Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 23 Fall 2005

              Santayana on Causation
In The Realm of Matter, a book where the reader would expect a full treatment of
causation, Santayana says almost nothing on the subject. This is especially curious
because of extensive work he had done while writing this book. John and Shirley
Lachs have presented three previously unpublished papers on this theme in their
anthology poml, which they say, no doubt correctly, were composed in preparation for
rm. However, almost none of this material found its way into rm. What then became
of his ideas on causation, and why were they not included in his definitive work on
matter? He castigates the empiricists, both the classical ones and those of his day, for
discarding the notion in its common sense meaning. It would therefore be strange if he
did not retain it himself in some form.
In the poml papers, Santayana does argue that in mature scientific theory the
notions of cause and effect disappear; on the other hand, in rm there are a few passages
where he does retain causation. Thus when we deal with the real flux of matter, he
says, causation is everywhere:
There is then no necessity in the relation between cause and effect, and no assurance that
law is constant. Nevertheless, causation is prevalent: were It not prevalent in fact, the
expectation of it could never have arisen. (RB 303)
What Santayana intends by the term 'prevalent' is not made clear. However, this
passage appears in the rm chapter entitled "Tropes," and is very similar to claims he
makes at some length there about laws. He does not try to quantify the term there
either, but the analogy does help to clarify his position. There, his attention is directed
to physical laws and the application to them of tropes. On a more mundane level,
though, causes are essential to our discourse; even though he does not deal with this
point in detail in rm, there is every reason to think that this remains a part of his
system.
Before turning to this main theme, I touch on one issue concerning causation — its
relation to mind. On the claim that spirit is entirely impotent, Santayana is
unambiguous. It might seem therefore that he is an epiphenomenalist and holds that
spirit is caused by psyche but not the converse. As is well known, however, the notion
that mind is caused by body raises its own difficulties. I mention here only that he
recognizes this problem, and is wary of saying that psyche causes spirit. In part this is
because there is simultaneity rather than succession. More important is the fact that
moments of spirit belong to a realm utterly different from that of the material flux.
About these moments he says:
This psychic lightning, since it flashes out of certain motions in the cloud of matter, might
well be said to depend upon them and be an extraneous effect which has them for a cause.
But if we adopted this language we should have to remove from the notion of causation the
suggestion of an identical substance or force passing from an earlier to a later arrangement:
the psychic expression of life is contemporary with its material phases, and it is in itself
perfectly unsubstantial, evanescent, inconsequential, and impotent. It is no continuation of
the same process that goes on in body, no transformation of the same energy. (POML 27)
According to the realms ontology, agency occurs only in the realm of matter.
Moments of spirit are generated by the psyche located in that realm, and may be said to
be caused by matter only if the sense of 'cause' is somewhat amended. In this special
sense, then, Santayana could be called epiphenomenalist, although he did not much
like the term. (See rb 134.)