Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 04 Fall 1986

              Santayana:
Some Recollections and Asides
On this prospective occasion, anticipating MIT's publication next year of
Santayana's autobiography, Persons and Places, I have been asked to speak
retrospectively, to say something about the man I knew for a few years in
his old age and have tried to know better since his death. The attempt
to understand Santayana the man must of course be collateral with the
attempt to understand the philosopher. To join the two, to see that they
were happily one, was his exacting task in all the years following his self-
exile from America - although the candor and self-possession of his
student letters to William James make it clear that honest speech came
naturally even to the young Santayana. His wish to fuse theory and
practice entailed more than a philosopher's carrying up of particulars into
the general, more than the joining of speculation in its ultimate reaches
with the minimum indispensable postulates of common sense, more even
than establishing a perfect mutual responsiveness between his daily
encounters with the world and his words about the world. The integrity
he sought depended on his joining the past to his own present. Self-
definition here sought its terms in the articulate history of the experience
of Western man — as much of it as Santayana could appropriate and make
his. ,
Doubtless the best efforts of critics and biographers to rehearse the
life of another must come more or less preposterously short of their aim,
even when, as in Santayana's case, coherence need not be invented or
imposed but waits for discovery. But the integrity achieved by Santayana
was of a kind not easy for us to compass. If we would recover and repeat
in ourselves the motions of mind and heart which governed his view of
things, we must be at least on speaking terms with the many philosophies,
the poetries, the cultures through which this inveterate traveller passed
on his long way home. Integrity, unity, coherence: these are, after all,
of little worth when they characterize, as they may truly characterize,
lives which are vacuous and philosophies which are impoverished. These
terms must borrow their glory from the number and nature of the
elements which a life or a theory holds in solution — the views which are
made to cohere, the values which are brought into harmony. I think of
no philosopher in this century who has sought to assimilate and include in
all his reckonings so wide a range as Santayana's of the intuitions and
perspectives of poets, dramatists, and philosophers from classical times
down to his own. If you would understand my philosophy, he once wrote
to me, you must begin not with me but with Thales. Mercifully he did
not add that, beyond the Ionians, you had better have some ear for all
the   voices,   some   grasp   of   all   the   contending   emotions   and   rival
This paper was read to the Santayana Society, Washington, December 28, 1985.