Santayana: Saint of the Imagination 9781487589318

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SANTAYANA: SAINT OF THE IMAGINATION This book has its origin in the author's deep admiration for its subject as a man of great cultivation with the instinct of veneration as well as the determination to learn and to face the facts, an engaging human being as well as an exciting thinker. Her aim has been to encourage a wider reading of Santayana himself. With this purpose she provides an intimate picture of the man using material from his letters and making reference to his autobiography and other philosophical works; but within the biographical framework she also expounds his thought, endeavouring to show the high quality of her subject's "religion" of the imagination. The result is a firmly handled, quietly mannered exposition of the growth of Santayana's mind as seen in his books and the small events of his life as scholar and thinker. It will be suggestive for the general reader and a helpful introduction for the student. Mrs. Kirkwood's teaching career in the University of Toronto has covered a period of many years. She has been a lecturer and Professor of English in both Trinity College and University College and the philosophical character which her interest in literature has always had was early shown in The Development of British Thought 1820-1890 with special reference to German Influences (1919). Academic responsibilities of another kind came to be her chief preoccupation during her years as Dean of Women at University College (1921-29) and later as Principal of St. Hilda's College (1936-53); as a result of these activities she was led to comment on her social experience in two books Duty and Happiness in a Changed World and For College Men and Women, both published in the 1930s. However, she has continued her philosophical and literary interests unabated, and in particular has long enjoyed making a close study of Santayana. This book is a fitting celebration of her many years of distinguished service to the things of the mind in her various university associations, which were also happily symbolized in the year of its publication by the giving of her name to a new wing for St. Hilda's College.

University of Toronto Press 1961

SANTAYANA: SAINT OF THE IMAGINATIONS BYM.M.KIRKWOOD

COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1961 UNIVERSITY OP TORONTO PRESS

Excerpts from the following books are reprinted with the kind permission of Charles Scribner's Sons: Persons and Places, copyright 1944 Charles Scribner's Sons; The Middle Span, copyright 1945 Charles Scribner's Sons; My Host the World, copyright 1953 Charles Scribner's Sons; Scepticism and Animal Faith; The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, copyright 1946 Charles Scribner's Sons; The Life of Reason (one-volume edition), copyright 1953 Daniel M. Cory; The Letters of George Santayana (ed. Daniel M. Cory), copyright © 1955 Daniel M. Cory; The Sense of Beauty, copyright 1936 Charles Scribner's Sons; Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, copyright 1900 Charles Scribner's Sons. Excerpts from the following books are reprinted with the kind permission of Constable & Company Ltd.: Realms of Being (1946); The Sense of Beauty (1936); Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900); The Life of Reason comprising Reason in Common Sense (1906); Reason in Society (1906); Reason in Religion (1906); Reason in Art (1906); Reason in Science (1906).

/ \Uttiversity ojToronto Press

Diemmd( ^Anniversary 1961

To WA.K.

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FOREWORD

I have read this book with considerable pleasure, and it seems to me to be a fair and useful introduction to the life and mind of George Santayana. In particular, I am grateful to Dr. Kirkwood for having stressed the essential Spanish stamp, or "essence," of the rich imagination of her "saint" (and mine), and for reminding us that after all Santayana was born in Madrid, spent his childhood in Avila, never spoke anything but Spanish in his new home in Boston—and remained a loyal Spanish subject all his life. There has been an understandable but misleading tendency in certain quarters of the New World to consider Santayana an exclusive flower of the New England literary and academic tradition. The truth is rather that while Santayana welcomed the intellectual opportunities offered by America (and especially Harvard), he was loyal enough to his roots to resist any winds of doctrine, whether social or academic, that were contrary to his fundamental vision of things. Dr. Kirkwood is also to be thanked for having rescued a splendid poem like Lucijer from the storehouse of half-forgotten works of

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FOREWORD

imaginative value. I, for one, have returned to this poem with a new zest and a clearer understanding of its importance. In her exposition of Santayana's deliberate philosophy as expressed in The Life of Reason and—even more conscientiously—in the Realms of Being, I have found Dr. Kirkwood a safe guide. The few suggestions I have ventured to make were more in the interests of a consistent terminology than such as to constitute any alterations in her interpretation. To sum up: I have no hesitation in giving this book my blessing, if such a gesture on my part is to be deemed of any significance. Siena, 1959

DANIEL CORY

PREFACE

My purpose in writing this book is twofold. First, being enchanted with my subject, the man Santayana, I wish to add to the self-portrait of his autobiography the fresh vivacity and light afforded by his letters, now available to the reader in Daniel Cory's admirable edition. Secondly, I have tried here to set forth what appear to me the significant strands in Santayana's thought. Outside the orthodoxies and the neo-orthodoxies, our age is strongly agnostic. To be without a creed is to lack direction and support. I believe that in this situation modern man, having found teachers like J. S. Mill, "saint of rationalism," ineffectual guides, may experience illumination in studying Santayana's way. This thinker, spiritual child of Spinoza and Aristotle as well as of the Christian tradition, teaches his reader how, in the world of things temporal, he may truly live sub specie aeternitatis. However, the fact is that although Santayana's writings on aesthetics, his literary criticism, and his one novel have won him readers, attention has thereby been distracted from his philosophical work proper. This appears to me a misfortune. My hope is to draw attention here to the principles which animate the thought of this modern saint of

X

PREFACE

the imagination, and which give his philosophical writings lasting value. My effort at a portrait of Santayana employs as its basic method extensive quotation from the writings, writings now amplified by the publication of the letters. For the right to quote I am greatly indebted to his publishers, Messrs. Constable of London, Charles Scribner's Sons of New York, and the former Dunster House of Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as to his literary executor, Mr. Daniel Cory. Mr. Cory has been most generous, reading the manuscript and making suggestions which I have adopted. He has also very kindly contributed a foreword. Grateful acknowledgment is also made to the authorities of the Houghton Library of Harvard University who gave the writer access to the Santayana papers stored in that library and gave permission to quote from "The Judgment of Paris." I am grateful for the grants in aid of publication provided by the Humanities Research Council of Canada (out of funds provided by the Canada Council) and by the University of Toronto Press Publications Fund. M.M.K.

Contents xi Foreword by Daniel Cory / vii Preface /ix

CHAPTER 1 Beginnings in Spain / 3 CHAPTER 2 Home and School in America / 13 CHAPTER 3 The Harvard Undergraduate / 24 CHAPTER 4 Studies Abroad and Return to America / 37 CHAPTER 5 The Young Poet / 48 CHAPTER 6 The Young Philosopher / 61 CHAPTER 7 The Harvard Professor / 82 CHAPTER 8 The Amalgamating Imagination at Work: Lucifer / 97 CHAPTER 9 The Imagination Producing a Philosophy— The Life of Reason (I) / 115 CHAPTER 10 The Imagination Producing a Philosophy— The Life of Reason (II) / 132 CHAPTER 11 The Life of a Travelling Student / 155 CHAPTER 12 The Imagination Amalgamates all Realms of Being/ 176 CHAPTER 13 The Religious Imagination— The Idea of Christ in the Gospels / 198 CHAPTER 14 A Philosopher Completes His Task / 218 CHAPTER 15 Finale / 231

Ml

CONTENTS

Facsimile of letter from Santayana to Professor W. A. Kirkwood / 234 Index / 237

SANTAYANA: SAINT OF THE IMAGINATION

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CHAPTER

1

BEGINNINGS IN SPAIN

Santayana's life and thought are all of a piece, providing material strong enough for hard spiritual wear. Such wear is needed in a world that through loss of faith and hope seems chill to many. Before the story is begun, Santayana the man and Santayana the thinker may fitly be introduced by two pictures. The first picture is based on a passage in The Middle Span, the second volume of Santayana's autobiography. Here the author recalls getting out his old box of water-colours and making figures for a toy theatre. He wished to amuse two little boys of four and five, the children of his sister Susana's stepson. He tells about reproducing a play in which Susana had acted in her girlhood, with one or two Russian ballets he had seen in Paris or London. The whole family was invited to one dress performance, but the preparations and rehearsals amused the little boys (and their director still more) for days and days. The second picture is drawn from a letter which Santayana wrote in October of 1948. An old Scottish priest had died, a man who had lived, as Santayana did, under the care of the Blue Sisters in Rome.

4

SANTAYANA: SAINT OP THE IMAGINATION

The requiem mass was sung in the chapel of the convent by the choir of the English college and the priests of the Beda. Santayana attended the service. He said of it that it brought tranquillity in view of life and death and all things, for it might have been Byzantine or Egyptian or pagan of the remotest times. One sees the stillness on his face as he listened. George Santayana, poet and philosopher, was born in Madrid on December 16,1863. His father and his mother's father had been civil servants in the Philippines. By an earlier marriage to an American, George Sturgis, his mother had three children, of whom the eldest, Susana, aged twelve, acted as godmother to the infant George when he was christened on January 1, 1864. The child was called George after his mother's first husband. Perhaps this rather odd naming symbolizes the addition to Santayana's Spanish heritage of an American tradition. The two cultures are represented in him, but not really blended. Although America was the finishing institution for his early years, Spain was his cradle and native country and Avila was his infant school. One might argue that the man was in effect made, when he took the voyage to America with his father in 1872. The inner soul of Santayana was very conscious of his Spanish inheritance. In a letter written to F. Champion Ward in 19351 he says, "If I ever write the autobiography I have in mind, Spain will come into its own in my life. It has always been a fundamental factor. That I have always retained my legal Spanish nationality has not been an accident or an affectation: it has been a symbol of the truth." Writing to Mrs. Theodore W. Richards in 1936, he says, "My mother, who had a little money, thought it her duty to bring up the three Sturgis children in Boston; but my father, who was over 50 and spoke no English, although he read it easily, couldn't think of living in America himself. It came to a friendly separation: and from the age of 5 to 8 I remained in Spain with him, after my mother and the girls had departed: my brother having been sent ahead two years ^Letters (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955), p. 292.

Beginnings in Spain

5

earlier. My father and I lived in a large house in Avila, with an uncle and aunt and their daughter Antonia [sic]." When Persons and Places, the first volume of Santayana's autobiography, appeared in 1944, Avila assumed its true importance in his story. This ancient walled town was "all grandeur and granite," Santayana writes, "yet it is so small as to seem in the country. Step out of one of the lofty gates and you are at once amid wheat fields and windy moors. At this altitude primitive bald nature has coexisted for ages with the tightest and most fortified civilization, ecclesiastical and military."2 There is no illusion here about nature's genial rule, but rather an impression of austerity and fate, fate resisted and mastered to the extent that religion and government can mitigate that power. Recognizing their sternness and the hard nature which they bound, Santayana nevertheless warms into passion as he describes "the perfect walls of Avila," revisited by him in the eighties and nineties and later years. He tells of every bastion shining clear in the level rays of the sun, with the cathedral tower in the midst rising only a little above the battlements, and no less imperturbably solid and grave. The stone in that level light took on a golden tint, beautiful and almost joyful against the blackish rocks and arid slopes of the descending hills, only relieved here and there by fringes of poplars or dark green oaks. The landscape near Avila (that, I suppose, of an extinct glacier), is too austere to be beautiful, too dry and barren, yet it reveals eloquently the stone skeleton of the earth; not a dead skeleton like the mountains of the moon but like the mountains of Greece, vivified at least by the atmosphere, and still rich in fountains and in hidden fields.8

Santayana shows himself aware of the impact of Avila upon his eye and mind in childhood. Talking about a drive on which certain friends took him and his father he writes, "my young mind saw nothing but the aesthetics of mechanism, yet my unconscious psyche ^Persons and Places (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944), p. 98. &llrid., p. 105.

6 SANTAYANA: SAINT OF THE IMAGINATION kept a better watch."4 In that psyche were stored up pictures not only of nature, but also of peasants riding in on donkeys with garden produce, markets and fairs, girls and young men gathering to draw water at the fountain, and particularly the religious processions which brought and still bring delight to the peoples of southern Europe. He notes the comic element in those processions, but considers their real and poignant appeal to be as "lovely marvels." In the Catholic world, the religious festival stands for the ideal in life. With regard to the Corpus Christi procession he comments, "Those to whom such things seem nonsense must be puzzled at the vogue that the cult of the Sacrament has acquired in the present conceited and distracted age: it seems incongruous with dominant industrialism and with opinion controlled by the daily press. Perhaps it is a safety valve, a self-defensive movement of the human psyche, threatened with absolute servitude, like that of the working ants."5 Santayana tells also about the autumn feast of St. Teresa. This reforming and literary woman, born in Avila, is commemorated by a beautiful image which annually is borne in procession from her church to the Cathedral, and welcomed there by the image of the Virgin. There is humour in the account of the movements of the two images, but Santayana's treatment of religion and religious practices is here as always tender and charming as well as realistic and critical. He writes at length about the churches, insisting that the feeling apprehended there in his youth was still of devotion and not show. In the Cathedral, he loved as a child the magnificent red damask hangings round the chancel and choir, which were later removed and sold to an American. He considered this change a spiritual theft, for the hangings had, like all rich ornament characteristic of Gothic building, been votive in effect, making the sanctuary "like a throne room and audience for the Most High." Purity of design and fine taste were then no real ground for pruning Church ornaments. Santayana says, "Churches are built for prayer, not to exhibit the history of architecture," and he considered that the purist approach might *Ibid., p. 20.

&Ibid., p. 102.

Beginnings in Spain 7 destroy any reality remaining in religion. Churches could become sepulchres for the religion that built them. Returning to Avila, however, through the years, he rejoiced to find the Cathedral still a living church, and not a museum or a ruin. "Here was ancient priestly religion, as acceptable to the truly intelligent as their native language or their accidental governments, not because miraculously right or perfect but because ingrained in all their traditions, part of the soil and substance of their only possible life, to be transmitted with the inevitable variations to the next generation, if this generation is not to be wholly disinherited and barbarous."6 So old men and old women, workers and young children, continued to find in their Cathedral comfort for the eye and mind and uplift for the spirit, while in the same place Santayana exercised his particular aspiration and gained insight. The small boy watching the acolytes as they scampered about their duties, listening to the rough and gusty music, and following the movements of the Mass while his eye strayed occasionally to admire the paintings in the reredos or the charming twin pulpits, was learning what was for him the main lesson of life. Doubtless Santayana learned also from the shrine of Our Lady of Sonsoles, who was commemorated in a stone chapel not far from Avila. This shrine, with which were associated a farmhouse, barns, a grove, and a fountain, symbolized for Santayana the yearning trust of the human heart in unseen benevolent powers. He felt that the perfect little stone temple and ornate image enclosed afforded assurance of values other than earthly. He writes, "It was . . . grateful to slip for a moment into the darkness of the cool oratory, and visit the Virgin in her placid unearthly splendour. The universe, our own souls, then revealed to us another dimension, besides those of our labors and sorrows."7 The shrine gave off a sense of "invisible sympathy of all things with man, when he takes his place gladly among them." The most obvious influence in Santayana's childhood in Spain 6Ifcid.,p. 114.

Vlid., p. 109.

8

SANTAYANA: SAINT OF THE IMAGINATION

was of course his father. The portrait drawn in Persons and Places is lifelike and intimate, a demonstration of that power of vivid characterization which adds so greatly to the interest of the autobiography in general. In considering the portrait of Santayana senior, one should note how carefully the background of history has been filled in. The reader is told about Santa Juliana, the place name which was corrupted ultimately into Santayana and which was adopted as the patronymic of a family living there and originally known as Ruiz. He also learns of the migrations of the members of this family and of the Borras connection (Santayana's mother was Josefina Borras), and of the odd circumstance that Augustin Santayana and Josefina Borras almost met in youth in the island of Batang where Borras senior had been governor. They actually met some years after on board ship, when Josefina with her husband and young children was on her way from Manila for a visit in Boston. Finally, after her first husband's death, the two were married in Madrid where Augustin was living as a retired official home from the Philippines. Persons and Places amplifies this tale of parents and genealogy, and the details are made interesting, but the significant feature of the narrative is the preliminary comment: "Accidents are accidents only to ignorance; in reality all physical events flow out of one another by a continuous intertwined derivation."8 So Santayana describes the movement of human life and announces the historical method as his approach to it. Lest determinism be inferred as the author's whole creed, we quote a paragraph which follows close upon the expression "continuous intertwined derivation." Santayana writes, Not that I would nail the flag of fatalism to the mast at the beginning of this retrospective voyage. What we call the laws of nature are hasty generalizations; and even if some of them actually prevailed without exception or alloy, the fact that these laws and not others (or none) were found to be dominant would itself be groundless; so that nothing could be at bottom more arbitrary than what always happens, or more fatal than what happens but once or by absolute chance. Yet in the turbid stream of *IfcttZ., p. 2.

Beginnings in Spain 9 nature there are clear stretches, and traceable currents; and it is interesting to follow the beginnings and the developments of a run here and a whirlpool there, and to watch the silent glassy volume of water slip faster and faster towards the edge of some precipice. Now my little cockle-shell and the cockle-shells of the rest of my family, and of the whole middle and upper class (except the unsinkable politicians), were being borne along more or less merrily on the surface-currents of a treacherous social revolution; and the things that happened to us, and the things we did, with their pleasant and their hopeless sides, all belong to that general moral migration.9

The home in Avila, after his mother left it to go with her daughters to America, showed little but hopeless sides to the small boy. His aunt Maria Josefa was an ignorant woman of the people, his uncle Santiago was simple (and later became insane), and his cousin Antonita was involved in love affairs. The latter ended with her marriage to a widower, Rafael Vegas, who after the marriage moved into the Santayana house with his two little girls. Of this assorted household Santayana writes, I didn't feel deeply or understand what was going on, but somehow the force of it impressed my young mind and established there a sort of criterion or standard of reality. That crowded, strained, disunited, and tragic family life remains for me the type of what life really is: something confused, hideous, and useless. I do not hate it or rebel against it, as people do who think they have been wronged. It caused me no suffering; I was a child carried along as in a baby-carriage through the crowd of strangers; I was neither much bothered nor seriously neglected; and my eyes and ears became accustomed to the unvarnished truth of the world, neither selected for my instruction nor hidden from me for my benefit.10

Antonita's death in child-birth is recorded by Santayana in a careful passage where he comments on his impression of her still-born child, "Most beautiful I thought him." The image of that child, as of green alabaster, remained in his mind all through life, and suggested to him the theory that all living things, if left to themselves in »Ifr«J.

u>ll>id.,-p. 119.

10

SANTAYANA: SAINT OF THE IMAGINATION

the dark where they have germinated, will evolve into the beauty consonant to their nature, but human beings, being thrust out all unfinished, are frequently twisted and become the opposite of themselves by the accidents of worldly environment. It was better that Antonita's child perished outright, he thought. "He had profited longer than is usual by the opportunity to grow undisturbed, as all children grow in their sleep; but this advantage, allowed to butterflies and flowers, and to some wild animals, is forbidden to mankind, and he paid for it by his life and by that of his mother."11 This curious discussion is similar in temper to a later passage in the autobiography when Santayana animadverts upon the rhyme, You must not in play Steal the birds away And grieve their mother's breast. He states clearly that such moralizing had no effect on him and rang hollow in his ears—he could not understand how a rational creature could be wrong in being or doing what he fundamentally wished to be or do. This was not to say that he, Santayana, had no conscience, but he thought he perceived that growth from seed was good, and that sound character emanated from potentiality, and that nature knew what she was about. So, early in life, were the convictions of naturalism borne in upon him. If the household in Avila seemed generally disturbed and ugly in the eyes of the young George, there was one member eminently sane and self-controlled, and that was the boy's father. Augustin Santayana had attended the University in Valladolid as a young man, receiving some training in the law, but when adult found success in the diplomatic service abroad until his health was affected. He had a knowledge of painting and practised it, although his son considered that preoccupation with the mechanics of the art and with accuracy in representation prevented the development of any real creative gift. Augustin Santayana knew Latin, and enjoyed translating Seneca "Ibid., p. 126.

Beginnings in Spain

11

into Castilian blank verse. His son admired his indifference to circumstances and to externals, his independence, and his capacity to live content with little and alone. Influenced, as his wife was also, by the ideas of the Enlightenment, Augustin Santayana was a political and religious radical, but he accepted the contemporary forms in Spain as necessary second-bests. His intelligence made him question things, but in him the characteristic Spanish modesty and dignity combined to induce a thoughtful quietism. His son tells that one day, in speaking of Newman, his father expressed surprise that he should have broken with the Anglican establishment. 'Was it so as to wear a trailing red silk gown?" Santayana senior found it difficult to accept the view that Newman might have been sincere, that he might actually have believed in the supernatural authority of the Church. He himself, although fulfilling the expected rites and duties, regarded the traditional religious system as invented. His son tells, with some humour, how on one occasion when the old man thought he was on his deathbed, he felt a sudden desire for some boiled chicken. He shouted (for he was deaf and could not modulate his voice), "Extreme Unction and a chicken!" Santayana says: To have asked for confession and communion would have implied much talking; he was too far gone for that. Extreme Unction would do perfectly to avoid all unpleasantness regarding his funeral and burial in holy ground. Nobody would need to be distressed about his soul. And meantime, since these were his last moments, and the consequences of any imprudence would make no difference, why not boldly indulge himself one last time, and have some boiled chicken? That, I am confident, was his thought. And he had the chicken. The last Sacrament, this time, was not required.12 Many years after, in Rome, when the writer of these words talked of his own death he requested that his body be buried in the Catholic cemetery. (He mentioned "the neutral ground" to Mr. Cory, but was actually buried in the national Tomba degli Spagnuoli in La Verano at the suggestion of the Spanish authorities.) He was not troubled "Ibid., pp. 28-9.

12 SANTAYANA: SAINT OF THE IMAGINATION about the fate of his soul, but valued the associations of religion and wished his dead body to bear witness to the fact. He was pious. Man fulfills his cycle amid Nature's rhythms, but he goes back to the earth richer than when he began. Religion, art, laughter, and thought have proved him spirit and not a clod.

2

CHAPTER

HOME AND SCHOOL IN AMERICA

The voyage from Europe to America meant a different world for the eight-year-old boy, involving not just a change of continent and country, but of people, language, assumptions, pleasures, and purposes. Where the Spaniard was reserved and fatalistic, with ripples of happiness on the surface when festivity occurred, the American was an extrovert, talkative, practical, and expectant of success. Santayana says that, having been moved, he felt himself an exiled Spaniard linked to Avila, but he implies that the transition to Boston made him into a worker, a thinking worker, whereas staying in Spain might have left him only an imaginative observer. He exchanged the austere inspiration of mountains, battlemented walls, and dark churches for a kind of World's Fair, where a terrific effort was needed to make sense of things at all. He writes, "You had to bring a firm soul to this World's Fair; you had to escape from this merry-go-round, if you would make sense of anything or come to know your own mind."1 The actual voyage began with a passage to England in a small ^Persons and Places (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944), p. 97.

14

SANTAYANA: SAINT OF THE IMAGINATION

freighter. The seas of the Bay of Biscay caused wretched seasickness, but on the third day the sun shone, the water was smooth, and life became interesting again. Some sentences in chapter vm of Persons and Places correspond in sentiment with a passage already quoted from chapter i. I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it widi humility and true religion. Our world is a cockleshell in the midst of overwhelming forces and everlasting realities; but those forces are calculable and those realities helpful, if we can manage to understand and obey them.3 Crossing the ocean seems to have confirmed in Santayana the tendency to use water in any form—rivers, eddies, waterfalls, but particularly the sea—as an image to symbolize life. Perhaps he had been told when very small about his grandfather Borras sailing to Glasgow with his newly-married wife, and had dreamed about this. Certainly he knew about the voyages of his parents, voyages sometimes lasting six months and marked by terrifying storms. As well as what he may have heard about wide waters, the boy had also had the river below Avila to captivate his childish gaze as he walked outside the town. Now he saw the sea itself on the first of many voyages, and his eye was fascinated by the mystery, beauty, and peril surrounding him and his fellow-voyagers. As his life was lived Santayana became fully conscious of the significance the sea had for him. He expressed this straightforwardly to a certain Miss Sylvia Bliss who had sent him a volume of her poetry. "The sea, though you speak little of it, has always been a great object lesson to me, a monitor of the fundamental flux, of the loom of nature not being on the human scale."3 "Ibid., p. 130. ^Letters (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955), p. 290.

Home and School in America

15

In Persons and Places Santayana recalls his pleasure at the sight of sailing boats in the Bristol Channel. These were a first hint of the free brave sporting side of the Anglo-Saxon which he later came to love. Almost in the same breath he notes the horror of dullness which met him and his father when they landed in a British nonconformist industrial town on a Sunday! They resumed their voyage shortly, embarking for Boston on the Cunarder "Samaria," a vessel of 3,000 tons. They landed on July 16, 1872, and were met by Robert Sturgis, aged seventeen. George was rather shocked at the rough and ready pier at which the ship tied up, and was disappointed that there were no smart carriages to admire such as he had seen in Madrid; instead there were "buggies" and horse cars. He was also rather put off by the ribbon on his half-brother's hat, which was blue but did not match his eyes! Not one detail escaped the young traveller's eyes—eyes of a fastidious careful observer that proved themselves in time the eyes of a poet. George and his father were welcomed at 302 Beacon Street by Susana and Josefina in white dresses, and, "much smaller, my mother wearing a cap and looking very grave." This grave, proud, stoical woman had managed a spare but dignified life in Boston for herself and her Sturgis children, feeling a stranger among Americans although assisted by and proud of her Sturgis connections. These were prosperous, kindly people, still prominent as "Great Merchants" (Santayana's expression), and mingling with the Lowells and Longfellows and other leading families in Boston society. However, this social milieu did not really touch the Spanish widow of George Sturgis. The courage and initiative which had marked the young Josefina Borras when her father died in Batang, and later when as Josefina Sturgis she lost her first husband in Manila, had disappeared. Instead she cherished a cold endurance. She lived in a spiritual solitude. Her needle and polite novels and occasional walks made sufficient recreation. Her son says she had one friend, a maiden lady who also was skilled in embroidery. He tells how some ladies in Roxbury ( a suburb of Boston) once invited her to join their Plato Club and

16 SANTAYANA: SAINT OF THE IMAGINATION she refused. When pressed for a reason she said "In winter I try to keep warm, and in summer I try to keep cool." Santayana traces this resolved remoteness to the death of her first-born child, a lovely little boy who died at two years of age. This grief overwhelmed her and pressed into her heart so that all the later chances and changes, including the death of her first husband and of her last-born Sturgis child, were dwarfed in comparison. Santayana marvels that this mater dolorosa was supported by so little, the very limited philosophy of the Enlightenment. She trusted to the gospel that reason commands virtue and is alone essential in life. She was in effect a faithful follower of Pope's maxims, and considered religion, and morality as traditionally taught, to be unnecessary. She believed in education in so far as it cultivated the reason, but failed to see it as the vital food of the mind and soul. Santayana comments, "The result of this was that two of her children had little education and led narrow dull lives, while the other two, Susana and I, had to make our friends and pick our way through the world by our native wits, without adequate means or preparation, and without any sympathy on her side—quite the reverse. Our new interests—religion, for instance—separated us from her and the things she trusted. We were not virtuous."4 It is clear enough that although Santayana admired his mother's courage and independence, and appreciated the tenderness which once vibrated through her voice when she spoke to him of the dead child Pepin, he gave to Susana the affection and trust which most children in a corresponding class give to their mother. Perhaps Josefina Santayana in that home in Beacon Street did not let her children love her. In any case Santayana expresses his feeling in the following way. "The Sturgis influence flooding me at home was primordial It imposed on me my Christian name, and it gave me my second mother or godmother, who, by virtue of her remarkable Sturgis warmth and initiative, was I think the greatest power, and certainly the strongest affection, in my life."5 Susana was all animation and *Ibid., p. 35. BIfewJ., p. 75.

Home and School in America

17

full of ideas. She had always led her brother and sister in games and lessons, and George tells how, during the first sojourn in America after her father's death, Susana was captain of the children in the neighbourhood in their coasting and other sports. "She ruled the roost." Her half-brother expands upon her ardent enthusiasms, none of these expressing her full needs, but in their sum representing a rich, sensitive, vibrant nature which deserved a fuller happiness than life actually brought. One of her early passions was for Queen Isabella of Spain whom she, as a little girl, used to watch taking a daily drive in a park in the Escurial. She was captivated by the fine coach and the salutes and cheering of the observers, and cried "Viva la Reina!" with the best. The Queen took notice of her, and later asked her to be brought, and, some time after, through an intermediary in Avila made offers for her to become a maid-in-waiting at the court. This all came to nothing owing to Mrs. Santayana's republican sentiments (she "hated royalties as she hated priests"), but the episode demonstrates Susana's ardour and its effect on other people. The light in her eyes and her expressive features and lively movements caught attention at once. However, the migration to America already mentioned broke into Susana's life, and showed her waiting to welcome her young half-brother when he arrived with his father on July 16,1872. Susana took the small brother right over. She began to teach him English, and because he had a good ear he learned to speak very well. After Augustin Santayana returned to Spain, Susana was the bright spot which prevented George's new home from seeming entirely drab and confined. Of course there was reading in the home and memories are recorded of Don Quixote read aloud (in Spanish) by Susana and Robert. Later they turned to Shakespeare because Robert found English easier. They read Julius Caesar, which George liked, and Romeo and Juliet, which he thought silly. The young boy fell into the habit of constant reading by himself. He records, "I played no games, but sat at home all the afternoon and evening reading or drawing, especially devouring anything I could find that

18

SANTAYANA: SAINT OF THE IMAGINATION

regarded religion, or architecture, or geography."6 Susana influenced him in the matter of architecture, having caught the interest from a young architect, an admirer of hers. The boy "spent the afternoons drawing plans of palaces and fronts of cathedrals." Susana influenced the boy particularly by deepening his interest in religion. She not only taught him Mother Goose in English, but she taught him his prayers and the advanced catechism. There is a contrast drawn between Susana and her brother in relation to religion. For Susana religion was all deadly earnest, but for the young George it was interesting intellectually and aesthetically. A comment may be quoted at length, for the light it throws on Susana's involvement and Santayana's detachment. The sister had, it is true, no real affinity for the religious life, as was proved when years later she spent some months as a novice in a convent, but Santayana says he could have borne it if he had wished to try it. The significant extract follows. She had always warmed towards religious doctrines and practices, as she had warmed towards anything interesting and vivid, such as children's games, social pleasures, or a reigning Queen in her brilliant equipage. She was abundantly alive, and all these were spontaneous ways of giving shape to life and of enjoying it intensely. This enjoyment, in her case as in mine, always had in it a touch of comedy. In regard to Queen Isabella this touch of satire became conscious in time or even dominant, and while Susana never lost her sympathy with that Queen and with all royalties, she saw and admitted their weaknesses and laughed at her own pleasure in those vanities. Thus she rendered her pleasure double, and rendered it pure. But in respect to religion she fought against all dramatic insight or transcendental laughter. She felt the laughter coming round the corner, and she attempted to run away from it, to condemn it in herself as a diabolical temptation. It was a sad business to have to be absolutely solemn, convinced and fanatical, against her nature and to the ruin of her possible happiness.7

Weeks and months passed. Susana and George were faithful at church, young Josefina tagging along, with the result that their 6 P. A. Schlipp, The Philosophy of George Santayana (Library of Living Philosophers, 1951), p. 6. iPersons and Places, pp. 78-9.

Home and School in America

19

mother resented Susana's influence. She did not like the boy to love images and church functions and the mysteries of theology. Conflict developed and the home became like a camp, with each member a separate combatant. George, however, lived his own life with no outward sign of distress. He found a continuance of the existence in Avila in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, where the Christian mysteries were presented with all their human expressiveness as in the Cathedral of his early memories. Santayana tells of a second church where he sometimes went for early Mass, always alone. This was a parish church for the German population, where a decent devout congregation (chiefly men) gathered for their early service in the basement, with only the altar and the Stations of the Cross round the walls to induce devotion. Santayana liked these men's spontaneous, musical rendering of hymns: "they had knocked off most of the Mass, but kept the popular German accompaniment of a general chorus, as in the Greek tragedies."8 He found a true religious atmosphere here, and got up before dawn in the wintry mornings to breathe it for a moment. He says, "I liked the communal spirit of those people, devout and unspoiled; I liked their singing, without myself understanding the words. . . . The strange language lifted me out of time and place, into the universal fold of all pilgrim spirits." He defines the end of worship as "to escape to another world, to live freely for a while in a medium made by us and fit for us to live in."9 The human element in the evolution of Christian worship is clearly stressed here, for Santayana writes, "Not all that is artificial is good . . . but only the artificial is good expressly." This might be a motto for the first major work of Santayana's maturity, The Life of Reason. In contrast with the comfort and exaltation of spirit found in the Jesuit churches, Santayana's reaction to the services of the Unitarian Church was amusement mingled with severity. If later I was taken to some Unitarian Church, it didn't matter. It seemed a little ridiculous, all those good people in their Sunday clothes, so deal!^., p. 164.

»IKid., p. 6.

^Letters, p. 35.

40

SANTAYANA: SAINT OF THE IMAGINATION

thoroughgoing idealism is impossible, for "just as all thought implies a truth, and all desire a value, so all consciousness of any kind implies the existence of something not itself outside of itself."5 Then, as to the possibility of viewing the universe and human life optimistically, Santayana says, "The idea of demanding that things should be worth doing is a human impertinence,"6 and "The point of view of the grave is not to be attained by you or me every time we happen not to want anything in particular. It is not gained except by renunciation. Pleasure must first cease to attract and pain to repel, and this, you will confess, is no easy matter."7 To Abbot's query about the absolute, Santayana replied, "I conceive that only the universe is an absolute being."8 In the same letter which discusses the self-existent or the absolute, Santayana praises incidentally "the talking philosophers," who "come to you as one man to another, on the basis of every day facts and life." He writes, "That is what makes Aristotle so much the safest and wisest of men."9 Finally, as to solipsism or complete preoccupation with the subjective, Santayana explains that any theory of the priority and sole reality of ideas is contrary to the normal mental habits of men, and therefore arbitrary and unsound. He insists, "We acquire ideas as the consequence of action and experience."10 This statement sounds like straightforward pragmatism, but it is actually the prelude to Santayana's developed doctrine of animal faith, explicitly disclosed in the volume of 1923, Scepticism and Animal Faith. As far as verifiable knowledge goes, Santayana trusts to the drift of man's mental life, but rejects the hypostatization of the mind and the priority of its constructs. Knowledge for him is a developing awareness of a reality to which it belongs, the reality of nature. In March, 1887, Santayana and Strong went to England for holidays. They did some sightseeing together and then Strong returned to the Continent. Santayana spent some weeks in London and, having made contact with the young Earl Russell, joined him in a brief BrWd., p. 11. eibid., p. 14.

illnd., p. 15. *Ibid.,p. 16.

»Ifcui., p. 17. ™IW.,f. 19.

Studies Abroad and Return to America 41

cruise down the Thames in Russell's yacht. This was the occasion when Santayana, forced by his host to attempt crossing to the yacht's deck along a slanting boat-hook (a feat "simple as lying" to Russell), fell into the water and pulled Russell with him. The torrent of abuse he had to meet injured Santayana's feelings, but he found that, when the storm was over, all was forgotten. As a result, instead of holding his natural resentment, he developed a theory about Russell's character which supported him through a long association. He regarded Russell as a gifted, wayward, and self-centred being, without any feeling for the reality of other natures or other points of view. Nevertheless he enjoyed the man's open-heartedness and overflowing vitality. He says of Russell's violence, "It was all serene observation of the perversity of things, the just perceptions and judgments of a young god to whom wrongness was hateful on principle, but who was not in the least disturbed about it in his own person."11 From this early contact in London, to the later time when Santayana was ready to bear witness for Russell in the distasteful suit brought against him by Lady Scott and her daughter, his first wife, and still later when Santayana entered with sympathy into the feelings of "Elizabeth" when she refused to live longer with her husband, he maintained a warm friendship with this capable, tempestuous, affectionate but unpredictable man. The most important part of Santayana's 1887 visit to England was his stay in Oxford. Here, through introductions from Russell, he enjoyed meeting undergraduates on an intimate footing, and felt that he savoured the very life of the university and of its colleges. He attended some lectures, finding them inferior to what he had heard in Germany, but became interested in and was impressed by "the English mind." There was in England, he felt, a better apprehension of the limitations of the various philosophic positions. There was no wholesale swallowing of Hegel, for example, a tendency perceptible in America and in Germany, nor on the other hand an entire acceptance of the pragmatism of William James, who was described by one "The Middle Span, p. 48.

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English teacher as a charming man but a bad thinker. One of Santayana's best contacts, made through Professor James, was with Shadworth Hodgson, who invited him to meetings of the Aristotelian Society. Here he heard discussions which, though by his own report not brilliant, must have confirmed his impression of Aristotle as "the safest and wisest of men." In any case he writes from Oxford to Henry Ward Abbot with stronger assurance about the problem as to absolute truth, which had been proposed several months earlier. He says, in a letter dated May 29, 1887, "I incline to the opinion that our intelligence has essentially a relative and partial function in the world and that its acquaintance with things is therefore partial and relative. No thought we are even potentially capable of would exhaust the reality and take it all up within itself. Our conceptions are of course part of the reality, but there is an infinite plus."12 To Santayana's enjoyment of Oxford was added some insight into the English public school system, for Russell, an old boy, invited him to Winchester when the School celebration of the Queen's Jubilee took place. Santayana's comments upon the visit illustrate his conservative sympathies, as well as emphasizing the strength of the aristocratic, honour-driven emphasis in education which the public school represents. Santayana believed that the human spirit is bred to loyalty and devotion by tradition, and he recognized a rich trainingground in the religious and academic routines of Winchester. He writes, "At the Commemoration service in the chapel it was the soul of modern England that stirred under those Gothic arches and windows, and knelt or sang in those monastic stalls."13 He says also, That everything external was perfunctory rather helped something internal to become dominant. . . . Adolescence, in its pregnant vagueness, casts about for some ineffable happiness in the fourth dimension. But how admirable here the setting to give a true pitch to those first notes! This simplicity in wealth protects from vulgarity, these classic poets, when grammar and ferrule are forgotten, leave a sentiment of taste and soundness in the mind, and these reticent prayers, with their diplomatic dignity and courtesy, leave it for the heart to say the last word. It is all make-believe, "Letters, pp. 26-7.

"The Middk Span, p. 64.

Studies Abroad and Return to America 43 as sports are: but in both those dramatic exercises there is excellent discipline, and the art of life is half learned when they have been practiced and outgrown. What has been learned is the right manner, the just sentiments. It remains to discover the real occasions and the real risks."14

Little need be said about the time spent in Avila in the summer of 1887 except that during this period Susana returned to Spain and was met at Gibraltar by her devoted brother. Santayana grieved that his dear Susana met at no time the ideal happiness which her nature craved. She was more at ease in Spain than amid the Protestantisms and pretences of Boston society, but she lacked social support and sympathy among Spaniards and, being unsatisfied, fell into irritability and unjust judgments. She solved her practical problems by marrying an old suitor, now widowed and with grown children, but this step was a movement not of affection but of reason. Santayana's epitaph for Susana reads, "That which grieves me now in her destiny is not so much what she missed as what she suffered. It is a shame that she should have suffered, when she was created to love, to laugh, and to enjoy."16 In spite of his regrets at her imperfect happiness, Santayana enjoyed returning to Avila from time to time chiefly because he would see his sister, and he developed very happy relationships with her husband and the stepchildren and stepgrandchildren. There is no reference to Santayana's pursuing studies in physiology during his second winter in Germany, as he had once intended, but rather continued emphasis on ethics and metaphysics. It is interesting to compare what he wrote to Professor James on January 9, 1887, with a passage in a letter dated December 15 of the same year. In the first letter he said, "My vocation is towards the human, political problems. Even the metaphysical and ethical puzzles appear to me rather as obstacles to be cleared than as truths to be attained. I feel now as if I could pass beyond them into the real world."16 In the later letter he wrote, If philosophy were the attempt to solve a given problem, I should see reason to be discouraged about its success; but it strikes me that it is "IfcwJ., p. 65.

Wbid., p. 97.

"Letters, p. 13.

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rather an attempt to express a half-undiscovered reality, just as art is, and that two different renderings, if they are expressive, far from cancelling each other add to each other's value. ... I confess I do not see why we should be so vehemently curious about the absolute truth, which is not to be made or altered by our discovery of it. But philosophy seems to me to be its own reward, and its justification lies in the delight and dignity of the art itself."

Although Professor James considered that Santayana was less ardent in his German studies than befitted a professor-to-be, he assented to Santayana's plan to return to Harvard for his final year of work towards the doctorate and defended his application for a renewal of the Walker Fellowship. In writing from Avila to thank James, Santayana was quite frank. "Three terms of Berlin have fully convinced me that the German school, although it is well to have some acquaintance with it, is not one to which I can attach myself. . . . My whole experience since I left college and even before, has been a series of disenchantments. First I lost my faith in the kind of philosophy that Professors Palmer and Royce are interested in: and then, when I came to Germany, I also lost my faith in psycho-physics, and all the other attempts to discover something momentous."18 He went on to say that the very conviction as to the vanity of much philosophical speculation might be as good a ground for a philosophy as any other, and that he hoped for the patience and audacity to work out such a position. It might be argued that this terse statement made to James on July 3, 1888, was actually fulfilled in the course of the years, first in the historical and descriptive achievements of his fivevolume Life of Reason (1905-6), and secondly in the experiential integrity of his Realms of Being, running from Scepticism and Animal Faith in 1923 to The Realm of Spirit in 1940. In any case Santayana returned to Harvard with a firm intention to round out his work for the doctor's degree, in spite of the fact that he had no conviction about becoming a professor and little hope of being given a post anywhere. "Ibid., p. 28.

isibid., p. 31.

Studies Abroad and Return to America 45

The matter turned out differently. Santayana went to live in his mother's house in Roxbury, spent a year working on Lotze, and at the same time attended a weekly seminar by James who read his new Psychology aloud to the group, chapter by chapter, and a second seminar by Royce who worked over Hegel's Phaenomenologie des Geistes. (From the latter Santayana got a certain inspiration, for it set him thinking about his Life of Reason.) In due time he presented his thesis on Lotze, became a doctor of philosophy, and was quite promptly invited to give a course on Locke, Berkeley, and Hume which Professor James wished to be rid of—this for a salary of $500. Shortly after the term opened, President Eliot asked him to take on a second course on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, to be paid for at the same rate. So the tiro was launched. He was happy to be living again in Harvard, and pleased that, with his mother's allowance of $500 added to his salary, he could look forward to travel in the summer; but he insisted in the Apologia pro Mente Sua, already referred to, "I always hated to be a professor." In spite of the above declaration, and his reiterated claim "I am a born cleric or poet," Santayana gave to his students an incomparable impulse, the same impulse which lies behind the title of the present book. Whether stumbling or eloquent (and there is some evidence for the applicability of both adjectives), he stirred the imagination of his hearers. His aim as a teacher was not indoctrination nor inculcation, but rather that he and his students should "philosophise together," "re-think the thoughts" of the various philosophers, understand why they took the direction they did, and consider the consequences and implications of that course. From this the philosophic imagination of the interpreter and of his hearers was apt to take fire, and so the attempt at a personal philosophy was evoked. Santayana believed deeply in the process described above, as we shall see, but never in the use of philosophy as his colleagues taught it. He writes, "The others were looking in philosophy for science or for religion...." "Those liberal minds were thirsting for a tyrant. I, being a materialist, cynic, and Tory in philosophy, never dreamt of

46

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rebelling against the despotism of nature."19 He writes also, "The history of philosophy is the only philosophy that should be taught in a university. Systems of philosophy are taught only by sects or by individuals setting out to be prophets and to found a sect. I now have a system of philosophy which I hadn't dreamt of then, although the reasons for it lay all in me; but this system is not intended to found a sect and will never do so. It aspires to be only a contribution to the humanities, the expression of a reflective, selective, and free mind."20 It is interesting to compare these retrospective views of Santayana, made public in 1945 when he published The Middle Span, with a very positive statement found in a letter to Henry Ward Abbot dated August 6, 1889. He rejects Abbot's attack upon neopaganism and says, "Paganism is the human and spontaneous attitude of an intelligent and cultivated man in the presence of the universe,"21 and later, "The world may have little in it that is good: granted. But that little is really and inalienably good. Its value cannot be destroyed because of the surrounding evil."22 So it was as a convinced and conscious naturalist that the young Santayana began his teaching career at Harvard in the autumn term of 1889, enthusiastic about the pursuit of philosophic thought if not about the profession of the philosopher, and welcoming with both hands the gifts that Harvard had to offer him. Chief among those gifts was the friendship of young men, as is reflected both in the chapter on "Younger Harvard Friends" in The Middle Span and in the amusing verse and quite brilliant plays written for "The Gas House" (now preserved in the Houghton Library). "The Gas House" or "the Club" or the Delta Phi had been founded by Ward Thoron, Herbert Lyman, and Boylston Deal in 1885 or 1886, but Santayana could not join at that time through lack of funds. This was, however, a constant resort when he joined it as a young instructor in 1890. Santayana was also a kind of senior member of the Spec, or Zeta Psi, where the members enjoyed scalloped i»Tfee Middle Span, p. 155. 20fttf.,p. 156.

^Letters, p. 34. 2211,^., p. 35.

Studies Abroad and Return to America 47 oysters and welsh rarebit and excellent drinks, and entertained one another with sporting yarns. Santayana made a friend of young Julian Codman, who was a Sturgis connection, and who possessed strong religious feelings and poetic interests. Of him he said, "We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society?"23 Julian Codman was the most ardent of the reading group which gathered in those first teaching years in Santayana's room in Stoughton to read Shelley, Shakespeare's songs and sonnets, and most especially Keats. These poetry bees were revived later in 1910-1911, to concentrate on the poetry of Shelley and to prepare Santayana for writing his essay on Shelley. It was at "The Gas House" that he formed his friendship with Bob and Warwick Potter, the latter of whom died shortly after his graduation in 1893. Santayana compared this young man with the lad Edward Bayley who was a friend of his boyhood—both seemed to him pure gold. But Warwick Potter possessed as well the gift of laughter which, Santayana believed, "liberates incidentally, as spiritual insight liberates radically and morally." So he appeared, like Susana, an archetype of the true comrade. Both possessed the prerequisites of perfect friendship, "capacity to worship and capacity to laugh." Santayana comments, "They were the two windows through which the mind took flight and morally escaped from this world."24 When Warwick Potter died, Santayana had an impression of the end of his spontaneous youth. He notes that other events, his sister's marriage in Avila twelve months before and his father's death that same summer, had served to disturb his sense of a stable world. This new loss made mutation appear the key-note of life. "The public world was retreating to a greater distance and taking on a new and more delicate colouring.... It was not my world, but only the world of other people: of all those at least, and they were the vast majority, who had never understood."25 Santayana calls this his metanoia, his final acceptance of disillusionment as a background for all his thought. 23Tfee Middle Syan, p. 104.

^Ibid., p. 110.

™Ibid., p. 109.

CHAPTER

5

THE YOUNG POET

Before any attempt is made at setting forth or criticizing Santayana's philosophic views, it is important to examine his youthful achievement as a poet. The young man who unexpectedly found himself lecturing on the philosophy staff at Harvard in 1889 had already uttered in poetic form impressions and convictions that were characteristic and significant. Whether the critics place him high or low, and even if his idiom catches few ears in a day attuned to the rhythms of Dylan Thomas and others, his poetry has life and meaning in it and deserves at least a look. Lest the reader be put off by the air of remoteness in Santayana's verse, a glance at his admirable prefatory essay to the 1922 edition is worth while. Here he gives the reasons for his lack of popular appeal, a patent fact. He points out first that the roots of the English tongue, learned by him as a second language, did not quite reach his centre. "I know no words redolent of the wonder-world, the fairy tale, or the cradle." He also admits that his feeling for landscape, instead of being a vital interest, is as a background for fable or a symbol of fate, and that the human scene itself is for him but a theme for reflection.

TheYoungPoet

49

In self-deprecation he writes, "My approach to language is literary, my images are only metaphors, and sometimes it seems to me that I resemble my countryman, Don Quixote, when in his airy flights he was merely perched on a high horse and a wooden Pegasus."1 However, it is open to the reader to look steadily at Santayana's poems and judge their quality and content for himself. They are entirely sincere, the literary and religious associations they express are natural in a man of deep and intertwined roots, and their idiom and metre will almost inevitably wake responses in any ear attuned to classical expression. Their author defends his traditional measures very effectively. Like the orders of Greek architecture, the sonnet or the couplet or the quatrain are better than anything else that has been devised to serve the same function, and the innate freedom of poets to hazard new forms does not abolish the freedom of all men to adopt the old ones. . . . To say that what was good once is good no longer is to give too much importance to chronology.... Mask and buskin are often requisite in order to transport what is great in human experience out of its embosoming littleness. They are inseparable from finality, from perception of the ultimate.2

Santayana had practised versifying since his school days. This proved an outlet for his feelings about the world, and came to him more naturally than teaching. Indeed, as has already been shown, he thought himself constitutionally unfitted to be a teacher, and confessed that at certain unhappy moments in his teaching career he felt himself to be a drudge, driving himself to his task. In explaining this feeling, he said it was not natural to him to adopt one side of a case and press it home. He was rather inclined to "see both sides and take neither, in order, ideally, to embrace both, to sing both, and love the different forms that the good and the beautiful wear to different creatures."3 This is his description of what it means to be a born cleric or poet. 1 s Preface to Poems (London: Constable, 1922), p. viii. lbid., pp. ix, x, xi. 'Persons and Places (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944), p. 159.

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There are two sides to Santayana's poetic gift, both appearing early and spontaneously. There is first the laughing side. Commenting on the satiric verses on his teachers, uncovered at the time of the move from the Beacon Street Schoolhouse in 1881, Santayana says, "The habit of scribbling mocking epigrams has accompanied me through life and invaded the margins of my most serious authors. Mockery is the first puerile form of wit, playing with surfaces without sympathy: I abounded in it."4 He considers that the mood of mockery is justified, for by laughter the mocking poet is delivered from rage at the imperfections of life. Although it behoves the sensitive observer to love every existent thing, it is still true that evil is involved with the good, and that the failure or lapse of natural perfection in any living being is an irreparable evil. Instead of feeling bitterness or rebellion at this, Santayana believes a man may laugh. That is what he did himself. He says, "Laughter helped me both to perceive [those] defects and to put up with them." When Santayana laughed, his feeling and the cause of that feeling were apt to be expressed in rhyme. The result was nonsense verses, satiric sketches, and comic poems of varying merit. The common factor in all is a gay detachment, which makes them attractive in spite of the fact that their original occasion was usually topical and local. They carry no ill humour, but express high spirits and a delightful amusement at human absurdity. Among Santayana's casual comic pieces that are extant, "The Judgment of Paris," written for his young friends of the Delphic Club in 1892, might be used to illustrate his humorous quality.5 Here the poet uses classical mythology, not moralistically in Tennyson's manner, but for purposes of wit in the tradition of Fielding and Pope. The alternative title of the piece, "How the First-ten Man Chooses a Club," indicates that Juno, Venus, and Pallas represent three Harvard clubs, the Fly, the Spees, and the Gas House or Del*Ibid., p. 160. B The manuscript of this poem is in the Santayana collection in the Houghton Library.

TheYoungPoet

51

phic Club. The denouement shows Paris, after ribald lines describing the engaging looseness of the goddesses, giving the prize to Pallas or the Gas House. Both in their neat music and in their use of classical symbols for modern and realistic matters, Santayana's couplets recall Pope, yet the piece is unmistakably of the new world. Paris saw beauties never seen before, But like a little man the situation bore. It never pleased him to behold unveiled Their charms: his so-phrosune never failed. The same man composed these lines as six years before had written in Gottingen the verses on travel. The humorous effect is produced in much the same way, by treating light things as if they were grave, and portentous things as if they were trivial, thereby illumining the human predicament. Although the humorous verse has merit, it is Santayana's serious poems which reveal the growing boy and the maturing man, and which are characterized by sincerity, intensity, and an occasional combination of poignant music with human insight. They are, it is true, literary poems, in the sense that Shelley was literary or Matthew Arnold. They may recall Keats, or, which may seem extravagant praise, the young lyrical Milton. Santayana tells in Persons and Places about two early poems called respectively "To the Moon" and "To the Host," written when he was fifteen or sixteen. They are linked in his mind because both express aspiration, the soul of the poet reaching up to the moon-goddess, or to the Host, alike symbols for him of heavenly beauty. Instead of assertions about ideal reality in the vein of Plato or of Spenser, the young Santayana says his faith is "too like despair." He yearns for the beauty or the Presence without any strong conviction that the beauty or the Presence is there apart from him. He uses the expression "faith's divine moonlight," but does not put the faith to ultimate testing by, for example, using the sacraments as a means to ideal reality. Explaining this youthful attitude many years after, Santayana says his faith was not faith at

52

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all. He merely desired to believe because he judged worldly standards poor and inadequate. He writes, "I breathed more easily in the atmosphere of religion than in that of business, precisely because religion, like poetry, was more ideal, more freely imaginary, and in a material sense, falser."6 In spite of his instinctive reserve about an absolute position in religion or philosophy, a reserve evident even in youth, Santayana used the Platonic conception of two worlds, the world of the senses and the world of ideal reality, in much of his early poetry. His favourite form at this time was the sonnet, and he composed two important groups, a series of twenty written between 1883 and 1893, and a group of thirty more, published first in 1894. Santayana calls these his Platonising sonnets. There are others, of course, on topical subjects, and a beautiful group of four induced by sorrow at Warwick Potter's death. The earlier sonnets show quite clearly that the young man suffered pangs at abandoning orthodoxy. Whether it was because he had felt so acutely the unloveliness and irrationality of existence as he observed it in his father's house when a small child in Avila, or because the same influences which produced Dover Beach were recognized and realized by Santayana earlier in his life than by his prototype in the England of the sixties and seventies, the early Platonising sonnets reveal a spiritual conflict in which the issue is clear from the first. The poet announces his naturalism before the philosopher had uttered a word. In the first sonnet, the writer yearns for a garden of delight and leaves Golgotha for Nature, the Eternal Mother. In the second he takes "farewell pious looks" behind and his sleep is haunted by "holy echoes" of "the ancient sorrow." In the third (actually the sonnet written first, in 1884), he appears to defend the claims of religion by quoting Euripides, ri> 6i> 06 «J., p. 219.

^ITM., p. 216.

"Ibid., p. 221.

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if we still used it, would have to mean for us not the universe, but the goods of the universe."45 The goal is then "not the troubled glories of this world only, but rather that desired perfection, that eternal beauty, which lies sealed in the heart of each living thing.46 Santayana was uplifted by the sight of the Domus Spinozana, but reported the tercentenary meetings as like all conferences of the kind, rather tiresome and futile. He wrote to Mrs. Toy, "My own lecture was kindly received and apparently rather well understood by the polyglot audience; and my eloquence transported at least one, and the most distinguished of my audience, Sir Frederick Pollock, aged 92, into Nirvana, for (it being after dinner) he slept peacefully through the whole."47 This humorous touch is matched by another reference, this time to an English audience for whom he had prepared to lecture on Locke. Locke as well as Spinoza was born in 1632, and the Royal Society of Literature in Bloomsbury Square invited Santayana to come on from the Hague and address them on Locke. Santayana enjoyed preparing a rather light offering—he called it gay, a jeu d'esprit—but his hearers disappointed him. He wrote in My Host the World "I had counted on an audience like the blessed one at the British Academy in 1918, who laughed merrily when they heard that, for a pragmatist, the real past was the idea of the past that he would have in the future. But I found a Bloomsbury audience that didn't consent to smile."48 Santayana ended this last visit to England feeling rather chilled. He wrote, "It was a relief to feel that this chapter, rich as it had been, was closed forever. It was like burying a wife long ago divorced: there was peace in the finality of it."49 It was early in 1924 when Santayana began heading his letters Hotel Bristol, Rome. When he left England in the autumn of 1932, he returned to the Hotel Bristol as to his home. In August, 1939, he wrote to Mrs. Toy from Cortina explaining that the Hotel Bristol was to be pulled down and rebuilt and, as noted above, he spent the ^Ibid., p. 222. Mlbid., p. 224.

"Letters, p. 277.

48

My Host the World, p. 116. *»lUcl., pp. 117-18.

The Life of a Travelling Student 171 following winter in Venice. After an interval at Cortina, the Letters show him writing from the Grand Hotel in Rome, where he stayed until October 1941. He explained to his nephew George Sturgis that he found he had neither the strength nor the endurance to take a projected journey to Spain, and that his quarters at the Grand Hotel were too dear for his resources (now limited by war restrictions). So he moved on October 4, 1941, to the Nursing Home on the Caelian hill run by the Blue Sisters. There he lived till his death. He wrote to his nephew, "It is a complete change from the international first class hotels that I have been living in of late. Morally I like it better; I am interfered with more, because I am attended to more. I am surrounded by women: one old Irish priest, a patient, and my doctor Sabbatucci are the only men I have seen in this establishment. It is a nice place, with grounds; you come in through an old gate and a wellplanted avenue; there is a church and several large buildings, and the old Santo Stefano Rotondo is next door, overhanging the terrace."50 When writing in My Host the World about his twenty to thirty years in Rome, Santayana lingered in thought over the beauties of that amazing city. He said he owed a debt to the Reverend Luciano Zampa, a modernist priest who had translated his Egotism in German Philosophy, for Zampa showed him some of the less obvious beauties. However, he confessed that he soon retreated into his aesthetic shell and concentrated on a few chosen sights. His favourite walks were to Trinita de 'Monti, the Pincio and the Villa Borghese, to the Tiber, St. Peter's, and the garden at Castel Sant' Angelo, and to the Janiculum, San Pietro in Montorio, and the Aqua Paola. If friends came he would apologize for avoiding museums and picture galleries, but would offer to take them, after luncheon, to see three things, the Pantheon, Michelangelo's Moses, and the Forum from the top of the Capitoline, which included admiring the two pavilions of Michelangelo and the statue of Marcus Aurelius. He commented on his idiosyncrasy. "Of these things I never tired, but of seeing more things ^Letters, p. 350.

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or other things I had had enough. Fresher thought came and I could transmit more pleasure in recognizing these old objects than in staring at new ones."51 Although Santayana was infirm in the last years, and his sight and hearing became increasingly weak, he still took walks in the forties. He wrote about his pleasure in St. John Lateran, which was not far from his home with the Sisters. I often cross San Giovanni, as I used to do the Cathedral at Avila, in order to avoid the hot sun on the rough pavement; and being old and fond of sitting upon public benches, I rest for a moment on one of the wooden seats that are found there . . . and in those calm moments my eye has learned to frame wonderful vistas in that great church, forward to the restored apse with its golden mosaics and its papal throne, or across aisles and aisles, into vast side chapels, each a church by itself. And then the whole place seems to lose its rigidity and its dead pomp, and to become a marvellous labyrinth, as if it were a work of nature or of fancy rather dian of human art. The gigantic violent Apostles in the nave cease to seem monstrous; they become baroque works of nature, as if water by chance had molded the sides of a cliff into the likeness of Titans."62 Although the English-speaking citizens of Rome never saw Santayana at their "Club," he did not deliberately cut himself off from people. He wrote to Mrs. Theodore Richards in February 1952, It amuses me to read in die papers sometimes diat I am now a recluse. It is accidentally a literal truth, because I seldom go about, on account of my bad sight and hearing, which makes crossing the city traffic dangerous; but I was never more conscious (or studious) of what goes on in the world, and there is nothing monastic about my daily life, in spite of living in a nursing home where the sisters are nuns. But I see only one of diem, die housekeeper, often, and all my visitors bring die air of free (but now preoccupied) America with them.53 So Santayana's social sympathy and gay human spirit remained unchanged. He was responsive and generous always. Not only 6iMy Host the World, p. 129.

™llncl., pp. 129-30.

^Letters, pp. 428-9.

The Life of a Travelling Student 173 close friends like Daniel Cory, and distinguished creatures like the Marchesa Iris Origo, were warmly received in Santayana's room with the Blue Sisters. Tom, Dick, and Harry were also welcomed, for of the numbers of American soldiers who were calling on him in 1945 he wrote in happy vein. "As to society, I have never received so many visits as the American soldiers in Rome have made me. It has been very pleasant to see so many young faces and to autograph so many books, which is what they usually ask me to do."54 Santayana was generous to a fault, never turning away from a human being, however unexpected that person might be, nor how much the effort might cost him. The letter reproduced in this book bears witness to his generosity—the time and circumstances under which it was written make it appear what it is, God's plenty. Santayana's unself-conscious independence almost caused his death through accident. In June 1952 (the year he actually died), he touched on the event in a letter to a relative in America. He wrote, "I had gone one morning to renew my passport at the Spanish Consulate, where I was served attentively and quickly (I am becoming known in Spain) and had got down almost to the bottom of the stairs when suddenly my head swam or my foot slipped and I fell backwards on the (artificial) marble steps. I saw that I had fallen, but in the effort to get up, lost consciousness altogether."55 He was looked after by the Consulate staff, and described with some humour how with bleeding head and bruised shoulder and ribs he was delivered over to the care of the Sisters. This eighty-eight year old man who sallied out on a June morning to renew his passport and who survived the ensuing accident recalls the youth who at Harvard carried water from the College pump, and the mature citizen who always, however distinguished he was in the world's eyes, looked after his own personal needs. The years in Rome were, it is unnecessary to say, extremely fruitful in the literary sense. Work on Realms of Being has already been mentioned several times and, following on Scepticism and Animal uibid., p. 359.

551^., p. 440.

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Faith, the four volumes appeared in turn, The Realm of Essence in 1927, The Realm of Matter in 1930, The Realm of Truth in 1938, and The Realm of Spirit in 1940. Parallel with these metaphysical labours occurred spasmodic but very satisfying efforts at a novel, The Last Puritan, which was published in 1935. Shortly after Realms of Being was finished Santayana worked on volume II of Living Philosophers. This series was devised by Professor Schilpp of Northwestern University for two purposes, first to expound and criticize the living philosophers in turn (Santayana followed Dewey in the series in order of seniority), and then to invite and publish the particular philosopher's answers to the criticisms advanced. While Santayana said he never enjoyed himself so much as when recalling youthful experiences and composing his one novel (and later his autobiographical volumes), he found work on the Schilpp volume very exacting. The result, however, was effective and contributed to his philosophical reputation. The reader will find The Last Puritan a delightful composition, with living creatures who still have power to grip attention and stir the imagination. In Jim Darnley Santayana drew perhaps his most arresting character, a clear portrait from life, the young Lord Russell who was recognized at once by "Elizabeth" when she read the book. In Oliver Alden, the hero, the author may be thought to have succeeded even better. This study of the young American idealist is a true piece of creative work, the affectionate portrait of a spiritual man incapacitated for natural life by his ideals, and yet without a genuine goal to pin his allegiance to. Santayana spoke very often about the barrenness of spiritual outlook suffered by many fine young Americans. In a letter to William Lyon Phelps, dated March 16, 1936, he wrote, "An important element in the tragedy of Oliver (not in his personality, for he was no poet) is drawn from the fate of a whole string of Harvard poets in the 1880's and 1890's—Sanbom, Philip Savage, Hugh McCullough, Trumbull Stickney, and Cabot Lodge: also Moody, although he lived a little longer and made some impression, I believe, as a playwright. Now all these friends of mine, Stick-

The Life of a Travelling Student 175 ney, especially, of whom I was very fond, were visibly killed by the lack of air to breathe The system was deadly, and they hadn't any alternative tradition (as I had) to fall back upon."56 Whether or not the average American reader saw the significance in Santayana's Oliver, he bought The Last Puritan in great numbers. It needed only the Book of the Month Club, an organization whose particular mechanisms for turning books into money entertained Santayana greatly, to make the novel the immense commercial success it turned out to be. In middle and later age Santayana used to wonder, and sometimes to worry, about how many irons he would pull out of the fire before death came upon him. The astonishing thing is that all the projects conceived in his youth and maturity appear to have been carried out and one, an unexpected task, was undertaken and in effect completed at the very end. The works to be noted at this point include first the very early Dialogues in Limbo, which appeared in completed form in 1925 and which he called his "favourite child."87 To be noted also are The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, published in 1946, and Dominations and Powers, finished at last and published in 1951. He wrote to John Hall Wheelock, editor of Scribner's, expressing his satisfaction at completing the last of these. "I am enjoying, in spite of the great heat of this whole summer, the sense of relief from responsibility at having finished my last book."58 So gallant was he, however, that when set a further task of revising The Life of Reason, he undertook it with Mr. Cory's help. sezfcjd., p. 306.

"Ifcid., p. 428 (letter to Mrs. Richards).

™Ibid.., p. 400.

CHAPTER

12

THE IMAGINATION AMALGAMATES ALL REALMS OF BEING

Santayana was accustomed to call himself a moral philosopher, indicating that his primary concern was with ethical values. It is a fact, however, that he spent years of his life writing Realms of Being, which he designed as his ontology, or study of reality, and he was incensed by those who considered him only as the writer of The Life of Reason. He wrote to Mrs. Toy on March 28, 1941, "What annoys me is that now people should still talk about the Life of Reason as if it represented my whole philosophy, or was the best part of it."1 It must be admitted, however, that The Life of Reason is still known to more readers than Realms of Being, being more descriptive, more eloquent, and more likely to stir the reader by its originality and spirit. It is a work of literature addressed to the general reader, while Realms of Being is written for philosophers. Nevertheless the latter was evolved by a strong and penetrating imagination and, granting the writer a minimum of philosophic competence, the reader owes this work at least as serious consideration as he might give to works by William James or Bergson or Dewey. It might even be found a ^Letters (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955), p. 346.

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more comprehensive and satisfying statement than any made by other philosophers of Santayana's time. There are weaknesses doubtless, and interest will fluctuate with the fashion and mood of the time, but in the volumes will be found a truthful view of the universe as modern man knows it, and an interpretation of the facts that is consistent, and illuminating at least to some readers. Interpretation is a key word for those who read Santayana. He has no final explanations and for this reason his name seems small among those philosophers who teach an absolute—Plato, Plotinus, Berkeley, Hegel. Life is too complex and difficult for such splendid theories as theirs to fit, Santayana believes, stimulating and sublime as those theories may be in pointing to high paths and opening moral vistas. The idealist's philosophy is a parable and should be valued as such. But the writer of Realms of Being remembers the stones and the worms, the lost souls, and men who appear no more than halfanimals. For him no "snug universe" (his own expression), nor even a rational one exists. Perhaps it is because his mind when he was a boy had rested on the certainties of a Petrine system that he reiterates his rejections. He was shocked into naturalism. His metaphysic elaborates the theme which has become familiar to the reader of hisi autobiography and letters, "My philosophy has always been that disillusion is the only safe foundation for happiness,"2 but upon disillusion he builds a discriminating doctrine. This doctrine concerns animal faith, essence, matter, truth, and spirit, to each of which themes is given a volume. There is a deliberate examination by the writer of representative human experience and, admittedly with some repetition, the constitutive elements in life and its environment are made clearer, and the reader's mind is illumined. But not by the whole truth. Santayana says in his preface to Realms of Being, "Mind was not created for the sake of discovering the absolute truth. The absolute truth has its own intangible reality, and scorns to be known. The function of mind is rather to increase the wealth of the universe in the spiritual dimension, by adding appearance to sub2

llrid.,p. 151.

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stance and passion to necessity, and by creating all those private perspectives, and those emotions of wonder, adventure, curiosity, and laughter which omniscience would exclude."3 Scepticism and Animal Faith was Santayana's answer to the solipsism in which English philosophy in his day had issued. He was strongly averse to vagaries and idiosyncrasies, and felt that solipsism and psychologism were philosophical vagaries. Preoccupation with a world of impressions and ideas seemed to him wrong-headed and unreal. As early as 1905 he had written to William James, "My nature, on the other hand, compels me to believe in something in quite a different sense, and this something is, in my view, doublematerial nature with its animation on the one hand, and logical or mathematical forms on the other."4 So the statement made in his preface to Scepticism and Animal Faith is no surprise. He writes, "In natural philosophy, I am a confessed materialist—apparently the only one living," but, he added, "I do not profess to know what matter is in itself."5 Later he writes, "Whatever matter may be, I call it matter boldly . . . whatever it may be it must present the aspects and undergo the motions of the gross objects that fill the world: and if belief in the hidden parts and movements in nature be metaphysics, then the kitchen-maid is a metaphysician whenever she peels a potato."6 Santayana's belief in and respect for the material world is therefore basic and is the foundation of his ontology, but his convictions about spiritual reality are not thereby diminished, rather increased. Scepticism and Animal Faith shows man the infant animal pursuing food and the other necessities of life, and in these experiences coming up against his environment. Need is felt first and upon this supervene interest, intent, preference, and preoccupation. These developments involve in the human animal intuition and consciousness. The subject matter of intuition is, according to Santayana, never an object or a fact but an essence, a term invented by him to ^Realms of Being (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1942), p. xiii. ^Letters, p. 76. 5 Preface to Scepticism and Animal faith CNew York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), p. vii. *Ibi&., p. viii.

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cover the quality or character of the thing perceived or the thought conceived. However, where the psychologist is concerned only with the essence (variously called impression or idea), and quite correctly points out that scepticism is the only sound attitude as far as any proof of existence behind the essence goes, Santayana insists that man no less than his fellow animals expects a certain coherence among the essences and develops ideas of things. He draws attention to the fact that a man remembers an object, not his own experience of that object, thereby seeming to attribute identity and duration to the essences which he has intuited. Of this tendency in himself and in other men, Santayana remarks, "I am [here] in the region of belief mediated by symbols, in the region of animal faith."7 Santayana goes on to make clear that objects are proposed to intuition as a result of natural instincts seeking them, instincts such as hunger, love, the fighting impulse, and expectation of a future. The object of which the essences are predicated is an object of faith, never really coming within the circle of intuition, but human beings by comparing and correcting their impressions gain some knowledge of such an object. Chapter xvm, "Knowledge is Faith Mediated by Symbols," is among the best parts of the work, not only for its enlightening and endearing sketch of the growing mind of the child as it passes from reaching for the moon to some understanding of the moon and of the world, but also for its perspicuous general statements. Santayana writes that although any poet or philosopher, like any flower, is free to prefer intuition to knowledge, he is in that moment choosing ignorance. "Knowledge is knowledge because it has compulsory objects that pre-exist."8 Further we read, "Knowledge is true belief grounded in experience, I mean controlled by outer facts."9 He ends the chapter by saying that while life lasts faith in some kind of knowledge must endure. "The object of this tentative knowledge is to discover what sort of world this disturbing world happens to be."10 Chapters xv, "Belief in Experience," xvi, "Belief in the Self," and ''Scepticism and Animal Faith, p. 115. silrid., p. 172.

*IUd., p. 180. Wind., p. 181.

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xvu, "The Cognitive Claims of Memory," should not be neglected. Santayana has a nice touch when treating of psychological development, and portrays vividly the transition in the individual mind from intuition to discourse, discourse which "is guided unawares by the efforts of the psyche to explore, not the realm of essence, but the world that controls her fortunes."11 Santayana indicates that the mind learns by contradiction and shock: "Experience is intuition; it is discourse interspersed with shocks and recapitulated."12 He describes the mind in process of realizing its own existence, writing, "In brute experience, or shock, I have not only a clear indication, for my ulterior reflection, that I exist, but a most imperious summons at that very moment to believe in my existence."13 However, he admits that a man cannot hope to discover what precisely his self or psyche is, and ends chapter xvi with a poignant sentence, "The self is a fountain of joy, folly, and sorrow, a waxing and waning, stupid and dreaming creature, in the midst of a vast natural world, of which it catches but a few transient and odd perspectives." Scepticism and Animal Faith, although called an introduction to a system, adumbrates the elements in the system, and sets the reader at ease with regard to the terms and meanings which will emerge and be applied as that system is unfolded. Besides stressing the term essence, already mentioned, Santayana emphasizes substance, nature, truth, and spirit. He shows that what is independent of knowledge is substance, and that substance is identical with natural objects. He believes that the laws of nature, tentative as they may be, illustrate how much we can find out about substance and constitute one answer to scepticism. Nature is a generative and controlling power with her own regularities and mysteries, but human progress in the arts proves that man's ideas are in correspondence with the sphere of his motion, that is, nature, and express his real relations. Santayana argues that this proves the existence of nature and of man as a part of nature. As to truth, the primary emphasis in this book is upon fact as the substance of truth, fact being an object of animal faith and not "Ifrid., p. 139.

^Ibid., p. 158.

isiHd., p. 141.

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of pure contemplation. Natural men are interested in success, not in truth, but in their pursuit of success they may reach the standard comprehensive description of a fact, which includes all that perspective implied by taking a particular fact as a centre. In this activity as in all activities that make men men, Santayana recognizes the presence of spirit. He writes, "Spirit, with knowledge and all its other prerogatives, is intrinsically and altogether a function of animal life,"14 rejecting thus early in the argument any conventional or traditional view of a bodiless soul or a supernatural spirit. With him spirit does not come down from above but rises in the natural order as soon as consciousness begins to operate. "Substance is a material and spirit is an entelechy, or perfection of function realised; so that (if I may parody Aristotle), if a candle were a living being, wax would be its substance and light its spirit."15 Scepticism and Animal Faith is a discursive volume, perhaps overrich in parts, but two passages may be found in the closing chapter which show Santayana's conciseness in summing up his argument as well as his usual imaginative quality. He writes, "This belief in Nature, with a little experience and good sense to fill in the picture, is almost enough by way of belief. Nor can a man honestly believe less. An active mind never really loses the conviction that it is scenting the way of the world."16 Later we read, "In rising out of passive intuition, I pass, by a vital constitutional necessity, to belief in discourse, in experience, in substance, in truth and in spirit." When Santayana published The Realm of Essence in 1928, five years after his introductory volume, he wrote a preface which he called "Preface to Realms of Being." For those readers who wish to get the hang of Santayana's thought as a whole, no better piece of writing can be found. He first points out that there is actually a dumb human philosophy prevalent among civilized peoples, expressed in the arts of agriculture, commerce, and mechanical achievement, and accompanied by a modicum of sanity, morality, and science. He then defines the leading terms in his own philosophy very carefully. The uttid., p. 166.

isibid., p. 217.

i*nid., p. 308.

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realm of matter means for him "a circle of material events called nature, to which all minds belonging to the same society respond in common."17 The realm of essence is the world of perception, and consists of symbols of matter or mind—the magical stuff with which the mind deals. Santayana reminds us of his basic position, assumed years before in The Sense of Beauty. He writes, "The imagination which eventually runs to fine art or religion is the same faculty which, under a more direct control of external events, yields vulgar perception."18 The realm of spirit is the world of man's creative life. Santayana believes that facts for a living creature are only instruments and that his play-life is his true life. "This world of free expression, this drift of sensations, passions, and ideas, perpetually kindled and fading in the light of consciousness, I call the Realm of Spirit."19 Of the creations of human spirit he states, "Among these must be counted literature and philosophy, and so much of love, religion, and patriotism as is not an effort to survive materially."20 While reminding his reader of the relativity of knowledge, Santayana finally comes to the realm of truth. He states clearly, "If views can be more or less correct, and perhaps complementary to one another, it is because they refer to the same system of nature, the complete description of which, covering the whole past and the whole future, would be the absolute truth."21 Santayana considers that the philosopher is particularly interested in the pursuit of truth and that, although he may miss the whole truth of nature, he will still achieve a work of imagination. "If a philosopher could be nothing else, he might still be a moralist and a poet."22 In discussing essence, Santayana never lets the reader forget man's dependence upon and involvement with matter. From matter he sprang, on matter he feeds, and upon matter he must leave his mark if he would render existence more friendly to the spirit. Santayana writes, "It is by the shifts of matter, in the world or in the brain, that essences are revealed"23 and "So much is nature the mother of spirit, ""Preface to Realms of Being," in The Realm of Essence (London: Constable, 1928), p. vi. soifettZ., p. xi. Wbid.., p. ix. 2lIZ>uJ., p. xv. "find., pp. x, xi. 22IZ>wJ., p. xvi.

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a child at the breast; it must be fed at every turn by things."24 When discussing traditional problems like the ancient play with the One and the Many, or the modern dilemma concerning free will and necessity, Santayana always comes back to things or matter. He writes, "An extreme violence is done to nature when such simple ethereal essences as unity and multiplicity are hypostatised. The result is a metaphysics which excludes the possibility of any physics. . . . The more intense the realisation of these essences is in intuition, the farther the contemplative mind flies from nature, and from any understanding of existence or any belief in it."25 And later he argues that both spontaneity and regularity are evident in nature. Speaking of the life of matter, he writes, "This groundless pervasive power, with its tireless inner monotony and its occasional outward novelties, is matter thumping in the hearts of the free-willists much more loudly than in those of their opponents."26 The essences then are percepts merely, or concepts, which may be enlightening if the mind cherishing them is humble and wise, but they are signs or symbols of varying cogency and not to be taken for indubitable fact. Santayana distinguishes carefully essences from things. To illustrate the difference he points out that while Socrates the man is a part of the flux of nature, "the essence which his life embodies when taken as a whole is also not Socrates, but is only the truth of his life, seen under the form of eternity."27 The point is here made, and reiterated in different parts of the work, that existence is a surd, external to the essence which it may illustrate and irrelevant to it. This fact, that essences are independent of existence, does not rob them of significance, but makes the student of works of the imagination cautious. "Sense, history, science, and poetry are all in the same case: they arrest essences, exclamatory visions, and apply them as names to the flux of nature, which they can neither fathom nor arrest."28 Santayana has a special respect for the essences embodied in poetry. "The poets have had their own visions, the truth and beauty of which are hidden in God; and their works have been so MThe Realm of Essence, p. 72. uilncL., p. 73.

^Ibid., p. 75. 26iz,;