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The Nature of Spirit The Realm of Spirit: Book Fourth of Realms of Being. London: Constable and Co. Ltd.; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940, 1–18. Volume sixteen of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. This selection appeared as Chapter I of The Realm of Spirit. Santayana found this to be “a most difficult book to put into proper shape” ( LGS, 6:208) and characterized it as “a funeral oration, if not a tombstone, on my opinions” ( LGS, 6:330) (though he went on to publish a three-volume autobiography, two new books, and two extensive revisions before his death). In this chapter Santayana sought to clarify his notion of spirit as natural, intellectual, and immaterial. He considered mistaken conceptions of spirit and provided an account of its emergence from animal life. He also distinguished seven entities in illuminating his notion of spirit. A body is a unit in the realm of matter; an organism is a body capable of nutrition and reproduction; psyche is the self-sustaining pattern of an organism ; an animal is psyche able to seek what it needs to survive. Soul is psyche considered morally or through self-reflection; self or person is soul involved in social relations. “Other names for spirit,” wrote Santayana, “are consciousness, attention, feeling, thought, or any word that marks the total inner difference between being awake or asleep, alive or dead” ( ES, 355). Everything that exists is confined to a specific character at a particular place and time; if it escaped from those bonds it would cease to be itself. Such an escape occurs continually in the realm of matter, where everything gradually lapses into something different; and this continuous flux, with its various tempos, composes the great symphony of nature. In living substance, plasticity and fertility are a virtue: matter might say, with Shelley’s cloud, I change but I never die. That which dies at every turn is only the negligible cloud-rack of the moment, easily replaced or even improved upon. To lament that individuals or even species should vanish would be natural only to some elegiac poet who clung to lost occasions and to remembered forms, not being ready for the next, and lagging sentimentally behind the glorious march of time, always buoyant with victory and strewn with wreckage. The case is otherwise when we come to the realm of spirit, as we do in that melancholy poet. Not that spirit is less mobile or elastic than matter. In its ideal vocation, as we shall find, it is infinitely more so. Even in its existence it is as evanescent as any cloud. But the inevitable concentration of existence at each point into something specific rises in the moral world to a higher power. Individuation from being passive and imputed here becomes positive and self-assured. Spirit, in its briefest and feeblest flash, sets up a moral centre for the universe. Contingence and partiality, in one direction, embitter spiritual life. Why should “I” (that is, spirit in me) be condemned to lodge in this particular body, with these Spirit shares the contingency of existence but surveys it morally. 347 The Nature of Spirit parents and nationality and education and ridiculous fate? Why choose this grotesque centre from which to view the universe? You may say that other people exist in plenty, viewing the universe from their several positions, so that in giving this involuntary pre-eminence to myself I am perhaps not more grotesque than the average man, or even than the most intelligent. But that only makes matters worse, if isolation, partiality, error, and conceit are multiplied indefinitely, and inevitably attached to conscious existence. In another direction, however, the imprisoned spirit escapes from its cage as no physical fact can escape. Without quitting its accidental station it can look about; it can imagine all sorts of things unlike itself; it can take long views over the times and spaces surrounding its temporary home, it can even view itself quizzically from the outside, as in a mirror, and laugh at the odd figure that it cuts. Intelligence is in a humorous position: confinement galls it, it rebels against contingency; yet it sees that without some accidental centre and some specific interests and specific organs, it could neither exist nor have the means of surveying anything. It had better be reconciled to incarnation, if it is at all attached to existence or even to knowledge. This is the force of intelligence, marvellous if we...

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