but these bodies do more than amuse the eye. Some are noxious or wild beasts; some are members of your own family. They suckle or hit you; and you know them apart by their works before you distinguish them clearly by their aspect. Even the most crudely physical forces wear a dramatic aspect when their action is violent, or for any reason arouses violent emotion. Spirit in us then rises or falls; and the cause is felt to be the action of spirits and gods: mythical beings not added fancifully to physical beings clearly conceived to be physical, but moral energies recognized as the very core and secret of the material facts. That souls exist and that they move bodies is indeed the primary form in which any sensitive soul will conceive the forces of nature. A soul, a dramatic centre of action and passion, is utterly unlike what in modern philosophy we call consciousness. The soul causes the body to grow, to Moral dimensions found in the world are readings of matter in dramatic terms. The Essential Santayana 232 assume its ancestral shape, to develop all its ancestral instincts, to wake and to sleep by turns. The soul determines what images shall arise in the mind and what emotions, and at the same time determines the responses that the living body shall make to the world. Consciousness is only an inner light kindled in the soul during these vicissitudes, a music, strident or sweet, made by the friction of existence. With this light and music, purified and enlarged, fancy has peopled heaven; but on earth the course of consciousness is helplessly distracted: a miscellany of conventional half-thoughts and evanescent images. A sympathetic intuition of such actual consciousness in another person often comes by imitation or by unison in action. When caught in a common predicament, we involuntarily understand one another. Each feels what everybody else is feeling; and the same thing happens, less voluminously, in ordinary conversation. Such mutual understanding is not in itself dramatic, though the occasion of it may be so; it is neighbourly, attentive, playful, as when we understand a child, a comrade, or an author. Spirit is essentially disinterested, even in tracing the fortunes of...

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