To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Feb. 14, 1932
It has never been easy for me to decide whether your view fell rather on the side of the line which I call panpsychism (or panpsychologism) or on the side which I call the mind-stuff theory. Of course, you are under no obligation to adopt just these categories, and may perfectly well put the lines of cleavage elsewhere: but I am talking of my own attempts to understand your position. You say now that I ought to have seen that you take the second view: very well. But in saying that “feeling” is “that in the nature of matter which makes it possible for it ever to be aware.” I am still in doubt as to your meaning. What is your criterion of possibility in such a case? The previous existence of something like awareness? The previous existence of the “luminosity” which in awareness is focussed into conscious feeling? Or rather, into the qualities of experience? Or do you mean merely such qualities or arrangements as give a normal occasion for conscious feeling–in a word, matter capable of being organized into living bodies? If you meant only this last, I should entirely agree. But I don’t think it helps at all to produce awareness that there should have been awareness, or something like awareness, earlier.
Yours ever
G.S.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Four, 1928-1932. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY