THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
The other America is American. It consists of those people, whether
Yankees or Hoosiers or cowboys, whose roots are in this soil, and not in
Europe; whose manners, ideas and ideals are a native formation; whose
souls are touched neither with the gentility of the families that adorn
Boston, or New York, or Philadelphia, or Richmond, nor with the volatile
passions of the southern or eastern European; men and women moulded
into physical ruggedness and mental directness and simplicity by their
primitive environment and tasks. This is the America that produced
Lincoln and Thoreau and Whitman and Mark Twain; it is the America
of "horse sense/' of "practical men," of "hard-headed business men"; it
that he be-
is the America which so itself impressed upon William James
came its exponent in philosophy while his brother became more British
than an Englishman; and it is the America that made John Dewcy.
We shall study Santayana first, despite chronology; because, though he
is the youngest of our greater philosophers, he represents an older and a
foreign school; and the subtlety of his thought, and the fragrance of his
style, are like the perfume that lingers in a room from which the flowers
have been taken away. We shall have, very probably, no more Santayanas;
for hereafter it is America, and not Europe, that will write America's
philosophies.
I. GEORGE SANTAYANA
i. BIOGRAPHICAL
Santayana was born at Madrid in 1863. He was brought to America
in 1872, and remained here till 1912. He took his degrees at Harvard,
and taught there from his twenty-seventh to his fiftieth year. One of
his students describes him vividly:
Those who remember him in the class room will remember him as a
spirit solemn, sweet, and withdrawn, whose Johannine face by a Renaissance
painter held an abstract eye and a hieratic smile, half mischief, half content;
whose rich voice flowed evenly, in cadences smooth and balanced as a liturgy;
whose periods had the intricate perfection of a poem and the import of a
prophecy; who spoke somehow for his hearers and not to them, stirring the
depths in their natures and troubling their minds, as an oracle might, to
whom pertained mystery and reverence, so compact of remoteness and
fascination was he, so moving and so unmoved. 2
He was not quite content with the country of his choice; his soul,
softened with much learning, and sensitive as a poet's soul must be (for
he was poet first, and philosopher afterward), suffered from the noisy
skyscraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion." Winds of
Doctrine, New York, 1913; p. 188.
^Horace Kallen in The Journal of Philosophy, Sept. 39, 1931 ; vol. 18, p, 534.