This is the finest coming of age novel in the known and unknown universe. It has everything..philosophy, memoirs of a world gone by, lots of quirkiness, and a great sense of heart. The best thing of all..is to have a copy of the 1936 edition. The yellowed pages of the edition are a perfect touch for a book written about time gone by.GREAT

One of the finest books of the 20th century, The Last Puritan was a sensation when published in the 1930's. It tells the triumph and tragedy of Oliver Alden, a youth born into a strict, "Progressive" Unitarian family in late 19th Century Boston. As his life progesses, he struggles to reconcile the harsh idealism in which he was raised with the beautifully chaotic nature of the real world. This conflict gives Santayana the ability to discuss God, love, morality, politics and the permanence of human nature all without ever losing sight of one man's heroic and tragic attempt to find his place in a world not meant for him. The Last Puritan remains the only book that has ever driven me to tears, and the only novel that has ever truly changed my life. If you've ever counted yourself a "lost soul" in the world, this book will hit home like nothing you've ever read.

The philosophy of Santayana is remembered mostly by his theory of aesthetics, which is discussed in detail in this book. His aesthetic theory is basically subjective, or "psychological", and if viewed from a contemporary standpoint, somewhat at odds with current developments in neuroscience, but closer than most schools of Western philosophy. All philosophical theories of aesthetics are interesting to investigate from the standpoint of comparing them to what is said about the human aesthetic faculty in modern research in neuroscience.

As in ethics, Santayana approaches aesthetics in three different ways, namely as the exercise of the aesthetic faculty, the history of art, and the psychological. The first two do not concern the author in the book, his attention devoted entirely to the third. His intention is to remove himself from the influence of the poets and of Plato, and find the out how ideals are formed in the mind, how objects may be compared with them, what properties are shared in beautiful things, and the process by which humans become sensitive to beauty and in turn value it. He is after a definition of beauty that explains its origin in human experience, and one that explains the human capacity to be sensible of beauty and the relation between a beautiful object and its ability to excite the human senses.

The author takes a different definition of aesthetics, being one that he calls "critical" or "appreciative perception", and which results from combining a notion of criticism with that of the notion of aesthetics as a theory of perception. Santayana wanted to develop a theory of aesthetics that relies on perceptions as a judgmental, critical notion. Perceptions that are not appreciations are thus to be excluded. An aesthetic theory then deals with the "perception of values".

The author's view of religion is well-known, and his atheism rare for his time. The religious imagination he says, has resulted in creations that rival those of the poets and novelists, so much so, he says, that humans believe the content of these creations to have objective reality. The ideas of these divinities are further enhanced by the realization of their natural power, with the belief in the reality of an ideal personality bringing about its further idealization, eventually spanning many human generations. History and tradition are cast by the imagination of these deities, in which peity resides and is nourished. The author of course does not excuse the God of Christianity from this, but he acknowledges the possibility that the human conceptions of Christ and Mary may in fact have real counterparts (the evidence of this not to be explored in this work).

The author states that unless human nature undergoes radical change, the main intellectual and aesthetic value of ideas will come from the creative acts of imagination. If human perceptions are not connected with human pleasures, there would be no need to look at things, no interest in them at all, and no importance would be imputed to them. It is indeed amazing how many ideas, thought to be rational, logical, or abstract, actually fit in with the author's aesthetic worldview. Concepts and results in science and mathematics in particular, after their discovery, are sometimes thought of as having their origin in logic and reason. But it was the keen human imagination that brought them about: a grand interplay of intuition and playfullness. Ugly ideas are not permissible: only the most beautiful survive...and oddly, and most interestingly, it is these that usually seem to work the best, and transcend the context in which they were discovered.

In this book, Santayana rejects the Platonic conception of beauty is an intrinsic characteristic of a thing, and argues for beauty that exists only in the mind (and senses, hence the title) of the viewer. The pleasure that beauty gives its audience is universal, but what is beautiful is not universal across audiences. That may be old hat to us, but wasn't quite so old hat in his time. Santayana enumerates various types of beauty, and relates each to the pleasure it gives its audience. Santayana even claims that some of our other preferences -- for example, for youth over age -- are fundamentally aesthetic in nature.

The argument is Santayanaesque, and thus not exactly rigorous. A lot of the physiology ("Psychology is always physiological," he writes) is hokey to our "modern" medical minds. Some of the digressions seem to be just him taking the opportunity to say something clever, rather than advancing the main argument in any way.

Still, Santayana is a virtuoso of putting together large, complex "big think" arguments, and he writes subtly and beautifully. This book is worth it, even if only to see Santayana doing what he does best: arguing broadly and forcefully, this time for a new conception of aesthetics.

For those who have never read Santayana, this is as good a place to start as any. The book begins with the essay "A Brief History of my Opinions," which is as good an introduction to Santayana's thought as you are likely to find. After Santayana's once famous essay on the Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, we come across two critical essays on William James and Josiah Royce. There are no two finer critical essays in philosophy. Santayana combines a symphathetic portrayal of the personalities (he knew both men, having studied under them at Harvard) with a devestating (though very polite) dissection of their specious views. Of James, he writes, "Philosophy to him was rather like a maze in which he happened to find himself wandering, and what he was looking for was a way out." Santayana's treats Royce's dreadful hegelianism with appropriate irony, pointing out the clash between Royce's practical good sense and his absurd philosophical views. But perhaps the best essay in the entire collection is the one entitled "The Genteel Tradition at Bay," where Santayana makes mincemeat of the so-called "new humanists." Santayana especially focuses his critical attention on their moral absolutism, which he demonstrates is self-contradictory and unfeasible. "Call it humanism or not, only a morality frankly relative to man's nature is worthy of man, being at once vital and rational, martial and generous," writes Santayana; "whereas absolutism smells of fustiness as well as of faggots." Santayana's philosophical reflections are not merely brilliant reasoned and beautifully written: they also gives us what is so conspicuously missing in the reflections of most other modern philosophers--namely, wisdom. His works cannot be recommended highly enough.

Don't let the fact that this book is out of print fool you. "Realms of Being" is one of the greatest works of philosophy ever written. It demonstrates a subtlety of argument and an interpretive vision which places Santayana head and shoulders above his better known contemporaries (e.g., Russell, Dewey, Wittgenstien). Since Plato, most of Western Philosophy has labored under the delusion that "true" knowledge is certain and demonstrable, rather than conjectural and provisional, in nature, "episteme" rather than "doxa." This view of knowledge goes hand in hand with the underlying premise of nearly all philosophy since Descartes---namely, the view that a man's own ideas, perceptions, concepts (call them what you will) are the most certain things he knows, and that knowledge, in its most profound and fundamental state, is nothing more and nothing less than the intuition of ideas.

In "Scepticism and Animal Faith," Santayana challenged & refuted the (idealist) contention that knowledge is intuition of ideas. The mere experience of an idea, Santayana argued, is without cognitive significance. It is solipsism, not knowledge. Ideas only become knowledge when they are taken for symbols representing an external, substantive reality. In "Realms of Being," Santayana develops all the important implications of this basic insight into human knowledge. In the first volume of the book, he examines the "Realm of Essence." Essences, for Santayana, are merely the mental constiuents of description, the form under which things appear to the mind. But although these essences describe or represent the qualities of things in the external world, they are not themselves external existences, but are merely signs or symbols which mediate between the mind and the world. Knowledge of reality, then, is indirect and transitive. For this reason, no idea can ever be perfectly adequate. Reality is far too rich and complex to be adequately represented in human symbolization. But for the practical purposes of living in the world---for eating, hunting, working, avoiding dangers, making love---the human mind will suffice. Nevertheless, human knowledge, because of its implacable mediacy, can never be certain. Knowledge, for Santayana, must always remain faith mediated by symbols, doxa rather than episteme.

In the second volume, "Realm of Matter," Santayana draws out some of the implications of his view that reality must be substantive, that is, it must be something and not simply our idea of something. In the third volume, the "Realm of Truth," he offers a series of very original & subtle arguments against the idea of "necessary" truth and logical facts. Facts are arbitrary, truth contingent, and logic ideal. The mind is "platonic from the beginning"; but reality itself is not platonic.

In the final volume of the book, the "Realm of Spirit," Santayana offers a sympathetic critique of several contrasting visions of the spiritual life, trying to extract from each of them their true wisdom in helping the afficted spirit make its way through its pilgrimage in life. The consequence is a naturalistic defense of spirituality. "Spirit pursues a perfection more inward and chastened than world arts and ambitions," Santayana writes; "but it would not exist or have a possible perfection to pursue, if it were not a natural faculty in a natural soul."

This book is the most distinguished work of philosophy to emerge out of the critical realist tradition. Santayana defends the duality between ideas in the mind and the things these ideas represent in the natural world. Using this epistemological dualism, Santayana explains why all forms of idealism are unwarranted and absurd. Since human knowledge is merely symbolic (rather than literal), all the skeptical arguments claiming that, unless we can prove that our ideas are in some sense "identical" to the things they represent, then it follows that things the ideas allegedly represent must be consider as "unknowable." But Santayana shrewdly reminds us that knowledge consists in "thinking aptly about things, not in becoming like them." External reality, before it can be grasped by the mind, must be reduced to the human level.

"Skepticism and Animal Faith," along with David Stove's "The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies," represents the most effective and withering criticism that has ever been directed against the idealist creed. Where Stove attacks the positive argument for idealism, Santayana focuses his polemical guns on the negative argument--i.e., on the idealist argument against realism. Santayana shows how idealist skepticism of the existence of an external reality, if followed consistently, would deprive all our ideas of their cognitive meaning. If idealism is taken to its logical extreme, we would all find ourselves trapped in a solipsism of the passing moment, unable to understand the significance of any idea, image, or feeling experienced by the mind. The reason why human beings generally do not lapse into this state of idealist stupidity is because biological urges prompt them to assume that their ideas refer to things existing in an external, natural world. This biological urge Santayana calls "animal faith." It is a faith that is rewarded and justified in every moment of our waking existence; and even those who deny it speculatively assume its validity in action and intent.

I personally regard "Skepticism and Animal Faith" as the greatest work of epistemology ever written. This is a judgment, however, that few would agree with. Many philosophers disparage Santayana because he eschews most of the technical problems of epistemology and also because he writes more like a poet than an academic scholar. There is no symbolic logic, no arid syllogisms, no dryasdust argumentation in any of Santayana's philosophic works. Philosophy, for Santayana, is not a technique or a science, but an art. The technical epistemologies of academic philosophers are, accordingly, hopeless endeavors. "Thought can only be found by being enacted," Santayana writes. "I may therefore guide my thoughts according to some prudent rule, and appeal as often as I like to experience for a new starting-point or a controlling perception in my thinking; but I cannot by any possibility make experience or mental discourse at large the object of investigation: it is invisible, it is past, it is nowhere." In the final analysis, what makes Santayana superior to most other philosophers is his superior good sense coupled with the rare ability to express this wisdom in memorable phrases and apt metaphors. If there is a more beautifully written book of epistemology, I have yet to see it.

This remarkable book is composed of six lectures which Santayana read at Columbia University in 1910--lectures based on a regular course he taught at Harvard College. It is extraordinary that there should ever have been university lectures of such outstanding quality. It is doubtful that we have anything to approach it today. As merely a book, "Three Philosophical Poets" is a masterpiece of style and interpretation. The three philosophical poets of the title are Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe, each of whom represents the three main sources of the major speculative systems of Western philosophy. Lucretius, the materialist, is the poet of naturalism; Dante, the Christian and Platonist, is the poet of supernaturalism; and Goethe, the romanticist, is the poet of experience and idealism.

What gives this book its special excellence is Santayana's ability to describe each of the traditions with sympathetic understanding. Although a materialist himself, Santayana does not use the book do advance any specific philosophical agenda. He does not try to score points against the speculative traditions he dislikes (e.g. romanticism, idealism), nor does he make any effort to trump the materialism that he favored or the Catholicism he admired. Instead, he seeks to uncover the special motivations and passions that lead to each tradition, showing how even the most dubious philosophical ideas have a sort of plausibility when one understands how intensely human they are. For example, the supernaturalism of Dante is ultimately an expression of the idea that things are to be understood by their uses or purposes. This, in the final analysis, is what unites Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle with the Christian tradition. The Greek naturalists, on the other hand, had a totally different view. "Nothing arises in the body in order that we may use it," insisted Lucretius, "but what arises brings forth its use." Here we have a discarding of final causes typical not merely of naturalism, but of modern science as well.

There is no better introduction to materialism-naturalism, platonism-Christianity, and romanticism-idealism. Santayana clears up scores of misconceptions which have developed regarding these traditions and shows that no philosophical vision can be entirely just to the totality of human life if it does not take into consideration at least some of the insights peculiar to each of these traditions. It does not speak well for our culture that this beautifully written work should have been allowed to fall out of print.

In a century in which philosophy has been taken over by pedants eager to "analyze" every technical problem ever devised by the perverted ingenuity of the mind of man--technical problems, moreover, which, as Santayana himself once put it, are "solved best by not raising them"--it is comforting to know that at least one major philosopher never forgot what philosophy is really all about: namely, wisdom and love of knowledge. Whereas other philosophers seek to impress by being original or controversial or obscure, Santayana merely attempts to describe things as they are. Santayana is above all a realist, not merely in the philosophical sense of believing that external objects exist outside of man's consciousness, but also in the more general sense of accepting the world as it really is and not as we might wish it could be. So many philosophers seem motivated primarily by a desire to rationalize away the disagreeable aspects of reality. Santayana's approach is different. While recognizing that reality has its disagreeable elements (Santayana was certainly no optimist), he seeks to distinguish, as he once put it, the part of this disagreeable or mixed reality "that could be loved and chosen from the reminder."

In "The Life of Reason," Santayana sought to explain how reason emerges in five separate areas of human existence: thought, society, religion, art and science. Originally, Santayana devoted one book to each subject. In this present edition, all five books have been abridged by the author and made into a single volume. The unabridged version is superior to this one. The abridged version is more difficult to follow, because in the process of condensing five books into one, gaps have been created in the exposition of Santayana's thought. Unfortunately, the original five volume edition is no longer in print.

The best two volumes of the unabridged version were "Reason in Common Sense" and "Reason in Religion." The first of these books shows how men came to discover the external reality of nature and the independent existence of other minds. There are chapters on how thought is practical, on the "malicious psychology" of philosophers like Kant, Hume and Berkeley, on how thought is practical, and on Santayana's contention that ideas are not abstractions. "Reason in Religion" is one of the most interesting books on religion ever published and ought to be read by every atheist and agonistic who regards religion as a mere tissue of delusion and irrationality. Santayana, while denying the literal truth of religion, contends that religion nonetheless represents a sort of poetic and moral truth expressed in symbols that can be grasped on a very human level. "Religion remains an imaginative achievement, a symbolic representation of moral reality which may have a most important function in vitalising the mind and in transmitting, by way of parables, the lessons of experience."

The over-riding theme of "The Life of Reason" is Santayana's conviction that only by recognizing the material world and the "conditions of existence," can the spirit become enlightened concerning the source of its troubles and the means of its happiness or deliverance. There is, I would contend, no philosophical work of the twentieth century that is more sane, that expresses better judgment on the main issues of philosophy, or that demonstrates a deeper wisdom about the nature of things than this classic work.

Santayana was not a stupid man. His only problem was that he was better learned in the tradition of philosophy and could write better than most philosophers. While he shared the intellectual accomplishments of many philosophers of the century--equal to any in the so-called "analaytic" tradition--he did not share their spiritual pursuits. Philosophy for him was a search for a kind of enlightenment that could not be found in the dustbins of "epistemology." If you think "knowing that" is the end of human life, you needn't bother reading this wonderful work.

The Life of Reason is a marvelously executed, exceptionally elegant philosophical tour de force. Santayana refuses to be blinded by prejudicial notions and founds his philosophical hermeneutic on common-sense, logic, and probability. One reviewer here has noted that Santayana takes a myopic perspective on religion. Frankly, this is baffling. Santayana believes that religion is a kind of species of literature and that we should not look to it for scientific insights. In contrast, he believes that religion, in the abstract, has, as all belief systems do, a rational framework, so to speak. In addition to this, Santayana finds much about theology and religious ritual, more aesthetically speaking, intriguing. This is hardly a one-sided view. The Life of Reason will not interest those attracted to the turgid obfuscatory mutterings of Heidegger, postmodernist critics, and other related thinkers. It will appeal though to those interested in analytic philosophy, logic, and scientific skepticism. A wonderful book.

George Santayana (1863-1952) was born in Madrid, Spain, but he had an American mother. I believe EGOTISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY was written in 1916, though I do not see any copyright information except "All rights reserved" in the old hardcover copy I just read. In the Preface, which mentioned "the present war," the author admits, "During more than twenty years, while I taught philosophy at Harvard College, I had continual occasion to read and discuss German metaphysics." (p. 5). After his Spanish father's death in 1912, Santayana's inheritance was sufficient to allow him to give up teaching and move to Rome. When I acquired this book, I expected an American point of view, fraught with anticipation of being dragged into a fight which was not of our own choosing. German philosophy could be considered as a factor for which Germans expected us to fear having to fight the Germans precisely because it could contribute to understanding what we would be up against. This book seems to be more interested in arguments against Egotism than in practical considerations in which politics would be the prime consideration for deciding who should defend civilization as we expect it to continue thriving on the weight of arguments for and against how American participation might push things one way or the other in the great war which is now considered World War One.

The intervening 96 years have provided the world with the political example of Adolf Hitler, a master of putting German feelings into words that defied the rest of the world so emotionally that almost everyone understands how the Germans thought that he was on their side, even if no one else would. Santayana seems to be opposed to that kind of national Egotism, but his writing is limited to the examples in philosophy which preceded it. As the Preface says, "They merely shared and justified prophetically that spirit of uncompromising self-assertion and metaphysical conceit which the German nation is now reducing to action." (p. 7). The religious background is surveyed for foundations of individual philosophies:

Kant was a puritan; he revered the rule of right as something immutable and holy, perhaps never obeyed in the world. Fichte was somewhat freer in his Calvinism; the rule of right was the moving power in all life and nature, though it might have been betrayed by a doomed and self-seeking generation. Hegel was a very free and superior Lutheran; he saw that the divine will was necessarily and continuously realised in this world, though we might not recognise the fact in our petty moral judgments. Schopenhauer, speaking again for this human judgment, revolted against that cruel optimism, and was an indignant atheist; and finally, in Nietzsche, this atheism became exultant; he thought it the part of a man to abet the movement of things, however calamitous, in order to appropriate its wild force and be for a moment the very crest of its wave. (p. 25)

Calvin had an early influence. "In Kant, who in this matter followed Calvin, the independence between the movement of nature, both within and without the soul, and the ideal of right was exaggerated into an opposition. The categorical imperative was always authoritative, but perhaps never obeyed. The divine law was far from being like the absolute Will in Fichte, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. . . . On the contrary the sublimity of the categorical imperative lay precisely in the fact that, while matter and life moved on in their own unregenerate way, a principle which they ought to follow, overarched and condemned them, and constrained them to condemn themselves. Human nature was totally depraved and incapable of the least merit, nor had it any power of itself to become righteous. Its amiable spontaneous virtues, having but a natural motive, were splendid vices." (p. 57).

In the index, Max Stirner is listed under M, probably because his real name wasn't Max Stirner, and he is hardly considered real. "The work of Max Stirner on the single separate person and what he may call his own hardly belongs to German philosophy as I have been using the words: it lacks the transcendental point of departure, as well as all breadth of view, metaphysical subtlety, or generous afflatus; it is a bold, frank, and rather tiresome protest against the folly of moral idealism, against the sacrifice of the individual to any ghostly powers such as God, duty, the state, humanity, or society; all of which this redoubtable critic called `spooks' and regarded as fixed ideas and pathological obsessions. This crudity was relieved by a strong mother-wit and a dogged honesty; and it is not impossible that this poor schoolmaster, in his solitary meditations, may have embodied prophetically a rebellion against polite and religious follies which is brewing in the working classes." (p. 99) Karl Marx is not mentioned in this book, but it seems to me that Marx may have learned from "Saint Max" what the average American of today learns by watching TV. Television is not mentioned, or expected, in this book, but George Santayana might have seen one sometime before he died, and I'll bet he heard Hitler on the radio within 20 years after he wrote this book.

Anarchy is not listed in the index of this book, but the tendency in that direction becomes apparent with "A highest good to be obtained apart from each and every specific interest is more than unattainable; it is unthinkable." (p. 111). Schopenhauer can easily represent "the spirit of opposition; his righteous wrath was aroused by the sardonic and inhuman optimism of Hegel, the arguments for which were so cogent, so Calvinistic, and so irrelevant that they would have lost none of their force if they had been proposed in hell." (p. 111). "The ground of life, the Will in all things, was something lurid and tempestuous, itself a psychological chaos. The alternative to theism in the mind of Schopenhauer was not naturalism but anarchy." (p. 112). "The romantic travesty of life and this conception of metaphysical anarchy were inherited by Nietzsche and regarded by him as the last word of philosophy. . . . Romantic anarchy delighted him; and he crowned it with a rakish optimism, as with the red cap of Liberty." (pp. 112-3). The logic of the rest of the text, which ends on page 168 in this old hardcover, has a lot to say about what Nietzsche did not accomplish as a philosopher. I wish people would have more awareness of what anarchy might await those who disregard the present systems that still hold it back, but this book never promised to be about that question.