Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 08 Fall 1990

              Substrative Materialism
In "Santayana's Peirce" above, Nathan Houser raises an interesting question:
what exactly was it about the Peirce lecture attended by Santayana which so
much stuck in his mind? It is clear that, as Santayana himself says, a part of this
was his favourite notion of the symbolic character of all knowledge; Houser's
measured conclusion credits Peirce for turning Santayana's attention to signs
"at a crucial point in his development" But what about the thermometer and
the hygrometer? As Houser perceives, something about these examples was
especially intriguing to Santayana. (See pages 12 and 13 above.) Passages like
the following from The Realm of Matter hem: on this question:
Meantime the practical arts . . . deal directly with matter, whereas a graphic or
dialectical analysis can be immediately concerned only with images which are
symbols, or with symbols which are words. When the act of measuring is an actual
transition,, like a journey, both the metre and the thing measured are material and
equally internal to the flux of substance. The measure is then congruous and literal
, . . bridging truly external relations, and catching nature in her own net. A
graphic analysis or a map may afterwards be constructed to give definition . . . but
now in another realm of being from that in which it might actually occur: for it
would occur in the realm of matter, and it is surveyed in the realm of essence.1
Here the focus is on internality to the material realm. If the surrounding
air is wet, a litde man will emerge from the hygrometer, whether or not
somebody is there to convert this fact into information. Santayana's view of
science and its modern successes rests on just such a picture excluding the
mentaL Scientific observation scrupulously compares two material aspects of
an event, without the intervention of any treacherous mental categories or
defined terms. He does not merely say that final causes must be stripped from
the scientific endeavour, but also insists that experiment strip away all that is
mental, leaving nothing but physical interactions. Of course, variables must be
named and theories constructed afterwards; but these conceptualizations are
notoriously unstable, (and are regularly superseded by "incommensurable" new
theories). The stability and reliability of science, however, rests on skill in
recording the play of events quite apart from our current understanding of
them, and from how variables might be defined or theories devised.
Nowhere does Santayana give a sustained development of this simple
insight, although he comes back to the idea frequently in The Realm of Matter
and in the many manuscripts associated with its writing.2 It would be something
of an extrapolation, then, to attribute to him a full-fledged philosophy of
1 See pages 239-240 of Realms of Being, one-volume edition, (New York: Scribner's, 1942).
2 John and Shirley Lachs have gathered together many of the most important manuscripts in
Physical Order and Moral IJlmly, Previously unpublished essays of George Santayana, (Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press, 1969).