Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 17 Fall 1999

              Sentimental Time and
The Sense of Rationality
Physical time, according to George Santayana, is constituted by matter; it has
none of the status of an independent substance. The substance of the cosmos
consists of dispersed events he calls "natural moments," each of which has
"forward tension" and "lateral tensions." These have a marked impulsive nature,
always asserting themselves in a forward direction; in the case of living organisms, a
focus on the present and the immediate future is undeniable. Such a self-directed
focus is inevitable and healthy for that animal life. But subjectivist modern
philosophy has incorrectly taken such a focus to be the true account of things,
sometimes tying this view to a transcendental idealism or to one of its more recent
mutants; in their extreme forms, such philosophies are antithetic to the intelligent
regulation of life due to the distortions of an egotism.1
Richard Gale brings an obvious expertise and subtlety to the discussion of time.
In the case of Santayana's doctrine, he correctly assigns it the image of science, and
brings out clearly Santayana's hostility to any anthropomorphic account, such as is
found in the four eminent contemporaries he mentions. Gale relies heavily on
McTaggart's well-known A- and B-Theories of time, which he takes as descriptive of
Santayana's sentimental and physical time. He offers refutations of various
arguments he finds in the text that the sentimental view of time must give place to
that of physical time; he speaks with approval of a Jamesian sense of rationality; and
he argues that Santayana's view of time is destructive of moral agency. I shall
question each of these three claims in turn, and press somewhat different
propositions.
On several occasions, Gale assumes that Santayana is appealing to standard
modes of argumentation, such as reduction; but I hold that the arguments are quite
different. I argue that the sustained attacks which Santayana directs at the notion of
sentimental time do not constitute the chief determinants of his account of physical
time. They are better seen as criticisms of sentimental time from the perspective of
an already adopted doctrine. An alternative, top-down justification of his view of
time is suggested. Thus my criticism is directed less at Gale's reading of the
substance of Santayana's views than at his account of the methodology by which it is
obtained. On rationality — or the sense of rationality, as James puts it';—
Santayana's position reflects his reliance on an absolute realm of eternal truth; our
view of what is rational must rest on our best perception of the truth. Those who rely
instead on what they would like to be true can anticipate misfortune and calamity.
While this is an obvious point, he feels that absence of a firm doctrine of truth in a
philosophy encourages such a failing. Santayana's account of truth is moreover
closely tied to and surely influences his understanding of time. Again, of importance
to Gale are the moral question and its relation to the theory of time. He takes the A-
Theory to be an essential part of a Jamesian moral agency, and Santayana's B-Theory
to lead to his later doctrines characterised by detachment from worldly concerns. I
argue that Gale too much stresses both the extent of Santayana's detachment, and the
1 An earlier version of this paper was read to the annual meeting of the Santayana Society in
Washington, D. C. on December 28,1998, in response to the above paper by Richard Gale