To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St Oxford
Oxford, England. September 29, 1917
My so-called second paper has given birth to various excursuses on “existence”, “consciousness”, etc, and I have run up against points which have puzzled me and made me vacillate in my views. What you call “semiexistence”, and I was inclined to accept or to call “specious existence” has given me special trouble. My conclusion now is that it is a mistake to speak of the essence as existing at all. What exists substantially is the organic or mind-stuff process; what exists actually and historically is the passing perception or intuition—a fact, a cognition, something spiritual, having a date and duration, but no substantial or efficacious existence; while the essence (though it would be pedantic not to say that it existed, while it is given or embodied) exists only by a current figure of speech, the true existence not belonging to it, but to the mind that perceives or to the thing that embodies it. Do you agree with this? I should be glad to know
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.