Santayana's Poetics of Belief

Abstract

Among the great masters in this century of the philosophic vocation James, Whitehead, Dewey, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Heidegger there is perhaps none whose legacy is today so indifferently valued as is George Santayana's. Nor does the inappreciation that generally marks the prevailing view of his work represent a development that has only just gradually come to pass in the years since his death in Rome in the early autumn of 1952: on the contrary, throughout his entire career, though he was always far from being ignored, he constantly faced an intellectual community, particularly in the United States, that reserved sympathies for him that were very imperfect indeed. The intense masculinity (as, I believe, Santayana himself somewhere phrases it) of his own Harvard mentor, William James, was slightly offended by a certain mandarinism and moribund Latinity it descried in the young Santayana, offended procedure of linguistic sanitation, and thus to them Santayana's manifest