705 West Elm St.
Urbana, Ill.

Feb. 14, 1940.

Dear Mr. Brooks,

Here is the review of the most significant books
on Dewey published last year which you were kind enough
courage me to write. I think I've managed to say a great deal
within the compass of a little over 12 pages. I sincerely hope
you can get this essay into your spring number. That's where
it belongs.

I'm mailing this off to you in a hurry, so I haven't
had time to include return postage and envelope. If you wish to
return the essay to me later, let me know then and I'll send you the
necessary postage and envelope.

Hoping to hear from you soon, I remain

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

705 West Elm St.
Urbana, Ill.
5/29/40.

Dear Mr. Brooks,

This summer two books are coming
out, which I should like to make the subject of an
essay. They are Santayana's _Realm of Spirit_, and
_The Philosophy of George Santayana_, Vol. II of
the _Library of Living Philosophers_ (this is a companion
volume to the volume on Dewey which I reviewed in
your last issue). I have been a close student of
Santayana for some years, and I'm thirsting for the
opportunity to write a brief and summary essay upon
him. I should like to spend the whole summer on
it, but I should like to know first whether the
_Southern Review_ would be interested in having it.

THE CONCLUSION OF
MR. SANTAYANA'S PHILOSOPHY

William Barrett

IF we are to view Mr. Santayana's writings now with any completeness we have to see him against the background of the Harvard of James and Royce, of the Genteel Tradition in Boston in the 1890's, and perhaps also against the whole background of the 'Nineties in England, of which Boston offered in some ways only a fainter replica. What might appear at first glance most characteristic of the man and his writing is the degree to which they seem to detach themselves from any background. But the critic must not allow himself to be so easily put off. A writer's milieu may operate upon him at various levels, and perhaps never more strongly than when it succeeds in isolating him from the life of his time. We can neglect this lesson from Mr. Santayana's life only at the cost of missing what is often central in his writing.

This isolation of the spirit is evident in Mr. Santayana's latest book.¹ Its particular circumstances we must trace back to his earliest experience. Mr. Santayana has not been unaware of his own ironical fate: that as a Spaniard and a Catholic, he was aware of traditions and habits of life with which American life in general, and the more restricted environment of New England Protestantism in particular, amid which he was condemned to spend the most vigorous years of his life, seemed in violent

¹The Realm of Spirit. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, $3.00. Almost simultaneously there has appeared an interesting collection of essays, *The Philosophy of George Santayana*, ed. by P. A. Schilpp. Northwestern Univ. Press, which attests, even where the writers engaged are critical of him, the extent and persistence of Mr. Santayana's influence.

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opposition. When William James once wrote accusing him of having deliberately cut himself off from the life around him, Mr. Santayana was prompt to reply that that life had offered him no reason for being interested in entering it. Even while he was still living in New England he had already made himself an exile. And when he left America in 1912 to settle, after an intermediate period of wandering, in Rome, he was simply continuing a state of exile, which had by now grown habitual, among new and more congenial surroundings. In his new exile he continues however to be the solitary. The impression of his isolation gathers intensity from his later writings: the man is more alone and his philosophical reflection is being fed more and more from purely introspective sources. At this point perhaps his isolation really becomes paradoxical. America, which has inherited his life, does not quit him. These later writings leave us with the suspicious impression of the cultivated American living in Italy amid the enchantments of the past. Mr. Santayana's Realm of Spirit, where "the psyche forgets its origin and its conditions and is absorbed in timeless forms," seems at times to express nothing so much as the American tourist lost in wonder at the ruins of Rome.

Now that Mr. Santayana has concluded his long philosophical work, *The Realms of Being*, begun seventeen years ago, it still remains very much of an unanswered question for his philosophical critics just what, if anything, has been illuminated by its five volumes. The present volume may leave it questionable too just what the content of this new one of Mr. Santayana's realms is. One gathers however that it is, for one thing, the realm in which the great devotional books of the religious would have their place if one removed from these any conception of an object towards which the devotions are directed. In developing this conception Mr. Santayana has probably performed a thankless task. His book has too much religion for the naturalist, too little for the religious. Mr. Santayana is probably aware—but, we believe, not altogether completely—of his incongruous position here. As early as 1900 he remarked in his *Interpretations of Poetry and Religion*, which expounded essentially the same attitude towards religion, that he was performing a thankless task. That he was right in this early guess is evidenced by, among other things, the sharp attacks his naturalistic brethren—principally those of the Deweyan

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sect—have leveled against this latter phase of his thought simply because he shows himself interested in such a thing as disinterested contemplation. But whatever their motives, they may very well be right in their suspicions that Mr. Santayana's religious desires are greater than his philosophy can permit. Probably Mr. Santayana does not see the extent to which his religious interests burst the bounds of his naturalistic philosophy. Here are his last words in the present volume:

So discounted and disinfected, the speculations of intense and consecrated minds have a great authority, especially when they have proved acceptable to mankind, and have become the companions and vehicles of aspiritual discipline. They do not thereby become miraculously true; nevertheless they reveal inner and outer harmonies established with long labor and sacrifice in the human soul. There they remain fountains of wisdom and self-knowledge, at which we may still drink in solitude. Perhaps the day may return when mankind will drink at them again in society.

Mr. Santayana is announcing an impossible hope. Impossible at least on the basis of what he believes. And perhaps it is better to follow his more consistent—if less sensitive and cultured—naturalistic brethren, and renounce devotions to non-existent objects.

But for the moment Mr. Santayana seems to have found rest in the spiritual luxury of this new realm, and perhaps we may safely leave him there for the present, meanwhile turning our eyes to the whole system that has been concluded, to raise a few questions about certain general, but very fundamental, features which stand out as significant.

II

The impression of Mr. Santayana's isolation gains strength when we examine his intellectual derivations. Like his historical antecedents they are cosmopolitan and ambiguous. The number of professed allegiances alone is greater than we might imagine one man handling successfully: The Greeks, Aristotle, Lucretius, Catholicism, Spinoza, Indian philosophy. His relation on the other hand with the thought of our time has been on the whole always that of a man criticizing from without. Except for one brief moment in his career we cannot place Mr. Santayana directly in

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any movement in contemporary philosophy. Thereafter he is aware of his own philosophic aloofness from the thought of his time, and he deliberately invokes higher sanctions for his philosophy: the past and its great ancient doctrines which the modern world had forgotten. No doubt he is right to charge some modern philosophers with an unfortunate ignorance of the past, but it is questionable whether his professed derivations have improved this general situation. Has he really absorbed any traditional doctrine sufficiently to bring light upon modern controversy?

The Greeks whom Mr. Santayana invokes as sanction for his philosophy probably do not attract us now as they once did. These smiling, happy, pagan Hellenes, in whose approval he feels his philosophy basks, never existed outside of Mr. Santayana's imagination. At their worst they are the prose equivalents of Swinburne's lush pagans, and at their best they still give indications of the sweetness and light of an Oxford education. We are reminded here that Mr. Santayana's career began in the 1890's with a book on aesthetics and some minor verse, and we should expect the Greeks to be different for us today than for a man who began under such auspices. The particular chasm between Christian and Greek that Mr. Santayana and others make we cannot make today, or at least we cannot make it in the particular way in which they do. The similarities between Christian and Greek thinkers are likely to seem to us now as significant as their differences. The figure of Aristotle, whom in his earlier writings Mr. Santayana used particularly to invoke as a sponsor, is one case in point. Mr. Santayana's Aristotelianism in his *Life of Reason* should appear questionable to us now in view of the fact that his later work betrays ignorance of some very elementary points in Aristotelian philosophy. We suspect that the extent of Mr. Santayana's Aristotelianism may not have gone very much beyond the use of a facile formula¹ which, apparently, was supposed to sum up the whole of Aristotle's philosophy. As for his profiting from the model of the intellectual life that Aristotle offers us, Mr. Santayana brings to mind the penetrating words of a great Hellenist of our time, Werner Jaeger writes:

> Aristotle has a dour, austere form; no wide-ranging survey, no ge-

> nial comfortable intuition, can really understand him. Rarely does he
> ¹ "Everything ideal has a natural basis, and everything natural an ideal fulfillment."

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offer us a whole on which the eye can rest with pleasure. Only in the
concrete details, only by intensive concentration, can his essence be
grasped. "For the actuality of Nus is life." [Aristotle, p. 170]

Whatever may be said against them, the great Christian Aristotelians
have at least not been guilty of the "genial, comfortable intuition," and
in precisely that "energy of mind" which the motto of Mr. Santayana's
early work seemed to extol they are infinitely closer than he to Aristotle.

Among the most paradoxical of Mr. Santayana's loyalties are those
he professes towards Catholicism. He has written as bitingly of Protestantism,
Modernism, and even Anglicanism, as would please the most
ultramontane of Catholics. In the midst of Protestant New England Mr.
Santayana understood that the traditions he might have had as a Spaniard
and a Catholic drew from deeper sources of light and life than those
traditions prevalent about him. And Mr. Santayana, we are told, has continued
all his life to decorate the walls of his chambers with the pictures
of the Virgin and the saints, while also insisting in his philosophy that
from the point of view of the imagination and of poetry the Church is the
truth. The paradox in Mr. Santayana's attitude is precisely in the intellectual
judgments we should expect to support this sympathy—that as a
philosopher his failure to comprehend the Church should be a failure to
comprehend its intellectual sources. The number of possible attitudes to
the Church are perhaps infinite, but I suggest that Mr. Santayana's is
not the most useful for us today. In leaving us a picture of the Church as
a highly baroque structure of liturgy and legend it leaves its real significance
untouched. If we are to learn anything that the Church and its centuries
of Christianity have to teach us, we have to go beyond Mr. Santayana's attitude.
His conception of Christianity is in the end a caricature, and it is the nineteenth
century's caricature.

Given Mr. Santayana's opinions and attitudes, one might perhaps
almost predict the interest in Indian philosophy which his later writings
exhibit. Buddhism seemed to offer Mr. Santayana a refuge where he
could satisfy his religious emotions without being obliged to accept theism.
But the emotional satisfactions of the Buddhist seem to demand more in
the way of belief than his naturalistic philosophy would permit. The history
of Buddhism certainly offers no unambiguous testimony that an

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atheistic religion can survive and satisfy human beings. And we could
hardly fail to question Mr. Santayana's understanding of Indian philosophy
when we know that he is absorbing it through translation, and translation
into a language very remote in associations and structure from
the original. We have too much experience of the interpretations of Greek
and Latin philosophers by people reading them in translation, and we
cannot easily forget the very elementary misunderstandings to which
such interpretations have fallen victim, to believe that Mr. Santayana at
his distance, in language and background, can have grasped what the
Oriental philosophers meant. We suspect the "genial comfortable intuition"
which he had thrown in the direction of Aristotle and Catholicism.

Mr. Santayana's real master, the master of whose doctrines he makes
most use, is probably Lucretius. Mr. Santayana has also claimed to derive
much from Spinoza. But his Spinoza is a very incomplete Spinoza, very
much dated, and we cannot at the present time read Spinoza in the way in
which Mr. Santayana at the end of the last century as a student at Harvard
College could read him. We cannot, for one thing, see Spinoza simply
as a prophet of the nineteenth-century materialistic picture of the
world. Insofar as Spinoza was deliberately doing a theological job, we
tend to believe today that in comparison with his medieval predecessors
he bungled. Moreover Spinoza believes in a doctrine of individual immortality
to which Mr. Santayana's naturalism could not subscribe. The earlier
naturalistic philosophy of Mr. Santayana is in effect another version
of Lucretius, with the details of Epicurean physics removed. In the later
work of Mr. Santayana this influence has been overlaid with other influences
from the most various sources—scepticism, Platonism, Indian
philosophy—but it nevertheless still persists as the underlying base for
the whole. The propositions important for Lucretius's philosophical system
(as distinct from his particular scientific system) are also those important
for Mr. Santayana's naturalistic philosophy. Mr. Santayana does
not always state them. At times he seems almost trying to persuade us he
does not have them. Lucretius is much more definite about the propositions
he needs and uses. That is part of his superiority over Mr. Santayana.
This comparison of merit is of course unimportant here, and may
be invidious. The significant question we are left with is whether Mr.

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Santayana has advanced the philosophic position of Lucretius or simply
added some new rhetoric attractive to the modern mind.

Ш

If Mr. Santayana's life is paradoxical, if his intellectual derivations
are ambiguous, we cannot find his work itself the most definite of *c*
time in its intention and lucidity. There is a sense in which in any one of
his philosophical works we seem to find the intentions of poet, philoso-
pher, novelist, and familiar essayist, all interpenetrating each other. Mr.
Santayana has in his literary career been all of these by turns. The dif-
ficulty the reader may have with his philosophy is that Mr. Santayana in
his philosophical writing seems to want to continue all of these functions
at once. He has claimed thus to be fundamentally a poet, that in his
philosophy he is looking at existence through a poet's eyes. He has read
and admired Proust, and in the "literary psychology" by means of which
he argues the scepticism of his later volumes he seems almost to vie
with the novelist in elaborating psychological nuance. But when Mr.
Santayana is writing a novel he claims to be fundamentally a philosopher.
In his poetry we see him complete the circle and proclaim himself simply
a philosopher versifying. When all these intentions are present in a single
philosophical work, the reader is not helped. Particularly in Mr. Santa-
yana's later writings, the reader might have enough difficulty as it is in
making out just what is being said without Mr. Santayana adding to the
confusion by telling us his own uncertain intentions about it.

Doubtless Mr. Santayana's philosophy would not have had the influ-
ence it has had without this particular literary finish of its exposition.
But the philosophical message is nevertheless separable from its mode of
exposition, and as a philosophic message it commands the assent of many
minds. The most complete versions of this message are given us in the
two series, *The Life of Reason* and *The Realms of Being*. A considerable
number of years separate these works and much controversy exists as to
whether the distance between their philosophic points of view is not
equally great. Whatever the outcome of this controversy, it is at least
certain that Mr. Santayana's philosophical reputation rests on these
works. They remain the two achievements by which we have to measure
his ultimate philosophic importance.

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This importance is probably inseparable from the rise and spread of
naturalism in American philosophy. He has been its most persuasive
prophet. Perhaps what Mr. Santayana has been able to sell has been an
attitude more than a doctrine. Naturalism does not exist at the present
time as a systematized philosophy, and we find in America no more un-
healthy condition for the intellect than the fashion in which this word is
bandied about. This loose usage has not been confined to any one group
on either side of the fence. The foes of naturalism have sinned equally
with the faithful fighting under its banners. The New Humanists, who
talked a great deal against naturalism, succeeded only in spreading con-
fusion about it. They insisted on speaking of the naturalist as the classi-
cal epicurean pig ruled only by animal impulse and appetite, and the na-
turalist had a perfect right in protesting that he could not recognize him-
self under the Humanists' descriptions. Humanism is now dead and na-
turalism remains. Perhaps there is some justice in these separate fates.
Mr. Santayana was no stranger to Humanism's high priest, Irving Bab-
bitt. For years he and Babbitt engaged in sniping at each other over the
polite barriers of academic life at Harvard. Mr. Santayana persisted how-
ever in public silence on the subject till 1931, when he brought out his
little volume, *The Genteel Tradition at Bay*, and even then he did not
actually refer to Babbitt by name. We need not subscribe to Mr. San-
tayana's philosophy to find him holding a superior hand against Babbitt.
Babbitt suffered from a philosophic confusion typical of the whole Hu-
manist movement. We are tempted to apply to him the judgment which
his pupil, T. S. Eliot, made of Matthew Arnold: in philosophy he was an
undergraduate. The upshot of Humanism was to leave the naturalist
more entrenched than ever in his position. The Humanist, having no real
alternative to offer to naturalism, merely confirmed the naturalist in his
misunderstanding of the real possible position opposed to him. As if one
evil were not enough, the naturalist insists on answering his inaccurate
condemnation by shuffling his own false coin. He seems capable only of
grasping a caricature of the antinaturalistic position. In certain philo-
sophic circles in this country the mere uttering of the words "naturalism"
and "naturalistic" to baptize almost any view on any matter whatsoever
seems sufficient to get this view accepted as correct without further analy-

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sis. The words have become pejoratives or empty honorifics. We
would do better to throw them away unless we can purge them of their
haloes, whether of saintliness or diabolism.

Naturalism appears at first glance a compost of many emotions and ideas, many of them very definite accidents of our time and society, but some with marks of greater antiquity. To penetrate the accidental, to reach the theses that may be essential, and to separate its positive from its merely negative assertions, is not an easy task, and Mr. Santayana does not help us forward in it. He has never codified his naturalism (unlike Lucretius, again) into any definite set of propositions. Contemporary naturalists have carried on a persistent but veiled flirtation with positivism, without being, however, as honest or forthright as the positivists. Positivism would permit no general philosophical, non-scientific, statement to be made about nature. It is explicit on the point. Mr. Santayana, and some of his naturalistic brethren, trim. *If naturalism has some positive, distinctly philosophic, propositions about nature—propositions which do not belong strictly to any one of the special sciences—we should like to know what they are.* What we usually get instead is popularized science or exhortation. Sometimes Mr. Santayana seems to imply, with the positivist, that such propositions cannot be had. We find this tergiversation prominent particularly in the later writing, where Mr. Santayana sometimes refers to his system as an ontology, sometimes as a mere grammar of discourse. Now which is it? Surely the two are not the same. If he is talking about words then he cannot be talking about Nature and Existence. But if he talks about the latter, he must take the philosophic responsibility for what he says. Mr. Santayana claims his system is not a cosmology but a logical grammar, and yet we find him criticizing a writer like Mr. Dewey for lacking a cosmology! The reader is forced to conclude that Mr. Santayana is unwilling to commit himself on the question whether his naturalism contains some positive, distinctively philosophic, propositions or not.

We have much less difficulty discovering the negative theses of na-
turalism. The naturalist is much clearer when he is denying certain posi-
tive and traditional philosophic positions than when he is affirming some
positive view of his own. We know his creed much better by these latter

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at any rate. The two most significant parts of the naturalist's beliefs seem to be his atheism and his denial of the existence of the soul or consciousness as a substantial unity. He denies that certain traditional arguments for theism or a substantial soul are valid. He may very well be right in both denials, but all that in any case he has to believe here is ordinary logic, which in itself of course does not give him a philosophy. To be unconvinced of something is not necessarily to have a philosophy of one's own. Sometimes the naturalist's denial takes a more positive turn, and he may deny that either of these traditional positions makes sense. He is then compelled to offer some positive criteria for what is meaningful and meaningless. At this point we generally find the naturalist relying on other schools of thought to do his positive job for him or simply adopting his prejudices for dogmas.

With regard, in particular, to one principal assumption on which Mr. Santayana's naturalism operates it might not be beside the point to indicate in passing a certain very drastic limitation to his point of view. It is his assumption, very dominant throughout his writing, though always assumed as self-evident without argument, that whatever exists is a body or some aspect of a body, and that apart from these nothing could possibly be said to exist. Now it may very well be the case that there does not exist any such thing as an immaterial substance in or out of our universe, but to operate always on the unanalyzed prejudice that such a thing is inconceivable may simply indicate an inability for intellectual imagination. And we ought to refresh Mr. Santayana's memory in connection with this to point out that people at one time believed with a firmness—equal to his, but considerably better argued—that space without a body could not exist. Yet the contemporary scientific picture of the world (which Mr. Santayana presumably believes) presents us with the existence of vacua. Why then should he find it impossible to believe that an immaterial substance could exist? Mr. Santayana would seem here simply to have cut his philosophy off from that “logical imagination” which Mr. Bertrand Russell finds, and rightly we believe, so necessary for the philosopher.

I am not concerned here with arguing the case for or against natural-
ism. I would only like to leave the term a little more neutral than it has

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been. If we are to be clear at all about what we do mean by the term, we
must be very careful to distinguish between what the naturalist affirms
and what he denies. Otherwise we get fog, and we have a good deal of
unclear talk, and we have in particular Mr. Santayana telling us in a
dozen or so volumes—with the appearance of telling us much more—sim-
ply that he does not believe in God or in Christianity. Probably it is not
possible at the present time to discuss the issues involved in naturalism
with any great degree of understanding between the conflicting parties.
and the best thing to strive after for the time being is simply to prepare
the way for such possible future discussion. For one thing the whole issue
of naturalism is connected in the modern world with the decline of Chris-
tianity as a revealed religion, and it is very difficult at the present time to
get the philosophic issues separated from the specific religious faith. And
these issues seem further involved in many cases with the concrete ques-
tion of orthodox institutions and their opposition to social revolution,
though this involvement is probably less strong now than in the previous
decade. It may very well be that the future will never see these issues
separated from their historical involvements. If Christianity is a divinely
instituted religion, one sign of this may be that, should it perish, men
would cease to turn their minds at all to these philosophic issues. But of
course if it is divinely instituted then we do not expect it to perish. But
whatever the future, at the present these philosophical issues are logically
separable from the other concrete questions connected with their history,
and it is very necessary to clear the ground for their discussion. From this
point of view it is questionable whether Mr. Santayana's philosophy does
not obscure much more than it clarifies.

He obscures fundamental issues where he does not see that religion
has to do with the intellect as well as with the emotions. Part of his
difficulty here may be that the only theology he seems to know is that of
Plotinus, which, excellent in some ways as it is, is in its mode of expres-
sion just such as to deceive Mr. Santayana by its literary color. The re-
sult is the usual naturalistic idea of religion as an emotional solace for the
individual's fear, loneliness, and despair. Intimately linked up with this
idea we find in Mr. Santayana's pages a curiously naive and oversimpli-
fied version of the later classical period in which Christianity had its

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origin. We get the impression of a classical culture sick and dying from
the death of Aristotle onward, incapable thereafter of any energy or pre-
cision of thought. This view is too naive to require refutation. We note
it only because it shows us that Mr. Santayana's failure to understand
religion is a failure to understand the intellectual reason for its existence.
No lower animal produces a religion. Only an intelligent being gravitates
to the light. The case of Tolstoy, as presented in his *My Confession*, is
one to which we must always return for renewed insight upon this point.
With every naturalistic comfort, with fame, success, love and wealth, Tol-
stoy suddenly found himself plunged into unspeakable misery because he
could discover no reason—a reason in which his mind might rest satis-
fied—for his existence. Religion attempts to give us such a reason. If it is
not found in religion, it is found nowhere. And if there were no reason to
be found, man, so far as he is an essentially intellectual being, might cease
to prolong that existence, no matter how incidentally pleasant it might be.
If Mr. Santayana's naturalism were the only possible answer to Tolstoy's
question, then we should have committed ourselves to as dismal a view of
human intelligence as can be conceived. Man's intelligence would be the
original sin of his nature. A wound inflicted upon our being, capable of
overturning, as with Tolstoy, our finest naturalistic happiness and plung-
ing us into a misery where we touch no bottom.

It is significant that Mr. Santayana's teacher, William James, who
undertook the study of religion from a fundamentally naturalistic point
of view, should have come out at the end with conclusions so different
from those of his pupil. The compulsion of the facts took James far be-
yond the commitments of his philosophy, and, we may add, somewhat
beyond logical decorum too. It was simply one instance where James's
instinct for facts exceeded his logical ability to handle them. He did not
have the logical and philosophical equipment to deal adequately with the
supernatural, and his conclusions about religion thus burst the bounds
of his philosophy. It is only Mr. Santayana's sentiments, not his conclu-
sions, about religion which burst the bounds of his philosophy. Mr. San-
tayana does not have the philosophical equipment which would enable
him to order these sentiments. Nor does he have James's ability to yield
before fact. So we would expect his conclusions to go no further than they

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do. But the facts which James could not fit into a naturalistic frame re-
main. Though our particular philosophy may lead us to evaluate them
differently, nothing has arisen since his famous work on religion to show
that we can discard James's conclusions.

The vagueness surrounding the term "naturalism" has probably
operated most disastrously in the field of ethics. It is here that we find
it affecting the ordinary person insofar as anything at all in philosophy
can be said to have an effect on the daily man. No doubt an ethical doc-
trine like Mr. Santayana's is an immense comfort to a great many people.
The extraordinary welcome accorded the early naturalism of Mr. San-
tayana's *Life of Reason* is to be explained in good part as a sigh of relief
after the dreary and colorless picture of nature painted by the nineteenth
century. Mr. Santayana had dressed up (or undressed) the old pagan
goddess of nature for modern eyes, and people felt immensely comforted
at the thought of the "harmonies" with which, as Mr. Santayana's opu-
lent prose so gracefully sketched, this goddess was fecund. Now this is all
very well, but it leaves us only at the beginning of an ethical theory. Sup-
pose we have whipped up our emotions into this naturalistic attitude, we
still have the problem on our hands of defining what is "natural" and
what "unnatural." And here we can find almost as much confusion as
human discussion permits. M. André Gide, for example, assures us that
certain things are natural which we feel in the highest degree to be un-
natural, and contemporary discussion elsewhere does not show any very
great agreement on such issues. The natural is very much in want of a
definition. The paradox is that supernaturalists have given us much more
precise directions about our acts as natural beings than any naturalist.
They have gotten down to cases. And the worst thing to be said against
Mr. Santayana's moral philosophy is that it has never gotten down to
cases. It talks a good deal about "harmony," "reason," "sanity," but any-
thing like a precise definition of these is not attempted. If one is inter-
ested in conduct, one is interested, I imagine, in such things among others
as pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, sloth. How much does
it advance our knowledge of these to be told—what, to be sure, we all
know—that they are "natural," that they exist for a natural being as in-
volvements within the natural world? It is as if in the midst of some per-

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plexing and specific moral situation we should turn to Mr. Santayana for a
word of illumination only to be told—what? Of the beauties of the sun,
moon, and stars, the plants and animals. This particular strain in Mr.
Santayana's naturalistic moral philosophy seems to be summed up in the
refrain "Heigh-ho the wind and the rain!"

On what does this naturalism rest? Mr. Santayana has attempted to
provide in his *Realms of Being* the groundwork of a systematic philoso-
phy for the morality of the *Life of Reason*. The ontologist of these later
writings professes to complete the philosophic picture sketched out by the
moralist of the earlier writings. I do not know whether the particular
philosophical basis he has chosen is the one Mr. Santayana's naturalism
really requires. At the moment I do not even insist that naturalism must
have any explicit metaphysical basis at all. But I do know, and I should
like to proceed to make clear, that if the philosophy of these later writ-
ings is in fact its basis, then Mr. Santayana's naturalism is very shakily
established indeed. Naturalism, no doubt, can survive this demolition, but
Mr. Santayana's naturalism, be it noted, is thereby left very much in the
air.

The later writings referred to, the series of *The Realms of Being*, be-
gin with *Scepticism and Animal Faith*, which philosophically is also prob-
ably the best of the series. Mr. Santayana tries in this work to clear the
ground for his philosophic system by pushing scepticism to its furthest
limits. Ultimate scepticism leaves us only the momentary intuition of
certain data or essences, and the momentary intuition in itself does not
necessarily imply any intuition beyond itself. None of the objects which
ordinary experience believes to exist may really exist. This part of Mr.
Santayana's scepticism is summed up in the formula, now quite famous:
"Nothing given exists." But after such devastating scepticism the second
part of the book, and the later volumes of the series, seek to rehabilitate
the beliefs of the daily man on the basis of "Animal Faith." What com-
mon sense professes to believe about the world it really believes only
because it is to the vital interests of the human animal to believe these.
This is the only basis, according to Mr. Santayana, on which we can
believe that such things, for example, as physical objects exist. From
here on Mr. Santayana seeks merely to expound a system of categories:

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his philosophy has not been brought into final harmony with Animal
Faith, and the beliefs of Animal Faith do not permit the particular argu-
ments for the scepticism. The reader may verify this assertion in the
details of Mr. Santayana's text.

The subsequent volumes of the series have not improved the situa-
tion at all. They simply present us with the picture of Mr. Santayana
pursuing his soliloquy further and elaborating these fundamental ambig-
uities at greater and greater length: whatever he has had to say could
have been said without intellectual loss in forty pages, and he has taken
five volumes. If we ask ourselves the reason for Mr. Santayana's spectac-
ular failure here, the only answer that seems to present itself is that he
has failed to concentrate on the specific task. To confine himself to his
philosophic task in these volumes he would have had to give himself to
piecemeal analysis, and this would have entailed the sacrifice of the "liter-
ary" interests which these volumes also prominently exhibit. The desire
for philosophic truth has not been the only, and perhaps not the most
important, one of Mr. Santayana's desires that his writing has tended to
fulfill. His non-philosophic writings represent interests which they have
not satisfied and these interests return to distract the philosophic author
from his proper business.

IV

Apart from our interest in their author, the literary writings of Mr. Santayana would hardly command attention. If we take the trouble to read his verse now it is only in order to see what themes haunted the philosopher's youthful mind. I cannot conceive of anyone without this interest pushing on to read more than a dozen pages of this early verse. His novel stands much more on its own feet, but it does not come off as a completely successful composition. What we notice first about it is a certain quality of fluency, something we never lack in anything Mr. Santayana has written, but which, unfortunately, he seems never to have checked in himself: he is able to get his narrative deftly under way, and there is a kind of comfortable ease in the way he can chat about his characters. But the author's invention is not equal to his novel's length. The initial fluency wears thin, the sense of drama is very much lacking: the story is prolonged, without being complicated or intensified, and the

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result is that the characters also soon become very apparently thin. The
story may bring them into new situations, but we acquire no deeper
knowledge of them. In the end we are left in amazement that Mr. San-
tayana could pursue through 600 pages a character so thin and uninter-
esting as his priggish hero. The final interest of the novel remains again,
as in the case of the verse, in how much of the philosophy it reflects. It
shocks us into a very serious doubt of the whole moral philosophy. One
wonders whether the tepid and thin emotions portrayed in Mr. San-
tayana's novel are not the emotions perfectly correlative to his particular
brand of naturalism. Does the moral philosophy give us any more reason
to believe that he has known a more significant struggle between Good
and Evil than that which vaguely agitates the adolescent soul of his puri-
tan hero?

Mr. Santayana's real and particular genre is probably neither poetry
nor the novel, nor even philosophic exposition, but the soliloquy. This
seems to be the particular spring of his inspiration. To understand his
later writings one must realize that Mr. Santayana is not so much devel-
oping for us a systematic philosophy as regaling us with his soliloquy
about human life and the cosmos. It is only from this point of view that
we can appreciate the adequacy of his style to his genre, and there is no
doubt that if Mr. Santayana's genre is really the soliloquy then his is a
style appropriate to his form: its whole tendency is towards expansive-
ness and the murmuring rhythms of meditation. But the question of its
adequacy as a philosophic prose is something else again. Mr. Santayana's
writing has of course varied in tone and manner at different times, and
there have been many occasions when he has written incisively, clearly, and
with singular vigor. But as time has gone on he has tended away from this
into the more florid melodies of his later volumes. It is rather difficult to
know whether Mr. Santayana has been following his own tendencies here
or simply listening to the siren songs of some of his more aesthetically
inclined disciples. When Mr. Irwin Edman tells us that Mr. Santayana's
style is "a model of conscious and deliberate art, and the art is that of a
poet," he seems to me to be calling attention to that aspect of this prose
which ought to have been least encouraged, and therefore calling attention
away from the real virtues of some of the earlier writings. We tend to

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suspect a prose which can be praised only by a comparison with poetry.
One need be drawn into no judgment of what is or what is not the proper
aim of prose. All that need be pointed out is that from the point of view
of effectiveness alone Mr. Santayana's philosophic message never found
its proper vehicle. Mr. Bertrand Russell (in Mr. Schlipp's collection of
essays) throws out a remark of considerable penetration when he points
out that Mr. Santayana's style has sacrificed accuracy for beauty, and
that it is actually his style which prevents Mr. Santayana from taking
account of modern analyses that would clarify his problems. Mr. Russell
himself could very well illustrate the opposed style of lucidity in prose
which Mr. Santayana has never attained. The reader may compare from
this point of view the argument for scepticism advanced by Mr. Russell
in, say, *Our Knowledge of the External World* with that of Mr. San-
tayana's *Scepticism and Animal Faith*. Mr. Russell has the advantage of
being in the tradition of English philosophical prose, a tradition of con-
siderable resources and virtues, while Mr. Santayana here, as elsewhere
in his philosophy, is not very solidly in any one tradition at all. Whatever
may be said against British philosophy, at least Locke, Berkeley, and
Hume are, in the phrase of Mr. J. M. Keynes, "prose writers seeking to
be understood," and they set a standard for prose not surpassed by any
philosophical writing in any other modern language. Nobody would
wish to exclude the possibility of beauty from philosophic exposition, and
there seems to be a special beauty of their own to such functional styles
as the Greek of Aristotle and the Latin of St. Thomas. Mr. Santayana,
who elsewhere shows himself so thoroughly to despise British philosophy,
might have at least kept these older models in mind. Certainly it is not
for want of good models that he has gone off on his own bent to cultivate
that thoroughly "personal" style for which Mr. Edman and others so
unitedly praise him, and which at its most elaborate seems only to suggest
as its nearest hypothetical source something like Jowett's Plato done into
verse by Swinburne and then turned back into prose by Walter Pater.
There is no reason for not pushing Mr. Russell's point a little further.
And perhaps, were his knowledge of classical philosophy a little more
adequate and sympathetic, he himself might have gone on to point out
that Mr. Santayana's style equally prevents him from making use of

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ancient as well as modern analyses that might have helped him in his
problems. What should have been the vehicle of the philosophy has be-
come so heavy with ornament as to leave us mired on the road.

v

The most immediately apparent traces of Mr. Santayana's influence
are, curiously enough, just those of this style. Sometimes the imitation is
deliberate and sometimes it has percolated through from other sources.
It is very questionable whether this influence has done the least bit of
good for the clarity of American philosophical discussion. But because
the influence here is in general so easily spotted one feels no very great
qualms about its being dangerous. When Mr. Irwin Edman writes some-
where that the aim of intelligence is to find a "rhythm of order amid the
chaos of evanescence," we recognize immediately the influence at work
which prevents him from saying simply that intelligence is looking for
order, and we feel no very great damage has been done. Actually the imi-
tation here has only made us see more clearly the periphrastic tendency
of its model.

But Mr. Santayana's influence also exists in a much less deliberate
form. It is most dangerous in the minds that are not conscious of being
dominated by it. The generation of American philosophers upon whom
Mr. Santayana made his strongest impression by his *Life of Reason* has
given way to another, and this latter generation, affecting a tougher mind
than their teachers, have professed to reject Mr. Santayana's as a deco-
rative but "unscientific" philosophy, and have turned to engage them-
selves in the more specific problems of society and science. The paradox
is that they should so tenaciously, though unconsciously, hold to Mr.
Santayana on the more ultimate questions of philosophy. Some of our
popular preachers of scientific method would be considerably jolted, I
suspect, to know that on certain fundamental philosophical issues they
are thinking as loosely as they reprehend Mr. Santayana for doing on
the more specific problems of science. Mr. Santayana has established
naturalism in these minds as a conviction beyond argument by persuad-
ing them that any other belief can be maintained only by people who are
deliberately trying to bluff themselves. This is the tone of his writings

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which has made them so effectively persuasive. It is regrettable that so
many other philosophers in America should have borrowed the same tone.

Nevertheless all the signs of the moment, whatever his persuasive-
ness, point to the waning of Mr. Santayana's influence. Naturalists are
already demanding a form of their doctrine more wholeheartedly natural-
istic than he has to offer. Mr. Schlipp's collection illustrates this tendency.
So far as there is a thread of unity through the collection it seems to be
the protest against Mr. Santayana's doctrine of essence, and the protest
is argued in most cases with Mr. Dewey always in the background. Vari-
ous degrees of struggle against the doctrine are represented. But generally
there is more at issue than a formal matter of metaphysics: Mr. San-
tayana's critics are disturbed by the impractical attitudes of contempla-
tion which his doctrine implies, and their criticisms, however justified
philosophically, seem prompted in great part by the practical prejudices
of Mr. Dewey. Whether or not we are satisfied with the success of any of
these criticisms is another question. I am inclined to feel that the tools
used are in most cases inadequate and that Mr. Santayana's comeback
lies right at hand. Mr. Dewey does not supply us with the instruments to
abolish Mr. Santayana's philosophy of essence. The Deweyan view ap-
pears to be essentially right so far as it denies Mr. Santayana's position,
but the positive prejudices that accompany it seem to me as unacceptable
as the doctrine it attacks. Whatever its success, this concerted attack
argues at least a gap in Mr. Santayana's naturalism probably even more
fundamental than this essay has been able to elucidate. Among contem-
porary figures I think we must find Mr. Dewey and Mr. Russell more
complete naturalists. In both there is a coherence between attitude and
belief which we feel absent from Mr. Santayana. Mr. Russell's cynicism
towards religion is much more the attitude appropriate to his naturalistic
beliefs than Mr. Santayana's emotional loyalty on the basis of the same
beliefs. And Mr. Dewey's "common faith" in the cheerful sociability of
the plain citizen does not strain any naturalistic credulities. But the fu-
ture, which may not after all be interested in obtaining a purer natural-
ism, may see Mr. Santayana's influence wane for another, and more
important, reason. If philosophers are ever again in the position to raise

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the issues involved in naturalism with some understanding between con-
flicting groups, Mr. Santayana's writings will be found to offer little in
the way of positive solution to either side. The future may agree that the
philosopher has sacrificed his opportunities in order to gratify certain
adventitious and impure literary impulses.