To Charles Augustus Strong
45 Chesterton Road
Cambridge, England. November 3, 1913.
Essences alone are intuited so that error about them is impossible, since whatever quality the mind has before it is, in intuition, the only object we profess to know. But such pure and infallible intuition is an ultimate and practically unattainable clarification of the human mind. It would require the suspension of all practical reactions, interpretations, inferences, and presumptions; it would require a mind in no way confusing or overlapping its chosen object of attention. Therefore, in animal perception, we have faith or suspicion, fear of the unknown or vaguely apprehended, etc, rather than intuition of an essence we can clearly define and recognize. It is this animal faith that is the basis of our knowledge of things material and dynamic, as well as of divine or human minds and even of our own past and future in their independent subsistence. Such physical and psychological objects are credited and reputed to exist (inevitably in animal life) but they are not really “known” as essences are known, when immediately present; for discourse even about essences requires some animal faith, to enable us to identify past and present meanings.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.