Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 22 Fall 2004

              A Free Man's Worship:
Santayana and Russell
on Transcendence
In "A Free Man's Worship/' a very interesting and in some ways uncharacteristic
essay originally published in 1903 and reprinted in Mysticism and Logic^ Bertrand
Russell sets out what he takes to be a bleak picture of the world that we inhabit and
offers an account of how we might best live in that world.1 His account bears a
certain similarity to Santayana's own vision of the world and, at the same time, what he
calls a "free man's worship" might be thought to overlap with Santayana's "spiritual
life." Both are concerned with "eternal" things. As Russell puts it, we are tsto bum
with passion for eternal things ... this is the free man's worship" (ml 53). It is my
purpose in this discussion to investigate those apparent similarities and to argue that,
on careful examination, they vanish.
Not only is Russell's vision very different from Santayana's but it Is not, in the
final analysis, a coherent account. At times we are enjoined to "burning with passion
for the eternal" so as to be lost to the world of change and, at others, it seems that such
passion might just be a way to improve the temporal. But if I so burn, why will I care
for the temporal at all and why is this passion not Itself a bit of the temporal and thus
temporary? Russell can't seem to make up his mind. Santayana sees Russell's moral
view, on its substantive side, as "impetuous" at worst and romantic at best. It is
impetuous because it councils abandoning the world but without a clear justification.
It is romantic because when it seems to abandon the world It actually remains tied to it.
As a version of the spiritual life, Russell's position is only half-hearted. In the final
analysis, it offers us no guidance. As Santayana complains, "It leaves us quite in the
dark." At the same time on Its theoretical side, it is confused in a most fundamental
way for it reads as an unconditional property of an object what is in fact a projection of
the subject.
In preparation to write this essay, I decided to consult Santayana's
correspondence for the period in which Russell's essays were published (1910-1920).2
There I found a letter to Russell in which Santayana announces that he will be
publishing a review of Russell's Philosophical Essays, a collection published in 1911,
but he makes no reference to Mysticism and Logic. Imagine my pleasure when, while
consulting a Russell bibliography for another matter, I accidentally discovered that
Mysticism and Logic was originally published as Philosophical Essays. I would have
Santayana's comments to guide me and to compare with my own assessment of the
work. I will first lay out Russell's basic argument and then develop some key points of
Santayana's criticism and my own.
Russell begins with a story about creation, attributed to Mephistopheles, in which
the creator looks on as humankind becomes aware of the madness and cruelty of this
world. In a desperate attempt to hide the true, we humans conclude that all is for some
greater purpose and that only renunciation of what little the world offers can ever
1 This paper was presented to the Santayana Society at its annual meeting in Washington, D. C.
on December 29, 2003. Russell's Mysticism and Logic (Garden City, Doubleday Anchor Books,
1957) will be referred to in the fonn (ML ...).
" Santayana, G. Tlte Letters of George Santayana, Vol V of The Santayana Edition, Book Two
1910-20, ed. William G Holzberger MIT Press 2002.