the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness."
It is "animal faith" that prompts this exchange. By "animal faith" is meant something that we share with other animals: the belief of the cat in the mouse, and of the mouse in the cat; the habit of taking our fleeting perceptions as signs of "things," and generally those fundamental beliefs without which daily life is impossible. Animal faith can be purified and systematized by philosophy, but cannot be abolished except on pain of death. Accordingly, it is to be frankly accepted where it is indispensable.
"I propose now to consider what objects animal faith requires me to posit, and in what order; without for a moment forgetting that my assurance of their existence is only instinctive, and my description of their nature only symbolic."
The remainder of the book reports the deliverance of such animal faith as has survived in Mr Santayana.
There are three points in the system which fail to make themselves luminous to the present reviewer. The first is the treatment of essence as something divorced from existence and independent of it. The second is the belief in "substance." The third is the discernment of "spirit" as a separate realm of being. This last raises such thorny problems that it will have to be left on one side. The other two, however, can be briefly considered.
The distinction between essence and existence is one which, apart from terminology, is familiar to common sense. Hamlet is merely an essence; Julius Caesar has an essence, but was also an existing being. For this reason Hamlet was whatever Shakespeare chose that he should be; whereas Julius Caesar was what he was, and not whatever the historians chose to invent. We can abstract his essence by describing him, and leave it doubtful whether he existed, just as it is doubtful whether King Arthur existed. When we do this we are freed from the trammels of historical fact. It is doubtful, however, whether this is a logically correct account of what occurs. Let us take some simpler essence—say, a certain shade of colour. Wherever this shade of colour exists, it seems to be the essence itself that exists. All that we do when we call it an "essence"
