Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 16 Fall 1998

              Spirit Within a Life of Reason
Many commentators have found in Santayana's later writings a detachment which
they did not find in earlier works, and which they find objectionable.1 They
suggest that he had abandoned his vigorous endorsement of a life of reason in
favour of a sterile, disengaged kind of spirituality. So marked is this perception that
some postulate two Santayanas having divergent philosophies and embracing
incompatible ideals.2 His defenders have in some cases accepted the view that in his
philosophy he indeed describes two incompatible ideals — the life or reason and the
spiritual life — both comprehensive and sharply different from each other; but his
commitment was to the former ideal throughout. This view is supported by Santayana*s
claim that there was no change in his doctrine, only a "change in mood." We agree that
Santayana does not at any time abandon the ideal of reason, which for him goes to the
heart of the good life, and wish only to clarify the argument. We point to several
passages in which Santayana asserts that spirituality is compatible with a life of reason,
saying explicitly that he is not talking of two separate and incompatible ideals. It is not
necessary to discount his later focus on spirit in an argument that he continues to adhere
to the ideal of reason.
Readers of The Realm of Spirit might take his account there of what he calls a lay
religion to describe his late moral philosophy, and to replace the life of reason as
described in the earlier LR. This would be a misconception brought on by selective
reading. No such illusion would arise from Dominations and Powers, a political treatise
which was his last work. This book has been found to be too Machiavellian by some.
Thus Santayana is accused of being too spiritual on the one hand, and of being too
unspiritual on the other; it is not unusual to find him supporting positions widely held
by the philosophical community to be incompatible. The key point here, however, is that
neither rs nor dp are meant to be full accounts of a moral philosophy. In the Preface to
rs, he explicitly limits the scope of his investigation:
My subject is not experience surveyed impartially, as in a book of descriptive psychology,
but experience viewed at a certain angle, in the measure in which it torments or educates the
spirit. Nor is my subject the whole of moral philosophy or the life of reason; for there aU forms
of health and government would need to be appreciated, many of which might be, and might
be content to remain, purely spontaneous and worldly. (RS viii)
Santayana makes it clear that the discussion will deal only with topics in respect to their
spiritual relevance. Although he has reservations about his volumes on reason, and
regrets that the naturalism of lr was somewhat hidden in phrases like "phases of human
progress," it is evident that he continued to take LR as his chief statement on ethics in
the wider sense. RS was meant to treat spirit as a specific aspect of moral or religious
philosqphy. The subject dealt with in lr is "the whole of moral philosophy," dealing
with "all forms of health and government." The individual emancipation or salvation
which Santayana discusses in rs is not suited to society in general, both because most
1 Parts of this note are contained in the paper "Santayana and the Materialism of Old Age,** read
at the 1992 International Conference on George Santayana in Avila. The author is grateful to David
Dilworth for discussions on these and a thousand other topics.
2 Justus Buchler*s paper, "One Santayana or Two,** reprinted in AFSL 66-72, brought this view
into prominence. Further criticisms along these lines can be found in PGS, especially in the articles of
Edman and Munitz.