If moral truths cannot come from embodiment in matter, perhaps they derive from envisagement by mind. And, indeed, Santayana is perfectly prepared to admit such truths as that Levinson thinks of genocide as awful. Now let us suppose that everyone who has ever thought about it to this day agrees with Levinson that genocide is a vice. This means that in every intuition in which the essence genocide occurs, it appears suffused with or characterized by the essence bad. It is more nearly right to say that it is a cosmic accident.
Value is the way animal interest and partiality are experienced in consciousness.
As such, they involve a relation between objects of pursuit, animal tendencies and the intuited moral essences the psyche projects on what it seeks. We cannot speak of virtue and vice, therefore, without taking the needs and the desires, the very nature of the animal into account. Moral truth thus becomes empirical truth about morality, a prosaic catalogue of who prizes what, a record of the moral history of the world rather than a guide to its correct development. I cannot believe that this would satisfy Levinson, yet I cannot see how Santayana could give more. Just as he is a pragmatist in certain respects, he is a positivist in others.