Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 18 Fall 2000

              30 OVERHEARD IN SEVILLE
the whole process of time are ideas only" (Cous 134). More specifically, Santayana
describes the "very essence and pride" of Absolute Idealism as being:
... that knowledge is not knowledge of the world but is the world itself, and that the units of
discourse, which are interwoven and crossed units, are the only individuals in being (COUS
135).
Santayana thus affirms that Royce's Idealism leads to the dispersion of unique
Individual minds into units of discourse. Santayana acknowledges (significantly) that
this last view is questionably coordinated with the social realist view expressed by
Royce above. Indeed, Santayana further observes, though Royce was led to his view
of Absolute Mind in The World and the Individual by his employment of the
transcendental method, he "wished not" to have been so led. This last is clear from
Royce's constant struggle to reconcile the unique individual to the all-absorbing
absolute. In the final analysis Santayana asks of Royce: "Why not admit solipsism
and be true to the transcendental method?" (Cous 137) Santayana*s answer: Because
of the importance, for Royce, of preserving a unique place for the individual within
the absolute. This last characteristic of Royce was in direct tension with the
transcendental method he employed to express his sceptical and mystical instincts.
Throughout Santayana's prismatic analysis of Royce's thought we find a
common theme, namely an evident tension and at times an outright conflict between
certain German and American strands. For Santayana, Royce's struggles with
moralism and his theory of mind are each traceable to a more fundamental conflict in
his metaphysics. Could Royce have fully worked out his instinctive attraction to
transcendental criticism as found in nineteenth-century German philosophy, the
monumental, and seemingly insoluble problem of reconciling unique individual
minds to the Absolute Mind might never have arisen. On the other hand, had Royce
developed a certain, latent naturalism he seemed impulsively inclined towards, he
might have avoided the moral struggles which preoccupied his later thought.
MATTHEW CALEB FLAMM
Southern Illinois University
The Three Lives of
George Santayana at Harvard
A myth has grown up around George Santayana's teaching career at Harvard
University, a myth that Santayana himself nurtured and that the people who
knew him have tried to dispel.1 The myth is that from the beginning of his
career in 1889 to the end of his career in 1912, George Santayana considered the life
of the professor and the life of the teacher at Harvard to be incompatible with the life
of the philosophical man. This is certainly the impression given by Santayana's later
writings on Harvard, education, and his own life, which he published after resigning
his professorship in 1912. In these writings, we learn that professional demands at
Harvard stifled his intellectual pursuits and that the prevailing educational philosophy
1 This paper was originally submitted on January 18, 2000, for credit in History 98a» a seminar at
Harvard College, taught by Professor James Hankins and Tutor Matthew Maguire.