He was not quite content with the country of his choice; his soul, softened with much learning, and sensitive as a poet’s soul must be (for he was poet first, and philosopher afterward), suffered from the noisy haste of American city-life; instinctively he shrank back to Boston, as if to be as near to Europe as he could; and from Boston to Cambridge and Harvard, and a privacy that preferred Plato and Aristotle to James and Royce. He smiled with a little bitterness at the popularity of his colleagues, and remained aloof from the crowd and the press; but he knew that he was fortunate to have found a home in the finest School of Philosophy that any American university had ever known. “It was a fresh morning in the life of reason, cloudy but brightening.”3
His first essay in philosophy was The Sense of Beauty (1896), which even the matter-of-fact Münsterberg rated as the best American contribution to esthetics. Five years later came a more fragmentary, and more readable, volume, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Then, for seven years, like Jacob serving for his love, he worked silently, publishing only occasional verse; he was preparing his magnum opus, The Life of Reason. These five volumes (Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Religion, Reason in Art, and Reason in Science) at once lifted Santayana to a fame whose quality fully atoned for what it lacked in spread. Here was the soul of a Spanish grandee grafted upon the stock of the gentle Emerson: a refined mixture of Mediterranean aristocracy with New England individualism: and, above all, a thoroughly emancipated soul, almost immune to the spirit of his age, speaking as if with the accent of some pagan scholar come from ancient Alexandria to view our little systems with unwondering and superior eye, and to dash our new-old dreams with the calmest reasoning and the most perfect prose. Hardly since Plato had philosophy phrased itself so beautifully; here were words full of a novel tang, phrases of delicate texture, perfumed with subtlety and barbed with satiric wit; the poet spoke in these luxuriant metaphors, the artist in these chiseled paragraphs. It was good to find a man who could feel at once the lure of beauty and the call of truth.
After this effort Santayana rested on his fame, contenting himself with poems and minor volumes.4 Then, strange to say, after he had left Harvard and gone to live in England, and the world presumed that he looked upon his work as finished, he published, in 1923, a substantial volume on Scepticism and Animal Faith, with the blithe announcement that this was merely the introduction to a new system of philosophy, to be called “Realms of Being.” It was exhilarating to see a man of sixty sailing forth on distant voyages anew, and producing a book as vigorous in thought, and as polished in style, as any that he had written. We must begin with this latest product, because it is in truth the open door to all of Santayana’s thinking.
2. SCEPTICISM AND A NIMAL FAITH
“Here,” says the preface, “is one more system of philosophy. If the reader is tempted to smile, I can assure him that I smile with him . . . . I am merely attempting to express for the reader the principles to which he appeals when he smiles.” Santayana is modest enough (and this is strange in a philosopher) to believe that other systems than his own are possible. “I do not ask anyone to think in my terms if he prefers others. Let him clean better, if he can, the windows of his soul, that the variety and beauty of the prospect may spread more brightly before him.”5
In this last and introductory volume he proposes to clear away, first of all, the epistemological cobwebs that have enmeshed and arrested the growth of modern philosophy. Before he delineates the Life of Reason he is willing to discuss, with all the technical paraphernalia dear to the professional epistemologist, the origin, validity and limits of human reason. He knows that the great snare of thought is the uncritical acceptance of traditional assumptions: “criticism surprises the soul in the arms of convention,” he says, unconventionally. He is willing to doubt almost everything: the world comes to us dripping with the qualities of the senses through which it has flowed, and the past comes down to us through a memory treacherously colored with desire. Only one thing seems certain to him, and that is the experience of the moment—this color, this form, this taste, this odor, this quality; these are the “real” world, and their perception constitutes “the discovery of essence.”6
Idealism is correct, but of no great consequence: it is true that we know the world only through our ideas; but since the world has behaved for some thousands of years, substantially as if our combined sensations were true, we may accept this pragmatic sanction without worry for the future. “Animal faith” may be faith in a myth, but the myth is a good myth, since life is better than any syllogism. The fallacy of Hume lay in supposing that by discovering the origin of ideas he had destroyed their validity: “A natural child meant for him an illegitimate one; his philosophy had not yet reached the wisdom of the French lady who asked if all children were not natural.”7 This effort to be sceptically strict in doubting the veracity of experience has been carried by the Germans to the point of a disease, like a madman forever washing his hands to clean away dirt that is not there. But even these philosophers “who look for the foundations of the universe in their own minds” do not live as if they really believed that things cease to exist when not perceived.
We are not asked to abolish our conception of the natural world, nor even, in our daily life, to cease to believe in it; we are to be idealists only north-northwest, or transcendentally; when the wind is southerly we are to remain realists . . . . I should be ashamed to countenance opinions which, when not arguing, I did not believe. It would seem to me dishonest and cowardly to militate under other colors than those under which I live . . . . Therefore no modern writer is altogether a philosopher in my eyes, except Spinoza . . . . I have frankly taken nature by the hand, accepting as a rule, in my farthest speculation, the animal faith I live by from day to day.8
And so Santayana is through with epistemology; and we breathe more easily as we pass on with him to that magnificent reconstruction of Plato and Aristotle which he calls “The Life of Reason.” This epistemological introduction was apparently a necessary baptism for the new philosophy. It is a transitional concession; philosophy still makes its bow in epistemological dress, like the labor leaders who for a time wear silk breeches at the king’s court. Some day, when the middle ages are really over, philosophy will come down from these clouds, and deal with the affairs of men.
3. REASON IN SCIENCE
The Life of Reason is “a name for all practical thought and action justified by its fruits in consciousness.” Reason is no foe of the instincts, it is their successful unison; it is nature become conscious in us, illuminating its own path and goal. It “is the happy marriage of two elements—impulse and ideation—which, if wholly divorced, would reduce man to a brute or a maniac. The rational animal is generated by the union of these two monsters. He is constituted by ideas which have ceased to be visionary and actions which have ceased to be vain.” Reason is “man’s imitation of divinity.”9