Santayana's World

...He explains that whether it was "conceit, or firmness of disposition," it did not occur to him then, or at any time later, to make any effort to overcome his native bias...

...They were "variable material complexes" from which he could draw "the pleasures and lessons of travel," but not the unchanging ideal objects to which he would pledge his troth...

...Here in this little book of 144 pages of text, notable of course for beauty of phrasing, but also for sharpness and freshness of thought, Santayana is, as always, the philosopher in the grand manner, the antithesis of what he once called "those little gnostics...

...I never understood him before...

...One cannot but recall what William James said of his young colleague's first philosophical book and which is no less true of his last: "The great event in my life recently has been the reading of Santayana's book...

...And when he settled down in Italy as the only country in which his life might come to a peaceful end, it was his Italy he chose...

...Early in this book the author informs the reader that in his youth "rather special and difficult relations to persons and places seemed clearly imposed facts...

...But if a thinker's interests are not so self-concentrated, and he takes the desires and endeavors of other men into account, or feels a genuine concern for the life-enterprise as a whole, then I do not see how the word profound can be applied to this concluding work of George Santayana...

...But what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy...

...This caused him more and more to live "in a kind of solitude, not transcendental and spiritual, but decidedly solitariness in a crowd and foreignness among very distinct people...

...For pleasure, and convivially, I like to share the life about about me, and have often done it...

...If it is a philosopher's aim to think and feel of, by, and for himself alone...

...I now understand Santayana, the man...

...if he is satisfied to interpret and appraise every thing and every one, center and circumference, by the standard of his own personal preferences exclusively, then this terminal volume of the three written by the author of Persons and Places goes perhaps as far as thinking can go...

...To live in what he calls my England, my Spain, my America, he abandoned the real, public, geographical England, Spain, and America...

...And now why not read Santayana's farewell to his Host, the world, at least the Epilogue, which is the statement of his faith in its essentials...

...After a hundred pages of direct or indirect exemplification of this fact, he remarks: "Certainly I am profoundly selfish in the sense that I resist human contagion, except provisionally, on the surface, and in matters indifferent to me...

...Yes, a philosopher in the grand manner, no doubt about that, who did not hesitate to sacrifice anything in the carrying out of his grand design...

...He never tried in any way to change himself...

...but never so as, at heart, to surrender my independence...

...George Santayana never lived anywhere except as a stranger or a guest, even when he lived now and again with some member of his family or with a friend...

...I did not find it a happy book, and its profundity would seem to me to depend upon accepting as final the author's attitude toward life...

...I would rather have been the author's enemy and hence ignored, than his friend and be written about...

...The surprising thing, at least to me, is the amount of gossip the book contains, some of it cruel in its frankness...

...His England, Spain, and America were, he freely admits, only "illusions" inspired in him by the real England, Spain, and America, but he adds: "It would have been treason to myself and a false profession of faith to have wedded the real England and the real America...

...I have literally squealed at the imperturbable perfection with which the position is laid down on page after page...

...If he is right, it might be well to know it...