THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

CHAPTER XI
Contemporary American Philosophers:
Santayana, James and Dewey
INTRODUCTION
THERE ARE, as everybody -mows, two Americas, of which one is European*
European America is chiefly the eastern states, where the older stocks
look up respectfully to foreign aristocracies, and more recent immigrants
look back with a certain nostalgia to the culture and traditions of their
native lands. In this European America there is an active conflict between
the Anglo-Saxon soul, sober and genteel, and the restless and innovating
spirit of the newer peoples. The English code of thought and manners
must eventually succumb to the continental cultures that encompass and
inundate it here; but for the present that British mood dominates the
literature, though no longer the morals, of the American East. Our
standard of art and taste in the Atlantic states is English; our literary heri-
tage is English; and our philosophy, when we have time for any, is in the
line of British thought. It is this new England that produced Washington
and Irving and Emerson and even Poe; it is this new England that wrote
the books of the first American philosopher, Jonathan Edwards; and it is
this new England that captured and remade that strange, exotic figure,
America's latest thinker, George Santayana. For Santayana, of course, is
an American philosopher only by grace of geography; he is a European
who, having been born in Spain, was transported to America in his unknowing
childhood, and who now, in his ripe age, returns to Europe as
to a paradise for which his years with us were a probation. Santayana is
steeped in the "genteel tradition" of the old America.1
J
Cf. his own analysis of the two Americas: "America is not simply a young
country with an old mentality; it is a country with two mentalities, one a survival
of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts,
practices and^ discoveries of the younger generations. In all the higher things of the
mind in religion, in literature, in the moral emotions it is the hereditary spirit
that prevails, so much so that Mr. Bernard Shaw finds that America is a hundred
years behind the times. The truth is that one-half of the American mind has remained.
1 will not say high and dry but
? slightly becalmed ; it has floated gently in
the back-water, while alongside, in invention and industry and social organization,
the other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids. This may be
found symbolized in American architecture. . . . The American Will inhabits the
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