"Santayana: No Illusions, No Despair"

...And, much earlier, William James was moved to characterize Santayana's The Life of Reason, still perhaps his greatest achievement, as "a perfection of rottenness...

...The reissue in much enlarged form of Professor Edman's selections from the works of Santayana is therefore a welcome event...

...A steady stream of publications, modern techniques of book-selling, and the unusual circumstances under which he spent his declining years in war-molested Rome nevertheless kept his name alive in America and made it familiar to newspaper readers...

...A remarkably penetrating apercu was for him frequently the equivalent of solid scholarship and detailed evidence, and a flashing metaphor embodying a bright image was often a substitute for painstaking argument...

...And there undoubtedly are traits in Santayana which help explain the comparative neglect which has been his portion, as well as the severe judgments that have been passed upon his work...

...Despite the undeniable flaws and provincial judgments which Santayana's writings exhibit, these are—singly and collectively—great achievements...

...Santayana had an aristocratic conception of the function of government, and rejected as a valid measure for the success of a mode of social government the accumulation of material goods or an increase in the mere numerical abundance of life...

...Peter's idea of Paul may be a better index to Peter than to Paul, but it may nevertheless reflect some objective features of Paul after all...

...and, indeed, the unpleasant snobbishness which his autobiography reveals him to have displayed toward other men also characterized his intellectual method...

...Indeed, Santayana was profoundly out of sympathy with the Puritanism that continues to dominate so much of American life, and he disliked the formlessness of democratic society...

...it consists in part in organizing those impulses so as to achieve a harmonious balance among them, with the ultimate objective of making possible the contemplative enjoyment of the symbolic forms embodied in the arts, religion and theoretical science...

...He remarked of himself that he was "an ignorant man, almost a poet...

...Accordingly, since so much of recent philosophy is an attempt at a scrupulously rigorous resolution of piecemeal problems, and since in consequence virtuosity in handling the tools of analysis is often prized above insight and vision, it is quite understandable why so many philosophers should find Santayana's highly poetical and emotionally charged language a perpetual obstacle to clear thought, and why so many of them should dismiss his writings as philosophically worthless...

...Bertrand Russell has acknowledged his intellectual indebtedness to Santayana...

...Notwithstanding all this, and despite the impact of his thought on some of his highly influential contemporaries, Santayana has been generally ignored by professional philosophers...

...The present volume makes readily available, within a single set of covers and at a reasonable price, both the substance of Santayana's philosophy of civilization and the essentials of his theory of knowledge and his metaphysics...

...He had also a sensitive appreciation for the values of traditional forms, and he saw in the doctrines and practices of modern political liberalism the substitution of sentimentalism and romantic wilfulness for the indispensable discipline that is required for achieving distinction and excellence...

...He has illuminated the moral significance of human institutions, supplied us with an integrated perspective for evaluating human effort, and made us more sensitive to the variety of moral goods that are embodied in different phases of human experience...

...He was neither a logician who sought to sharpen and disinfect his intellectual tools, nor a metaphysician with a tightly-knit system of the universe...

...but, in a recent BBC talk, he declared that "I find myself, in reading him, approving each sentence in an almost somnambulistic manner, but unable, after a few pages, to remember what it was all about...

...He served well and importantly the cause of an enlightened philosophy, and helped to emancipate it from the domination of homiletics and theology ; and he wrote with moving eloquence, but without technical jargon, on themes that are both technically philosophical and deeply pertinent to all reflective men...

...It contains all the materials included in the earlier edition of 1936, augmented by 300 pages drawn from Santayana's subsequently published books: several chapters from The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, some fifty chapters from Dominations and Powers, and three philosophically revealing chapters from the autobiographical volumes...

...Moreover, despite his life-long concern with the conditions and nature of a life of reason, and with the moral values of human institutions, Santayana maintained a fundamental aloofness from the burning practical issues of our times...

...Professor Edman's introductory essay for the original edition is retained unaltered, but he has added a new preface, in which he makes clear the continuity between the fresh material in the present edition and the themes developed earlier...

...The selections are admirably suited for enabling the reader to obtain a just appreciation of the range and significance of Santayana's philosophy, and the editor's introduction and preface supply a lucid analytic guide to the structure of Santayana's meditations...

...Reviewed by Ernest Nagel Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University Half a century ago, George Santayana formed with William James and Josiah Royce what was at that time probably the most distinguished group of University teachers of philosophy in this country...

...He was a naturalist in holding that the moving forces of nature are material, and that mind and spirit are not substantial agents which can direct the flow of events...

...It is therefore perhaps inevitable that both the substance and the manner of his philosophy should have been intensely distasteful to thinkers who, because of temperament and conviction, were overtly involved in the hurly-burly of human affairs...

...But notwithstanding the serious limitations of Santayana's intellectual methods or the shortcomings of his essentially esthetic political philosophy, he is, in my opinion, one of the few commanding philosophical thinkers of our times...

...In the nature of the case, therefore, it would have been impossible for him to be the acknowledged spokesman for the inchoate aspirations of a society as fluid as ours...

...In his view, however, the life of reason for man consists neither in permitting the springs of action to run riot nor in extirpating our natural impulses...

...and he has found a wide audience for his more systematic writings neither within nor outside academic walls...

...He was primarily and confessedly a philosophical moralist, surveying in a detached manner phases and stages of human achievement, and appraising them for their contributions to human power and human excellence...

...He has produced a comprehensive vision of human life that is perhaps unrivaled in contemporary literature, a vision that contemplates the place of man in nature without illusion and yet without despair...

...He resigned his professorship at Harvard in 1912 and left for Europe, where he lived until his death almost a year ago...