Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 14 Fall 1996

              Sagas of the Spirit:
On the Retrospections of
George Santayana and Henry Adams
Nature, for Emerson, was a part of spirit; "the world is a temple whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures and commandments of the Deity."1 Human beings
are poets, to whose active and free perception "the ideal is the real" (ECW 3,42).
If the world or part of it seems opaque, it is because the human faculty is not active. In
parallel with Peirce's demonstration that man, as thinker, is himself of the nature of a sign
(Peirce 5.238 and -313), Emerson announces that "we are symbols and we inhabit symbols"
(ECW 3,20). For him, the lived environment is ever a semeiosis.
But for Santayana spirit is, on the contrary, an outcome of nature. Nature does not
cease to be emblematic of spirit in Santayana, but it is so in a radically different way from
Emerson's. This is because, for Santayana, nature is most clearly seen by spirit under the
aspect of eternity; and in this aspect it is awesomely inhuman in cosmic scale and teemingly
— if not chaotically — complex in its molecular texture. Nature so viewed is the non-
-human matrix of the human, and therefore not the home of the human psyche or self, hi
this reversal of Emerson's idealism, spirit is transcendental only in having gone beyond the
human in an unsustainable stance of Godlike perceptivity.2
The present essay will show, curiously enough, that "spirit," in just this sense, was
at the basis of the mode of discourse adopted by Henry Adams in The Education of Henry
Adams* and his late essays on "cosmohistory." More curiously yet, this essay will show that
the application of Santayana's categorial system to Adams's works succeeds in clarifying
the tone of his "impersonal" retrospections as well as the drift of the gloomy anticipations
in his "cosmohistory," so to call it I refrain from qualifying Adams's recollections as
"personal," because, as we shall see, the Education is the narrative account of a
representative sensibility, not the biography of a particular individual.
The object domain of spirit, in Santayana's system, is that of which it is aware; it is
the realm of essence. But psyche, the mother of spirit, must compound instinct with ideation
and so humanize animal nature that, in our sublunary world, natural societies can eventually
become high civilizations. Though nature seems to bend to culture in the civilizing process,
it was the eruption of new natural forces—neither fully tamed nor fully understood — into
the operations and awareness of his culture that aroused Henry Adams's concern about the
quality of life in nineteenth and twentieth century America.
This was because Adams's "dynamic theory of history" takes for granted that it is the
forces of nature that capture man, not the other way around, as we see in Chapter 33 of
1 See page 17, Volume 3, of Emerson's Complete Works, which we cite as ECW 3.
2 This is also the conclusion of an essay "Spirituality in Santayana," namely, that the latter's
conception of "spirit" — because it takes the point of view of eternity and because of the inhuman
impartiality of its insights — should not be mistaken to be the basis of a way of life. Transactions of
the C.SJPeirce Society, XXV.4 (1989). This reading of Santayana's idea of spirit is based on, and
coincides with, the interpretations of John Lachs and Douglas MacDonald in the Santayana issue of
The Southern Journal of Philosophy Vol.10, No.2 (1972).
3 To be cited hereafter as Education.