There is a tension in Santayana's ontological system, one that is generated by the interactions of his (1) doctrine of existence, (2) doctrine of systematization, and (3) critical agnosticism on the infinity of material substance. From (1) and (2), in conjunction with what will be called the expansionist postulate, an infinite material expansion is generated, one that is in conflict with (3). This tension is remediated by a coherentist proposal regarding Santayanan existence, the relevant feature of which is that existents at distinct orders of organization are in symmetrical dependence relations. “Metaphysical coherentism,” which has recently been described as “one of the least explored areas in contemporary literature” (Tahko), chiefly involves positing such symmetrical grounding relations.1The coherentist proposal blocks the infinite expansion identified; it also supplies a more productive Santayanan treatment of the existential status of the “world system.” It is quintessentially Santayanan, since (i) it is a plausible extension of coherentist themes already found within his official doctrine, and (ii) it diagnoses the appearance of the infinite expansion as a function of a broader metaphysical error he describes, that is, that of conflating the nature of being with the nature of existence.The discussion of the paper is directed at readers interested in the exegesis and internal consistency of Santayana's ontology. However, it also discovers a distinctively Santayanan basis for a thoroughgoing metaphysical coherentism, and is thus of broader interest. Sketching Santayana's central distinction between being and existence is the first order of business.Santayana considers essences as universal characterizing properties or whatnesses. The distinction between essence and existence reflects the bifurcation of what a thing is (its qualitative identity) from that a thing is (the existential instantiation of something that has this identity).2 As Santayana puts it, “[e]ssence is just that character which any existence wears in so far as it remains identical with itself and so long as it does so” (RB 23).Essences, on Santayana's view, “are primordial and distinct forms of possible being” (RB 430).3 Eternal,4 atemporal, nonspatial, and incorruptible,5 these universals have ontological priority over existent things. The priority of essence follows from the fact that the realm of essence, according to Santayana, contains an infinity of qualitatively diverse characters (without duplication).6 Thus, any character that could be existentially instantiated is necessarily prefigured in the realm of essence: W]hatsoever form an existence may happen to assume, that form will be some precise essence eternally self-defined. . . . [E]vents can never overtake or cover the infinite advance which pure Being has had on existence from all eternity. (RB 122)7Santayana reasons that it is accidental to an essence whether or not it exists (no essence exists essentially), and no essence implies, causally or logically, any other essence (RB 20–21; see also RB 836).8 The metaphysical contingency of existence makes the bifurcation of essence and existence total.9 Celestine J. Sullivan, Jr., encapsulates the relevant point: “[W]hat is a contingent fact but one the nature, or essence, of which does not imply its existence[?]” (220).Santayana's theory of essences has an affinity to Meinong's view on nonexistent objects,10 and thus intersects with central theses described in the neo-Meinongian doctrine of noneism. “Noneism” is a term coined by Richard Routley to refer to a handful of theses. Most notably, noneists deny that (i) “only what exists can have properties” (Routley 22), and (ii) “non-existent items . . . cannot be sensibly spoken about or discussed” (Routley 11).11 Conversely, noneists affirm that (iii) “[e]xistence is not a characterising property of any object”; and (iv) “essence precedes existence” (Routley 2–3). Santayana's commitment to (iv) has been covered already. Santayana's commitment to (i) and (ii) can be observed in the following: The science of chess—even if chess never had existed in the world—would be an exact science. . . . [A]n exact science is not without an object. . . . Indeed, the ideal definition of that object . . . renders exact science of it possible. (RB 4–5)12Sylvan (aka Routley) provides a nice rendering of the distinction between characterizing and non-characterizing predicates (and, mutatis mutandis, properties): Characterizing predicates are those which specify what an item is like, in itself. They tell how an item is in fact. They give its description. A good dossier of an item would perhaps give its characterization first, by way of its characterization features. (qtd. in Hyde et al.)It is clear that Santayana conceives of essences as characterizing properties; as he says, “[e]ssences do not need description, since they are descriptions already” (RB 67), and elsewhere, “essences . . . are the original elements of any description” (RB 32).If an essence's existence is always metaphysically contingent, then existence cannot be a part of any essence's intrinsic character, since otherwise an essence would exist necessarily, contrary to the contingency hypothesis. Thus, the contingency of existence implies that existence is not a characterizing property of any essence (i.e., [iii]). As Santayana insists, “[n]o essence . . . has any power to actualize itself in a fact; nor does such actualization bring to any essence an increment in its logical [intrinsic] being” (RB 416).13There are marked dissimilarities between the two accounts, however; the most fundamental are that the noneist maintains that “there is only one way of being, namely, existence,” and noneist objects (“items”) are non-entities (Routley 42). Conversely, Santayana affirms multiple ways of being, that is, diverse realms in which essences obtain—namely, the realms of essence, matter, and spirit (RS 826–28)14—and also that essences in themselves, that is, irrespective of their existential instances, are entities (SAF 129),15 namely, transcendent universals.16Santayana holds that a thing's qualitative identity (though not its existence or token individuation) is exhausted by its essence, and a thing's being (though not its reality) is exhausted by its qualitative identity. Essence is responsible for type-individuation, but particularization (token individuation) is external to essence per se. On type vs. token individuation, Santayana explains: [I]nstances can occur only once, while essence may recur any number of times; that which is local in the occurrence is the instance, that which might be identical in various occurrences is the essence. If I write the same word twice, the word which is the same is the essence and the words which are two are its instances. (RB 121)17Santayana draws the Platonic division between being and becoming,18 according to which being is a static, unchanging universal form (essence) that may be multiply realized across distinct instances, and becoming is an intrinsically unstable reality of perpetual flux wherein universals get mixed-in with something other than being, to form a succession of particulars. The existent world, according to Santayana, is a material world of becoming in which essences are impure, and, here, as Timothy Sprigge notes, he “is not too far from Plato in regarding the world of process into which . . . [essences] are dragged from time to time as a second rate reality” (“Whitehead and Santayana”). As Santayana says, “the very nature of existence . . . is flux and, as Plato would say, non-being” (RB 48).19However, Santayana also considers being (essence) a precondition of the possibility of change and becoming per se, writing that “[t]he flux flows by flowing through essences” (RB 40).20 On his account, essences are the nodes of character demarcating one state from the next, and, thus, are implied in any succession of distinct events.Any existent involves being, since it must possess its logical identity as the type of thing it is; but “in existence Being is impure, having in it something more or something less than any essence” (RB 119).21 This something other than essence is matter, which Santayana describes as “a primeval plastic substance of unknown potentiality, perpetually taking on new forms” (RB 292; cf. Lachs, “Santayana”).There is a controversy over whether “matter” and “substance,” on Santayana's view, have distinct referents.22 I am largely in agreement with Angus Kerr-Lawson on this point (cf. “Name”; “Santayana on the Matter”); the Santayanan distinction between substance and matter is one of genera and species. “Substance” is a class concept principally denoting a foundational subject of characterization, whatever that subject may be.23The nature of this foundational subject is not a function of essence, since its reality is that which undergirds all instantiation of essence; its nature is therefore logically prior to such instantiations. Santayana refers to this irrevocably occult aspect of substance as its “residual being, or not-being” and calls it “antithetical to essence altogether” (RB 218).24 This is not to say that substance and essence are metaphysically separable—something Santayana denies (e.g., see RB 13). Rather, this is to say that substance and essence are not equivalent.25“Matter,” on my reading, refers to the only type of substance that is not a “false substance” (SAF 218): Candidates for membership under the class “substance” fail to qualify if they are immaterial. When Santayana says that spiritual substance is “a self-contradictory notion at bottom, because substance is material” (SAF 217), he means that substance is a class of things with, by necessity, only one species as a member, namely, matter.26A chief characteristic of the substance of the natural world, Santayana believes, is that it is a subject and engine of change (RB 225, 279–80). While, as will be later discussed, substance is implied by change as the thing that is conserved (and thus, changes) through a series of distinct states, not all metaphysically possible substances involve change, according to Santayana. Santayana speculatively entertains the possibility of radically different substances from that of the actual world, some of which are not subjects of change.27 Thus, while he thinks that material substance is the only species of substance, he is also open to the metaphysical possibility of distinct subspecies of material substance.On Santayana's view, the material of existents is responsible for their reality being unexhausted by characterization. Paradoxically, since he defines “truth” as that subset of the realm of essence consisting of all existentially instantiated essences past, present, and future (SAF 267),28 his position that existents are more than their essences entails that worldly facts transcend what is true about them—since what is true about them is merely their essences (RB 48).29 Let us focus on one of the three features Santayana thinks existents indispensably have that mere essence lacks: namely, external relations.30Existence, according to Santayana, involves essences bearing external relations to one another. As he says, “[e]xistence exists by virtue of oppositions in the place, time, and exclusive characters of particulars: being has being by virtue of its universal identity” (RE 48–49). Mere essences, in their purity,31 do not exist because they do not have external relations; the only relations that pertain to them are those they have intrinsically, that is, internal relations. In order to explain what internal and external relations are within the context of Santayana's doctrine, one must unfurl his distinction between simple and complex essence.Simple essences are universal characters that consist of a singular theme. They cannot be analyzed into constituent elements. Santayana considers the affective intensity of brightness (RB 146), a smell, a solitary musical note, and a color (RB 70) as simple essences, for instance. Conversely, complex essences are universal characters that consist of an ensemble of themes. For instance, the essence of a triangle consists of a certain organization of lines and angles. The respective essences of a series of numbers, a mermaid, and a visible sunset are complex essences. According to Santayana, there is an infinite plenum of non-competing, self-sufficient, simple and complex characters (RB 78).Internal relations obtain solely in virtue of the constituent identities of the related things. According to Santayana, there are two types of internal relations: (1) the constitutive relations holding among separate essences, and (2) the constitutive relations holding within one and the same complex essence (RB 71, 131). As an example of (2), the interior angles of a rectangle must be related to one another in such a way that their sum is equal to 360 degrees. As an example of (1), a square could not be a square if the sum of its interior angles were not greater than the sum of the interior angles of a triangle. Following Sprigge, call (1) “contrastive relations” and (2) “holistic relations” (Santayana: An Examination 83).External relations, on the other hand, obtain not solely in virtue of the identities of the related things, but are rather a function of their accidental situation. “External relations,” Santayana explains, “are such as are due to the position, not the inherent character, of the terms” (RB 206). For example, I am externally related to the Earth's Equator: I am to the north of it. This relation is not internal, since I remain the same if I walked to the south past it, and so does it.Only is it when essences become exemplified in the realm of matter do they take on external relations, according to Santayana. On his view, what it is for an essence to be existentially instantiated is for it to be situated in a spatiotemporal framing in which it is externally related to other existential instantiations of essences: [T]he intrinsic qualities of a thing compose its essence, and its essence, when caught in external relations, is the thing itself. (RB 44)[A]n existential order . . . by definition . . . is a realm of being over which inessential relations are compulsory. (RB 418)A mutual externality, or Auseinandersein—an alternation of centres such as moment and moment, thing and thing, place and place, person and person—is characteristic of existence. (RB 203)32Given that an essence qualifying an existent must have external relations to other essences, it follows that there can never be only a singlular instance of an essence qualifying existence, on this view.33 Moreover, it also follows that any description of an essence's instance must not only record the relevant essence's internal relations, but also its external relations.34Santayana means for the existence-making external relations to be to other instantiations of essence. Thus, even though, by his account, essence is (perhaps) technically placed in an external relation to matter within its existential instantiation,35 this is not the relevant type of external relation, for “everything that exists exists by conjunction with other things on its own plane” (RB 276).36 Matter and essence are not on the same plane, on Santayana's view, though existential instances of essences are on one and the same plane. Santayana maintains that it is “the conjunction of existences in nature” (RB 203) and “the succession or continuity among [essences]” (RB 208) that constitute the relevant external relations. The relevant relations are between existentially instantiated essences; this rules out any existential import of mere enmattering without a plurality.The centrality of external relations here can appear odd: Surely what is at the business end of an existential instantiation of essence is its enmattering, and any external relations are subsidiary to this “thickening”—to borrow Santayana's expression (RB 119). This suspicion overlooks the meta-philosophical framework informing Santayana's natural philosophy, the governing operator of which is that well-founded philosophical discourse on substance, to borrow P. F. Strawson's notion, is “descriptive”; that is, it is “content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world” (Strawson 9). For Santayana, this means that it is confined to “substance” that is “the object of animal faith posited in action and described in perception spontaneously and more deliberately in theory and discourse” (SAF 228–29).As a result, not all logically possible forms of substance are on the table, only, rather, ones which may constitute an actionable reality. A possible enmattered essence that bears no external relation to anything is one with respect to which human action is impossible (SAF 229–30):37 An action implies at least an agent and a recipient within a range wherein the agent's effects can be transmitted, and thus, involves at least two existents in a unified field of action (RB 202–03).No essence, Santayana proclaims, can adequately capture the reality of a thing standing in external relations. Within any candidate essence of a natural succession of events, the lesser separate events out of which that succession is composed are recorded as elements of a formal sequence wherein all relations of before and after are internal. As Santayana puts it, “historical events . . . cannot be gathered up or understood . . . without being sublimated and congealed into their historical essences and forfeiting their natural flux” (RB 269).38 The same point holds for spatial adjacency: What in natural space is an accidental aggregation of separate particularized essences is in essence reduced to a system wherein all separateness and accidents are lost. Santayana writes that “the conjunction of existences in nature must always remain successive, external, and unsynthesised” (RB 203), and moreover that “essence . . . contains no reference to any setting in space or time, and stands in no adventitious relations to anything” (RB 18).39Santayana thinks that the realm of essence archives all complex forms, to anticipate, of composite material order (see below),40 and the spatial and temporal orders of external relations together with the separate particularized essences that are their relata qualify as composite material orders. But his position here requires qualification. Such composite material orders cannot be characterized exclusively as the expression of a certain totalizing complex essence, since then not only would they cease to consist of external relations, but, by the same token, they would cease to involve separate essences. The relations would be reduced to holistic relations; the separate essences would be reduced to elements of a complex essence.Nevertheless, though from a certain standpoint, composite material orders cannot be viewed as exemplifications of complex essences, it is clear that they nevertheless involve them or, better, “inform” them. One observes Santayana attempting to adjudicate just this sort of, call it “dual-aspect” position, in the following: Of itself existence has no wholeness: it would not be existence if it were not scattered into moments, each its own centre, reaching out towards one another in the dark, forgetting what they were in what they become, and learning what they will be only by becoming it. (RB 305; emphasis added)[T]he truth is much richer than existence can be at any moment. Not only does it retain the essence of all moments equally, but it contains much that each moment, and even all moments in their inner being, can never contain, since it contains also the systems which these moments form unawares, merely by co-existing and alternating as they do. (RB 486; emphasis added)The qualifications “of itself” in the first passage and “inner being” in the second are designed to create the logical space for another standpoint from which to consider the composite material orders of existents. In the second passage, Santayana affirms that the “systems” of the composite material orders comprising the simpler particularized essences and their external relations are recorded in the realm of truth as complex essences. And since “truth,” again, denotes the set of all existentially instantiated essences, it follows that these complex essences or “systems” also exist.41Santayana also discusses what he calls “the blind flux of matter” (RB 348). The “blindness” of existence consists precisely in the “insoluble problem of self-knowledge” (RB 486), that is, the inherent myopia of existence that excludes from the character of any separate existential instantiation of essence the registration of its material's seat in a more comprehensive system wherein it is but an expression of an element belonging to an instance of a more complex essence. It is precisely this “single blindness” that Santayana thinks renders “centres of existence . . . nests for external relations” (RB49). Given the unmitigated scope of systemization (see RB 71), without this blindness, the universe would be reduced, per impossibile, to the instantiation of one solitary totalizing complex essence.In order to properly articulate Santayana's difficult view here, let me define some terminology: Let “accidental aggregate” refer to composite material orders taken under their primary aspect, that is, considered as collections of separate particularized essences together with their mutual external relations. As Santayana says, “[m]aterials do not synthesize themselves by being heaped together” (RB 657). Let “systems” refer to composite material orders taken under their secondary aspect, that is, considered as expressions of complex essences. Finally, let “composite material order” be understood as the neutral way of referring to the material or physicality of such aggregates and systems. This is a legitimate manner of speaking, since Santayana thinks that “there is . . . [no] difference of physical status between a thing and the substance of it” (SAF 203). “Composite material order,” thus, refers to what Santayana means by the “physical status” of a thing—as opposed to the thing per se. It is a heuristic device, however, since material, recall, has no separate existence from essence.Santayana runs into a difficulty here: An essence is only realized in existence, we are told, by taking on external relations, and this is for it to be situated in a spatiotemporal framing with respect to separate particularized essences. However, this framing together with its relata, qua composite material order, also “informs” the existence of a system. But then, it seems, we are confronted by an infinite material expansion: The existence of this system in turn requires its own existential frame, and such a frame, given, call it, the expansionist postulate, can only be its external relation outward, that is, to a particularization of essence outside of its own physical boundary. But then this external framing together with its relata (i.e., the system and the particularized essence lying beyond it) will inform another system, and so on ad infinitum. At each step, more material substance is required.42If Santayana held that material substance43 were infinite in magnitude, the endless progressive multiplication would not be objectionable: Every composite material order, no matter how comprehensive, could always take on external relations outwardly to particularized essences beyond its physical boundary.The problem, however, is that Santayana cannot consistently require that the material universe is infinite. He is a critical agnostic about the infiniteness of substance, as can be gleaned from his following remark: To ask whether substance must be discrete or continuous, finite or infinite, many or one, is like asking whether the Almighty must think in French or in English. Having no competence in that sphere, why should we have preferences? (RB 239–240)44His agnosticism here is a function of the abovementioned meta-philosophical framework of his theory: The question of material infinity transcends the bounds of well-founded philosophical reflection on substance, given that such reflection is confined to articulating the properties that substance must have for it to constitute an actionable reality. While any substance of an actionable reality must be diversified, since “[a]ction evidently would be objectless in an infinite vacuum or a homogeneous plenum . . . and . . . the . . . possibility of action would vanish if I, the agent, had not distinguishable parts, so that at least I might swim forward rather than backward in that dense vacuity” (RB 209), it need not be infinitely diversified (RB 216).While his critical agnosticism requires that he leave open the possibility of material infinity, it also cuts in the other direction: He cannot consistently require such infinity. Thus, the expansionist postulate is undermined by the principle of interpretive charity, since it saddles Santayana with a commitment to material infinity that goes against his professed critical agnosticism, which renders any postulation of material infinity, including an infinity of parallel worlds, idle supposition (cf. RB 28).There is another difficulty facing Santayana's doctrine of existence. This problem is distinct from the infinite expansion problem, since it cannot be resolved by postulating a material infinity. Nevertheless, it is cut from the same cloth as the expansion problem, namely, the expansionist postulate, according to which a particularized essence's external relations always proceed outwardly to material objects beyond its substantial boundary.Consider Santayana's following remarks on the world system: Every articulated image offers some spatial or temporal pattern which is essential to that essence. There is no limit to this complexity in unity: the system of any world is one essence; the whole realm of essence is one essence. (RB 71: emphasis added)[T]his world is much more emphatically a medley than a unit; and yet it is one in some respects, as in its dynamic continuity and in its speculative totality or system. (RB 75)45The existence of the world system is implicated by the dual-aspect account of composite material order.The world system constitutes the totalizing essence of our universe, and thus there can be no external framing beyond this system. How, then, does this system come into existence, given the expansionist postulate? It must, it seems, exist; for the composite material order that comprises the totality of particularized essences together with their external relations exists, and therefore, given the dual aspects of composite material order, so, too, does the system of those particulars. But the world system—a particular in its own right—cannot be in a situation of some further network of external relations; there is no material outside the substantial boundary of this system. By Santayana's admission, this is so even if there are parallel universes: If there are other centres and active substances moving in other spheres, the relation of these disconnected spheres is not a physical relation. . . . One will not exist before the other, nor will they be simultaneous; nor will either lie in any direction from the other, or at any distance. (RB 215)46There are strands in Santayana's philosophy that will later be explored that show he was aware of this problem, and that his remedy was to deny the full-blooded existence of the world system while nevertheless retaining its status as a truth. But this is a tenuous position, and he was not entirely comfortable in maintaining it. In a related vein, Sprigge (Santayana: An Examination 171) goes in a similar route in order to circumvent another problem that arises from Santayana's dual-aspect view of composite material order: He denies the full-blooded existence of “tropes,” that is, essences of the natural sequences of events. Such proposals (as will be argued in sections 5.1 and 5.3) are ill-conceived.The expansionist postulate is in conflict with Santayana's critical agnosticism regarding material infinity. It is also in conflict with the existence of the world system—something to which he is bound in virtue of his dual-aspect account of composite material order. The path to a more productive interpretation of Santayanan instantiation goes through his unique refinements on the nature of complex essencehood, to which we now turn.Santayana denies that complex essences are mereological wholes, that is to say, are aggregates of proper parts. A complex essence, Sprigge explains, is “an individual unity, identifiable by its unique overall character, which, though it can be analysed into elements cannot be regarded as composed of them” (Santayana: An Examination 77–78).47 The notions of complexity and constituency at play here are thus rather exotic.48 Since, in order for a complex essence to include as one of its elements another (simpler) essence, it must be composed of parts, complex essences do not comprise a manifold of simpler essences (RB 88).49Essences, both complex and simple, are irreducibly whole, unitary, and primitive, according to Santayana (RB 85–91).50 This is in contrast to the material contained within their instantiations. The complex essencehood of complex essences, or constitutional integrity of an ensemble of themes in holistic relations, is distinct in kind from, call it, the compositional or mereological complexity of material. The latter involves accidental aggregations (adjacencies) of material parts, which is to say, a collection of conceptually and metaphysically independent particulars, whereas the former involves a differentiation of aspects within a single complex essence. Both kinds of complexity are to be observed within existential instances of complex essences.In both passages, we observe Santayana drawing the distinction