Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 22 Fall 2004

              The Pathetic Fallacy in Santayana
In this paper, I bring to the forefront a set of issues linked to the pathetic fallacy, in
order to show that this is the bond underlying Santayana's work as a whole.1
These issues involve many doctrines to which he takes exception, such as
Pantheism, Moralism, Egotism, Subjectivism, Transcendentalism, Platonism,
Puritanism and Utopianlsm. Because these doctrines are each linked to this one
fallacy, each can be seen as an instance of a general "false step" in philosophy. One of
his unfinished essays is named just "On the False Steps in Philosophy" (br 147-174).
On the positive side, the rejection of false temptations opens the door to a spiritual way
of life. Critics of Santayana have called attention to the pathetic fallacy only with
regard to The Life of Reason, and have assigned it only a limited theoretical relevance.
However, I will gather together the most significant passages that explicitly mention it
and analyze the contexts in which they appear. In this way, its critical philosophical
implications are revealed, and these prove to go beyond a simple psychological
mechanism that has been known to poets for ages. In Santayana's treatment, the
ontologicai and epistemological assumptions of the pathetic fallacy are interpreted
from the perspective of materialism.
Santayana mentions the pathetic fallacy for the first time in the chapter "The
Elements and Function of Poetry" ofInterpretations of Poetry and Religion (ipr):
The poet is himself subject to this illusion, and a great part of what is called poetry,
although by no means the best part of it, consists in this sort of idealisation by proxy. We
dye the world of our own colour; by a pathetic fallacy, by a false projection of sentiment, we
soak Nature with our own feeling, and then celebrate her tender sympathy with our moral
being. (DPR 158)
The pathetic fallacy is a return to that early habit of thought by which our ancestors
peopled the world with benevolent and malevolent spirits; what they felt in the presence of
objects they took to be a part of the objects themselves. (IPR 159)
In this chapter, he studies how poetry can mm into an interpretation of life, instead of
being a mere "aesthetisizing" journey into the realm of fantasy. The polemical context
consists on the overcoming of aestheticism, which dominated the literary scene at the
end of the 19th century. This was Santayana's effort in The Sense of Beauty, Another
aspect of this polemical context was the balance of his position with regard to the
delimitation between poetry, religion and science as a way to avoid the confrontation
fostered by positivism. Although the pathetic fallacy appears in the context of literary
criticism, Santayana's distinctive contribution is the shift of interpretive level achieved
by widening and enriching his statements with references to his own philosophical
system. Poets are perceived as being subject to illusion, are criticized because in the
idealization of nature they project their own feelings upon it, and because they confuse*
in an aberrant way, vision and feeling — two faculties that modem thought tries to
keep apart. On the other hand, Santayana claims that this is a natural confusion, a
return to the old habit of animistic thought. In that sense, the poet complements the
scientist: the poet does not want completely to part with ancient ways of thinking about
1 This paper is an extract of the second chapter of the doctoral thesis La falacia patetica: una
pieza clave en el pensamiento de George Santayana defended at the University of Salamanca
(Spain) in September 2003. The translation is by Daniel de Santos Loriente. I am very grateful
to Angus Kerr-Lawson for his encouragement and comments.