overheard in seville.9.1991

7/27/2019 Overheard in Seville.9.1991

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Overheard in Seville

SantayanaNo. 9Fall 1991


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OVERHEARD IN SEVILLE

Bulletinof tike

S a n t a y a n aSociety

NO . 9FALL 1991

TABLE OF CON TENTS

Anthony Woodward

Richard G Lyon

Angus Kerr-Lawson

Leo T. Rosenberg

Angus Kerr-Lawson

Herman f. Sa atka mp, Jr.

HermanJ. Sa atka mp, Jr.

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ii

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8

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Table of Contents

1992 Santayana ConferenceAvila, Spain

Santayana and Goethe

Oliver's Last Soliloquies

A Soliloquy in Limbo

William Jamesand GeorgeSantayanaTh e Extent of aa Philosophic Vision

Santayana on James: 1891

Th e Santayana Edition

Bibliographical ChecklistEighth Update

Edited for the Santayana Society byAngus Kerr-Lawson, Departm ent of Pu re Mathematics, Universityof Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3GJ, and by Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., Department ofPhilosophy, TexasA&M University, College Station, Texas 77843-4237. All com munications should besent to one of the editors. TheBulletin will appear annually. It is formatted and composed fortypesetting with Waterloo Script and PostScript, and printed by Graphic Services, University ofWaterloo. It is published and distributedby the D epartment of Philosophy ofTexas A&M University.


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1992 SANTAYANA CONFERENCE - AVILA, SPAINThe first international conference on George Santayana is scheduled in Avila, Spain, for

May 27-SO, 1992. This conference is part of the Columbus celebrations of 1992 and isbeing sponsored by the Spanish Cultural Foundation in Avila, the University ofSalamanca, and Texas A&M University. The conference will include scholars from theUnited States, Spain, Germany, France, Italy, eastern Europe, the U.S.S.R., Great Britain,South Africa, and Canada.Any who wish to participate in or attend the conference are asked to write to Herman J.Saatkamp, Jr., Department of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas778434237.

AVUA CATHEDMAL.The Gothic building was larger than the Romanesque one and extendedacross the city wall, so that the periphery hadto be construed as partof the system of defence (plate69a). Within the heavy p erimeter, however, Master Freuchal,the architect, placed a ring of shallowchapels aroun da doub le ambulatory much like Suger'sSt Denis. The slender columns, composed ofseveral mono lithic shafts, confirm St.Denis as the m odel for Avila, although the more domed vaultsand the rectangular arch section interruptthe continuity of the spaces. This is underlined by theseparate vaultingof the chapels, and of course th e very small windows, with deep splays, destroy th eextraordinary effect of light that Suger's church had achieved. While this was occasionedat Avila bythe thicknessof the city wall,it was also a reaction to northern aesthetics, one which can be foundinlater periods of Spanish Gothic;for great windows werenot essential in the bright Mediterranean

sun.1

69%. Avila, Cathedral Plan.

69b, Avihi, Cathedral Longitudinal section of choir.

1 These lines, and the plates copied below them,are taken from Gothic Architecture, by RobertBranner.We wish to thank George Braziller Inc. ofNew York for permission to copy the citation.


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Santayana and Goethe

"William Jam es es t un reformateu r, un pasteur de l 'energie hum aine ;Santayana est un poete et un sage, double d 'un physicien cruel."Thus J acquesDuron, in the course of an extended comparison between the twophi losophers .1 T h e co m m en t si tuates William Jam es in a Faustian l ine ofdescen t , and accoun ts for Santayana 's being so unresponsive n ot only to Jam es,but also to the restless strivings of Faust, in his essay on Goethe's play in theearly Three Philosophical Poets. Santa yana 's view of, G oe thehimself, in a sectionof the polemical Egotism in German Philosophy,written shortly after thebe gin nin g of th e First W orld W ar, was also less than flat tering:"(Goethe's) love-

affairs were means to the fuller realisation of himself . . . . Every patheticsweetheart in turn was a sort of Belgium to him; he violated her neutrali ty witha sigh.*2 It is one of these Santayana pieces where the iron claw thrusts mostvigorously from behind the velvet glove. Yet was his view of Goethe, let alonehis account of Faust in Three Philosophical Poets, a fair on e? Fair not ju st to Fau stor to Go eth e, bu t to that el em en t of Santayana 's own self which h ad a k inshipwith Goe the , if no t with Faust .

"Un p oe te et un sage, do ub le d 'u n physicien cruel" - "A po et and a sage,twinned with a cruel physicist"; perhaps "one who stresses the natural orma terial co nte xt of all things" would be an acceptab le gloss of D uro n's"physicist." It is a description that in all crucial respectsfits Goethe as well asSantayana. I t may set us thinking of the irony that governs the structure ofFaust, establishing a distance between G oeth e and his crea tion. Th e play isframed in a divine perspective, tr icked out with some of the panoply of aBa roque 'Auto Sacramental ' , and Faust ' s career of glor ious yet erroneousstriving is framed by the structural equivalent of an all-encompassingspeculative gaze. Go eth e's is a God's-eye view. H e is the pup pet-m astersu pre m e. I t wou ld, however, be barely convinc ing to m ainta in th at anyorth od ox re l ig ious viewpoint was being uph eld. G oeth e is no t the in ter pre ter of

divine t ranscendence, but ra ther an i ronic natural is t wi th a penumbra ofreligiosity, and an Olympian human being. Not unlike Santayana, in fact .Go ethe told Ec kerm an, con cern ing the re lig ious apotheosis of Faust a t the endof Part Two, that "the conclusion, where the redeemed soul is carried up, wasdifficult to m an ag e . .. . Am id such supersensual m atters ab ou t which wescarcely have an intimation, I might easily have lost myself in the vague - if Iha d n ot, by m ea ns of sharply-drawn figures and im ages from the Christ ian

1 La Pensie de George San tayana : San tayana enAmerique (Paris, 1950) 75. T h e European sequel ofthis masterly work w as, sad to say, never w ritten.

2 Th e German Mind: A Philosophical Analysis(Originally publ ished un de r th e t i tle ,Egotism in GermanPhilosophy)(New York, 1968) 49-50.


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2 OVERH EARD IN SEVILLE

Church, given my poetical design a desirable form and substance."3

Such cool an d lofty app ropr iation of Christ ian symbolism is very m uc h inthe spiri t of Santayana's conclusion toRealms of Being,where he too br ings in to

service key elements of Christianity to act as symbols for his own seculartheology: "The presence and pressure of existence confronts us, theunfathomable mystery of the actual . . . . This assault of reali ty, in the force ofwhatsoever exists or happens, I call matter or the realm of matter; but evidentlythe very power is signified by the First Person of the Trinity, the Father,almighty creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible."4

Santayana then proceeds to rationalise the God the Son, the Logos, as a symbolof the realm of essences, upon which God or Matter seizes in order to producethe articulated forms that actually exist. Finally, he presents us with the HolySpirit, the Third Person of the Trinity: Spirit - the Holy Spirit, if you will -derives existentially from God or Matter, but can equally be said to"give life inthe sense that l ife nowhere would be morally worthy of the name, if spiri t wereno t actua l th er e .. . . It lives in mo m en ts an d spots; yet from any station it maysurvey everything, rescuing its causes from ignorance of themselves .. . . Passionis therefo re insep arab le from spiri t in i ts actual ex istence , and expose s i t toperpetual obscuration and suffering."5 There is of necessity strife andincompleteness in the career of incarnate spirit; yet it may be saved by theglimpses of ultimate good that are the spur of its strivings:

Das UnzulanglicheHie r wird's Ereignis6

An analogy between the career of Faust , part icularly i ts ' rel igious ' culmination,and e lements of Santayana 's mature phi losophy, begins to dawn upon themind. Each was a *myst ic wi thout fa i th '. T he p hrase was coin ed for Go eth e,and it fits Santayana too.

An element of imaginat ive sympathy had entered into Santayana 'sdiscussion of Goethe's characterisation of Faust even in the earlyThreePhilosophical Poets, despite what might seem a steady crescendo ofdisparagement . In the concluding section of that early essay Santayanaconcedes thus much to Faust and the romant ic a t t i tude to exper ience:

... The spirit of natu reis itself romantic .... The veering of life is part ofits vitality,- it is essential to romantic irony and to romantic pluck ... .The great merit of theromantic attitude in poetry, and of the transcenden tal m ethod in philosophy, is thatthey put us back at the beginning of our experience. They disintegrate convention,

s

J. P. E c k e r m a n n , Conversations with Goethe (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930) 414.

4 Realms ofBeing, One-Vo lume Ed i t ion, (New York: Co ope r Square P ubl ishers , 1972) 845-6.

r> /


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SANTAYANA AND GOETHE 3

which is often cu m br ou s and confuse d, an d restore us to ourselves, to im me diateper cep tion an d prim ordia l will. Th at, as i t would seem, is the true an d inevitables tar t ing point .7

*The starting-point." For Santayana it could never be the finishing-point. Hisofficial stance, early as well aslate, was that of detached sage surveying from onhigh the moulds of reason into which the energies of matter settle, andevaluating their consistency by means of a blend of Greek and Catholicteleology adapted to a naturalisticWeltanschauung. Nevertheless it is worthnoting that reference to"primordial will": it reminds us that Santayana, for allhis courtly and civilized airs, was indeed a"physicien cruel," for whom thetropes provisionallyassumed by ultimate Substance- which Schopenhauer hadcalled Will, and which Santayana called Matter, of which human polity and

civility were phenomenal appearances - had no teleological prerogatives. Someof Santayana's most eloquent passages are precisely those where he celebratesthe b lind , resistless fertility of m atter, dark symbol of the divine and elem enta l.They call to mind Goethe's"Erdgeist," as evoked near the beginning ofFaust,Part One:

In the floods of life, in the storm of work,In the ebb and flow,In warp and weft,Cradle and grave,An externa l sea,A changing patchwork,A glowing life,At the w hirling loom of TimeI weaveTh e living clothes of thedeity*

Concerning that "Erdgeist,** or Earth-spirit, the literary critic Eudo Masonhas written that it "is indeed daem onic, resdess, destructive, beyond good andevil, an d consequently also sinister. It is no t a personwith a consciousness or a

conscience or a sense of responsibility; it is nature, and does what it has to dowith a magnificent indifference."9 Was not Santayana himself, with hisdisillusioned de tachm ent and scornfulincisiveness,also a trifle sinister? Despitethe urbanity, the charm, the civilised graciousness. One thinks ofhis no t whollyimpish pleasure in adopting the Mephistopheles role.("He distrusted me forbeing a materialist.... He feared me. Iwas a Mephistopheles, masquerading as

7 Three PhilosophicalPoets, (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956) 170,175.

8 Goethe's Faust, tr. Louis MacNeice and E. L. Stahl, {London 1965) 23.

9 Goethe s Faust: Its Genesis a n d Purport, (University of California Press, 1967) 164.


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4 OVERHE ARD IN SEVILLE

a conservative. H e saw be hi nd m e the dreadful spectre s of trut h a nd d ea th." )1 0

How m uc h of a role was i t? T he p rose in a passage such as this is elo qu en t witha cold, calm exaltation in face of the a m oral cycles of dissolution a nd ch an ge :

... Matter is no model devised by the human imagination, like Egyptian atoms orthe laws of physics, but is a primeval plastic substance of unknown potentiality,perpetually taking on new forms; the gist of materialism being that these forms areall passive and precarious, while the plastic stress of matter is alone creative and , asfar as we can surmise, indestructible .... Matter, as if ashamed at the irrationality ofhaving one form rather than another, hastens to exchange it, whatever it may be,for some other form, and this haste isits whole reality; for it can add nothing to theessences which it successively exemplifies except just this; that they are enabled tobe exemplified in succession, to be picked up and abandoned. Matter is theinvisible wind which, sweeping for no reason over the field of essences, raises someof them into a cloud ofdust: and that whirlwindwe call existence.11

With due a l lowance made for the Sturm and Drangafflatus of Goethe's"Erdgeist" passage, as com pare d with the calme r prose-per iods of Santayana, d onot both share a similar vision of the natural world as an arena ofunpredictable ever-changing energies? Both writers, in the perspective ofhumanism, mus t be deemed"physieiens cruels." As too m ust Sp inoza wh o, withhis chil l ing denial of al l teleology, was important to both of them. In his novel,The Last Puritan, Santayana a t t r ibuted to Mario an d Lord J im a n app rop ria te

response to the maels t rom of change and metamorphosis : daunt less , adaptableinsouc iance . Jim himself end orses such a resp ons e, with specific refere nce toGoethe :

... What could be friendlier than this invisible, indefinite, all-permeating ether,that perhaps fed the stars and certainly fed the spirit within you? Here Goethe hadbeen in the right; he had breathed in the ether freely, and had breathed it outagain warmed; breathed it out completely, fearlessly, joyously. He had obeyed everyvital impulse; had shaken off every chain not forged by nature in putting ustogether, every bond not itself a fibre in our vital organism. Life as it came seemed

to him divine - not happy, happiness was not the test - but such life as you wereprimed to live and couldn't be yourself without living. Goethe was at home innature and at home inhimself. 12

Amidst the Peacockian diversity of view-points so engagingly puton display bySantayana in The Last Puritan,where no viewpoint ent i re ly cancels out another,such endo rsem en t of Go ethe is no t wi tho ut signif icance for ou r th em e.

10 Persons an d Places, Fragmen ts of an Autobiography,ed. Wil l iam G. Holzberger and Herman J .Saatka mp , Jr. , with an Introduction by Richard C. Lyon, (Cambridge, Mass . , and London: MIT Press ,1986) 387.

u Realms of Being, 292, 286.

12 The Last Puritan ,(London: Constable and Co. , 1935) 250.


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SANTAYANA AND GO ET HE 5

Santayana of course would have been the first to concede that he aspired tono l i teral knowledge concerning the Realm of Matter poetically evoked in thatpassage of The Ijist Puritan, as in many another more overtly philosophical

passage of his writings. H e cou ld only convey by sym pathetic evo cation, an d inthe terms of his own brand of'literary psychology' , what he took to be the deeptruth of things. Strictly, we only know by means of essences, or units ofmeaning, which the currents of mat ter suggest to the dreaming psyche, andwhose adequacy is confirmed by their more or less happy conformity to thedrift of material substance. All our knowledge resembles what Santayana called"cloud-castles"; it strains toward the constancy of essence, but is subject to thechangefulness endemic to the material substrate of existence. The character ofintuit io n is intrinsically m om ent ary a nd fleeting:

Certainly life and nature, when they produce thought, turn from themselvestowards the e ternal, bu t it is by a glance, itself mom entary, that they turn to it; for ifthey were themselves converted into something changeless, they could neither live,think, nor turn ... . They are fertile only like the clouds, in that by dissolving theygive place to some other form, no less lovely and elusive than themselves; andperhaps if we took a long view we should not feel that our own passage throughexistence h ad a very different quality ....Intuitions may be likened to soap-bubbles.Soap-bubbles are impossible to synthesize; if they touch they vanish; yet the surfaceof one may repeat the iridescence visible on the surface of several others. Thesecolours are not taken from the smaller bubbles, and transferred an rearranged onthe larger one: they are reborn in each instance, in each degree of complexity,according to the circumstances of that more or less similar moment. Of those lights,of those spheres, nothing endures; but the soap-suds and the air remain availablefor bubbles ad libitum, and the colours of the rainbow may be drawn upon for everfor decoration without being exhausted.13

Cloud-casdes, soap-bubbles, the ir idescence of rainbows . . . . The last image maywell now rem ind us of the turn that Goe the gave to Faust 's jou rne y thro ughexis tence a t the b egin ning of Par t Two of the dram a.

Faust , having ex pe rien ce d the vicissitudes of the private realm in Part I , andhaving allowed himself to be tossed to and fro by the Erdgeist amid a tumult ofpassion and criminali ty, is discovered at the beginning of Part II waking fromsleep in an endcing landscape , jus t before dawn. He is no t shown as rep enta nt .(Can one imagine Mario ofLord Jim as repen tant?) Faust 's recovery is pa rt ofa purely natural process, a stage in the resurgent energies of natural existence.When he awakens at length to the full glory of the rising sun, in the vicinity of arushing waterfall , he has a speech that signals a growth in awareness of thequal if ied s ta tus of hu m an kn owledge and exp er ience. He is no t repe nta nt buthe is cha stened - for the t ime being:

13 Soliloquies in England and LaterSoliloquies, (London: Constable and Co., 1922)20-21. Realms ofBeing, 654-5.


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And so I turn , the sun upon my shoulder,To watch the water-fall, with heart elate,The cataract pouring, crashing f rom the boulders ,

Spli t and rejoined a thousand t imes in spate;T he t hu nd ro us water seethes in fleecy spu m e,Lifted on high in many a flying plume,Above the spray-drenched air. An d then how splen didT o see th e rainbow rising from this rag e,Now clear, now dimm ed, in cool sweet vapo ur ble nd ed.So strive the figures on o ur m ortal stage.Th is po nd er well , the m ystery closer seeing;In m irrore d h ue s we have ou r li fe and being.1 4

The coloured rainbow appears when the sun reflects i tself in the waterfall . Inthis imag e th ere is on th e on e side the sun, from w hich Faust is pa rt tu rn edaway, the ideal realm of l ight and t imeless essences; on the other side is therushing waterfall , the emblem of the material realm. The rainbow arises fromthe coa lescence of thes e two. I t is an im age conv eying tha t the divine is no tbehind the world , but wi thin the mater ia l world of appearance . . . . Thecoloured rainbow in the glancing droplets of the waterfall is an image ofmetamorphosis as wel l .15 It is no t possible - I co nti nu e to tran spos e theFaustian epiphany into Santayana's terms - to dwell solely in the realm of

essence and l ight ; one cannot gazedirecdy at the sun. Nor should one besubject wholly to the rush of material existence that carries one along. One hasone 's being amid the constant ly f leet ing coalescence of l ight and water, mat terand essence, in ir idescent rainbow intuit ions.

Goethe, in good Aristotelian fashion, would allow of no dist inction betweenform and mat ter.1 6 His naturalism rejected all dualism. So too with Santayana.It is misleading to insist too much on the Platonic or dualist ic nature of hisessence-existence distinction. To do so diverts one from the mystery beingconveyed. T he re are not two exis tent worlds , even thou gh his m eta ph or of'Realms' can understandably confuse. There is a symbiosis of meaning and fact ,of essence and m atter, integ rating within a single proc ess of intu it ion . Labelslike 'natura lism ' or 'materialism ' have the ir l imitatio ns, with their over tone s ofposit ions being taken up, of polemical claim andcounte r-c la im. Santayana, apoet and a sage, aims to convey the nature of existence in i ts encompassingsingularity:

There is only one world, the natural world, and only one truth about it; but this

14

Faust, P art II, tr. P. W ayne, (Pen guin Bo oks, 1959) 26. San tayan a's translatio n of th e last l ine,used as epigraph in Th e Realm of Spirit,reads: "Light, coloured in refraction, makes our l ife."

15 Transla ted an d s lightly adap ted f rom D oroth ea Lohm eyer,Faust und dieWelt, DerZweite Teil de rDirhtung (Mimchen : Verlag C. H. Beck, 1975) 28-29.

m Md., 19.


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SANTAYANA AND GO ET HE 7

world has a spiritual life possible in it, which looks not to another world but to thebeauty and perfection that this world suggests, approaches, and misses .... It is sosimple to exist, to be what one is for noreason, to engulf all questions and answers

in the rush of being that sustains them. Henceforth nature and spirit can playtogether like mother and child, each marvellously pleasant to the other, yet deeplyunintelligible; for as she created him she knows not how, merely by smiling in herdreams, so in awaking and smiling back he somehow understands her; at least he isall the understanding she has ofherself. 17

Those las t sentences sound the note ofpart-playful profundity that we associatewith Goethe, in the vein of Olympian serenity which he shared with Santayana.

What f irst alerted me to a possible shift in Santayana's at t i tude to Goethewas his use of the final l ine of Faust 's speech at the beginning of Part Two of

the drama, ("Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben,""Light, coloured inrefract ion, makes our life") as one of the epigraphs for the culmination ofRealms ofBeing. Surely Goethe's Faust would no t have figured t he re in th eexal ted company of Plodnus, Spinoza, and one of the Upanishads , i fGoethe'sFaust st i l l meant for Santayana the thoughtlessenergumine depicted with somescorn in Three Philosophical Poets. Finally, I ask myself- perhaps a few others areasking too - was what Santayana would appe ar to der ive f rom Go ethe , by theuse of that phrase as epigraph to the final volumeof Realms of Bein g,really therein Goethe? Was Santayana, as I have tended to suggest , a kind of spiri tualcousin of Goethe ? Can we f ind in Goeth e any fur ther and d ee pe r hints of an

essential kinship between the two poet-sages? Let part of the answer besuggested to us by the sensit ive and discerningUse Graham, in her reflectionson Faust's waterfall and itsrainbow-hued droplets :

Here is being in time; a force that does no t exhaust itself in its downward rush , inthat it is ever renewed; and a force which, for all its dynamicmovement, seems tohover in mid-air, in its own cloud of spray. The infinite in the finite, stillness inmovement, being in time, yet no t devoured by time; thisis how Faust now perceiveshimself ... . Like die perception of the phenomenon of the rainbow in itsevanescent Gestalt, true 'having* presupposes distance, and therenunciadon of all

possessiveness from thestart. When Faust says:

Ihn schau'ich a n mit wachsmdem entzucken

his words are expressive of that disinterested perception of pure being, in all thefrailty tha t attaches to this as to any other Gestalt inGoethe's world 18

As too in Santayana's world.

ANTHONYWOODWARD

University ofWitwatersrand

17 Realms of Being,833, x ix .

18 Goethe: A Portrait of the Artist {W. d e Grayter, 1977) 334, 335-6.


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Oliver's Last Soli loquies

You will recall th at so m e years ago a small gro up of professional ph iloso phe rswho had h ad person al acquaintance with Santayana m et a t the New York h om eof Corl iss Lamont to exchange reminiscences and their impress ions of theman. That almost uniformly patronizing exercise in the higher gossipgenerated several suggest ive comments , and none seems to me so penetra t ingas Horace Kal len 's remark that The Last Puritan may be seen asautobiographical . In Kallen's view Santayana's novel yields a truer, a moreauthent ic pic ture of the man and his career than does his autobiography,Persons and Places, which he termed "a shield and a deception." I t is only in thenovel, he asserted, that we may find"the t rue image of the man."1 Since Kallendoes not venture to say why he concludes that Santayana conceals ormisrepresents himself in his autobiography, that debate cannot be jo ined.Surely the adequate apprehension of Santayana's l ife requires a carefulreckoning with both the autobiography and the novel . Yet no one has , to myknowledge, a t tempted a susta ined explorat ion ofThe Last Puritan as a crucialtext for the right understanding of Santayana's circumstances, his history, andhis philosophy. The question which I want to propose for discussion tonight isthis: In wha t ways m ight the novel serve as a key to tha t un de rsta nd ing ?

Answers to so large a question may lie, of course, in diverse quarters:psychological or psychiatric, sociological, historical, philosophic. My ownpurpose tonight is to consider the character of the novel ' s protagonis t , Ol iverAlden, and to propose that Oliver is the young Santayana. I think that inOliver 's reflections we may find an exact and candid portrait of the art ist as ayoung man, and in the achieved wisdom of Oliver 's last soli loquy a point ofview cor resp on den t to the matu re phi losophic out loo k of his creator.

Of course I travel here a perilous course. We grant to novelists a boundlessfreedom to transform the materials of l ife into fict ion, but warning cries aresou nd ed w hen a cri t ic at tem pts to reverse th e proce ss. Especially is this th e casewhen the cri t ic at tempts to identify the writer with one or another of hischaracters, for this seems to deny to the writer the impersonal power to be,throu gh his characters , what he is no t and has no t bee n, to say what he wouldnot say in his own pe rso n, or, in Mr. Darn ley's lan gu ag e, to sing wha t he hasnot felt.

In his let ters Santayana often sought to discourage readers who he felt weretoo ready to identify characters or incidents in the novel with his own life. Inthis vein, for example, he wrote to Daniel Cory in 1938,"It is pleasant andcurious that you should assimilate me to Oliver," protesting that Oliver, l ike

Mario, "represents rat he r what I l iked tha n wha t I was. Th ey are bot h [he

This pap er was read to theSantayana Society, Boston, December 28,1990.

! Dialogue on George S a n t a y a n a ,ed. Corl iss la m o n t (New York,1959) , 5 2 .


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OLIVER'S LAST SOLILOQUIES 9

wrote] distilled from my friends, taken in the mass, trampled like grapes, andturned into my private vintage, white wine and red."2 Insisting on the syntheticand projective powers of the imagination, he often had to defend his

characters' right to be themselves and no one else. Thus, to a former student,Bob Barlow, Santayana wrote, "As to the hovel, and the originals of thecharac ters, you are really almost in a better position to jud ge than I ammyself. Ihave lived so long with Oliver and Mario and the rest that they have anautom atic existence within me. They do and say what they choose, and I merelytake note , as in a dream."3

This is the fiction writer's ancient retort to those who would tether theimagination: the characters of his fiction exist on a plane of being other thanthe merely historical; they spin out their lives under impulsions of their own;they are born of an imperial imagination which, if it is imperial enough, setsthem free to be what they must be. Yet when Santayana says to Barlow that hischaracters are the stuff that dreams are made of, it is a reminder that fictionalbeings are, after all, children of their creator's psyche. Thus he continues hisletter, "Naturally, this probably makes them all versions ofmyself; not only am Ithe substance of their being, like the author of a play, but I am also the actorwho speaks their lines." The fiction writer lives in all his characters; they are somany masks for himself - for alternative possible selves unrealized beyond thepages of his arde nt feignings. Still, he will always be a quantity something morethan any one character taken alone, or all of them together. That something

more is what Jo hn Updike has called "the space whereby you hope still to becreative."4 and is indicated by Santayana in a further remark to Barlow: "Evenin assuming the most different characters, something of the ventriloquistremains his own."

Though we grant these axioms, we must add the observation that fictionswill vary widely in the degree and kind of their relatedness to the writer's ownhistory. The roots of any fiction will run more or less deep into the soil ofautobiography. That the roots ofThe LastPuritan run deep into Santayana'spersonal experience is indicated clearly by his novel's subtitle, "A Memoir inthe Form ofa Novel." Norwas he reluctant to name the sources ofhis fiction inhis own circumstances and character and in the persons and places he hadknown. For example, Mario (he once remarked)"is th e person I would haveliked to be but could not be - seeingthings as the gods, sure of his heart."5

Oliver's father, he observed, is"what my own father would have become if hehad been rich."6 Lord Jim, we know, was closely modeled on his friend, John

2 Daniel Cory, San tayana :The Later Years, (New York, 1963), 197-8.

3 Th e Letters ofGeorge S a n t a y a n a ,ed . Daniel Cory (New York, 1955), 308.

4 John Updike, The Boston Globe, September 25,1990.

5 In conversations with the auth or, August, 1948.

*IMd.


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Francis Stanley, Lord Russell.But what of Oliver? In the course of our conversations in August of 1948,

Santayana turned one afternoon to the subject of his novel. (And here I quotefrom my notes of that conversation, written in the evening following my visit.)"He spoke of The Last Puritan as a more comple te , a more persona l andrevealing record of his life thanPersons and Places, and said that Oliver 's feelingswere his own as a young man -*except tha t at Harvard I was a grind ' ."7 And hethen called my attention to the novel 's epigraph, an observation from "Alain":"It is truly said that experience speaks through the mouths of the old, but thebest exper ienc e which they can convey to us is wh at they have preserved fromtheir youth." During the forty and more years of his writ ing ofThe Last Puritan ,Santayana had sought to salvage his youth by giving it form, and in the feelings

of Oliver one might, by implication, find it.I recall my surprise and bafflement in hearing that test imony. How possiblycould one identify the suave, sceptical Spaniard, the materialist and theCatholic in sympathy if not inbelief, with the wealthy football-hero scion ofNew England Puritans? a late-coming exemplar of Protestantism in i ts mostaustere mood? A tenacious Calvinism, st i l l clouding the skies of Santayana'sturn-of-the-century New En gland , had be en , after al l , th e targ et of his relentlessattack. Th at oppressive atavism he nam ed "the gen teel tradit i on."

Yet it was not only in my talks with him, as I have since learned, that hespoke of Oliver as a mask of his youngself. In reading subsequent ly a le t ter toWilliam Lyon Phelps in which Santayana observes that his novel "gives theem otions of my exper iences , and n ot my thou ghts or exp er ienc es themselves. .. ,I inferred by his own later test imony in Rome that the emotions in questionwere Oliver 's .8 In writ ing to Barlow about his protagonist , he again resists theimputat ion that "I am he," but with an interesting reservation:"you say Oliver ismost like me: he was meant to be most unlike me, but only in his physical andmoral character: in the quali ty of hismind, he is wh at I am or shou ld have b ee nin his place."9 With this observation, Santayana seems to ally himself withOliver 's thoughts, not with his feelings or emotions. Yet to dist inguish sharply

between them is at variance with his often-expressed conviction that a genuinephilosophy is "a way of thinking and feeling" simultaneously.10 In any case it isclear that Oliver repeatedly arrives at his insights under the pressure ofemotion, nor can those insights once achieved be divorced from aparticularway of feeling ab ou t thin gs as they are .

Testimony of this kind may at the least suggest an affinity of temperamentand poin t of view between the young Puri tan a nd Santayana. I t ca nn ot prove i t .A wri ter ' s declared inte nt ions are on e thing; the perform anc e is ano ther .

' Ibid.

8 Isttns, 282.

9 Ibid, 308.

ln The Later Years,199.


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OLIVER'S LAST SOLILOQU IES 11

Ignore , we say to the novice s tudent of fiction, ignore what a writer may saya b o u t his charac te r s ex cathedra - beyond, that is, the bounds of the story itself,and observe their life only within the enac ted drama. Conforming to thatcounse l , I propose tha t we ignore all that Santayana has said abo ut O liverin hislet ters and conversat ion, in the novel 's prologu e and epi logue and in his Tr i to nin t roduc t ion , in o r d e r to catch his he ro in act. Since Oliver-in-act is for themost par t Ol iver in the m o d e of response and reflection, it is in his manysoli loquies, short and long, that we may best discover his na tu r e - and, if 1 amright, the young Santayana's .

I am afraid that at th is point another a larm bel lmay be sounded . It may begran ted tha t a close and energet ic a t tent ion to a dramat ic text can lead us to asure sense of a chara cter ' s ident i ty,yet on what g roun ds may we proceed to say

t h a t the charac te r is a mir ro r of his creator? Was Stephen Dedalus the youngJoyce? Or was Joyce steadily ironic at Stephen 's expense? The debate willc o n t i n u e , nor will it end. This difficulty, endemic to the novel, or to would-beb iog raphe r s of novelists, is obviated in the case of The Ijzst Puritan by twocircumstances .The first is the na tu r e of the book itself. All of the inhabi tants ofOliver 's world are phi losophers manque. At the d r o p of a hat or a n a m e , any ofthe novel ' s characters , youngor old, male or female , are ready - some readerswould say too ready - to phi losophize , and to phi losophize of ten in thecadences and dict ion of thei r creator. But do they speak his sense? Are thei rfeelings and jud gm ents h is?In this extrao rdinary casethe m e a n s of reply are at

h a n d . For su r round ing the novel on all sides - and this is the second andcrucia l c i rcumstance- are the copious philosophic writ ings of the novelist. Inthese Santayana spokehis own mind indefatigably, and in these we may find acont ro l for the hypothesis that Oliver repeatsin himself the intellectual andemotional h is toryof the young Santayana.

I c an no t hope to convince you that this is so in the course of my briefcomm en t s ton igh t .But I would l ike to make a beginn ing by t racing a recur r ingand e x pa nd ing me tapho rin Oliver 's thinking, the m e t a p h o r of sun and shade .I want th en to no tice O liver 's grapp lings witha mora l p rob lem , the status of the

good .And I

willend

witha few

side glancesat

Oliver's final liberation.

You wil l remember that under the tutelage of I rma , the boy Oliver "soonfound , as he afterward used to put it, that there was a sunny and a shady side tothe road of knowledge" (113) . On the sunny side lay the natural sciences;onthe shady side were philosophyand religion, languages, l i terature,and history.I t seemed to the young Oliver that the geographer, the natural h is tor ian, theas t ronomer were engaged in happy explorat ions of the n o n - h u m a n - studies"open, fr iendly, and rewarding." In the study of nature 's ways "you werehonesdy cha l lenged by your p rob lem, and could work your way honestly

forward unti l you came to an honest solution or an honest difficulty" (114) .The hu man i s t s , on the contrary, seemed to Oliver mere opinion-pushers ,conte ntiously urg ing views which w ere arbitraryand accidental. M ore than that :they of ten seemed intent on passing off their fictions as fact . Fabulationsinfected by individual passion or prejudice were to be g ran t ed the status ofliteral or metaphysical t ruth , and to f la t ter mankind seemed theiraim: "The


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12 OVERHEARD IN SEVILLE

hu m an w orld was so horr ible to the hu m an min d, that it could be m ade to lookat al l decent and interesting only by ignoring one half the facts, and putt ing afalse front on the other half (114). Thus did the posit ivist ic Oliver conclude

that "only non-human subjects werefit fo r the human mind" (114) . All else wasadvent i t ious , presumptuous babel .

Oliver 's co nte m pt for the merely hu m an is above all a response to an d afunction of his steady sense oft rans -human, omnif icent Nature , the t rue seat ofpower. If he prizes physical exercise, it is because in the open air he knows "agen uine c om m un ion with nature . . . : the conf ident active sympathy of m an withthings larger than himself, an d with a universal repti l ian intell ige nce which wasnot thought , bu t adap ta t ion , un i son , and momentum. Tha t g rop ing labourwhich had produced the trees, the rivers, the meadows, which was pil ing upand dissolving the clouds, seemed then to engage his inmost being in i tsmeshes and to tur n h im for the m om en t in to the gladdest , the most perfect, yetthe most de pe nd en t of creatures . An d he co uld accept joyfully th isde pe nd en ce an d this fugit ive strength, feeling at th e sam e time th e im m en sepromise of a thousand other perfect ions s leeping in the womb of nature , in towhich the s t rong soul of th is moment must present ly re turn"(115) . Oliver maybe the posit ivist in his reaction against theorizings which show man too partialto himself; he is a t ranscendental is t and myst ic in the presence of nature , thepowers in re la t ion to which al l hu m an tho ug ht seems im pert i nen t .

This nascent phi losophy- inart iculate st i l l in the boy but made art iculate by

Santayana - is confirmed and gains resonance as the book proceeds. Oliversoon learns to include in the company of those who live in a daylight world notonly scientists but all those who study and master the ways of things. In his ownhousehold "all was a matter of discussing opinions, and feeling bit terly howsupe rior your own op inio n was," bu t Mr. Murphy, Oliver 's sculling master, m ustreckon not with opinion b ut wi th imposed e xternal c i rcumstances an d forces -wind and waves, the body's capacities. "Bodily skill," Oliver reflects,"wassom ethin g unm istakab le: the proofs of i t were materia l , an d so were the forceswith which you had to count, material and sure" (120). The lesson whichOliver 's father hopes his son will learn, that "the great , the trusty educator ofman kind was ma t te r" (123) , Oliver does ind eed learn. Seeking to edu cate thesent imental Edi th , he wri tes to her, "There 's no real author i ty except theauthority of things. We run up against things, we must work with things, wemust study things if ever we hope to change them: but apart from the authorityof things, we are free, and there is no authority but our own reason" (499). Ouryoun g transce nde ntalist is also a m aterialist.

Ol iver 's sense of de pe nd en ce on powers which are no t ma n 's dee pe ns as hegrows older. Nature becomes his one great companion and source ofinspiration. H is exaltations in its pre sen ce a re n ot ju st respo nses to pretty

landscapes or to the publicly designated wonders of the natural world; he feelsrather nature 's "steady flow, the inevitable equil ibrium of her sustaining l ife"(226). He begins to move in the world with a "secret and almost malicioussense of all iance with the un see n" (22 5). "Malicious" bec ause his imp assion edsense of nature 's omnificence brings with i t contempt for the world and forworldlings. Society, in i ts self-preoccupation, is inconsequent and blind. "It


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OLIVE R'S LAST SOL ILOQ UIES 13

would be enough," Oliver reflects, "if one-fourth of our t ime and of our heartswere given to human affairs and the otherthree-quarters to - what? Nature ,truth, God, call i t what you will : that larger inhuman something that

surrounded humani ty, susta ined i t , and made i t r id iculous" (359) . Under thestars or at sea - for these come to supplant the sun and woods asemblems of" tha t l a rger inhum an someth ing" - hefelt how unnecessary, how absurd wereth e busde an d r an co r of social m an . I t is no t surprising that ne ar the en d of hissho r t life, Oliver should think of becoming a lumberjack or sailor: at sea, heobserves, he would be "far from the world of men, with only the wind and thesea to wresde with, honest and useful enemies" (573).

Was Oliver 's contemplated retreat from society escapist? For Oliver thereverse was true: those who are immersed in affairs blind themselvesprotect ively to the human condi t ion and their own pover ty. Contemplat ing hisfath er 's dr ug hab it , he asks (an d implicidy answers) this que stion : "Could i t betha t life, as the world understands i t , was the veritable dope, the hideous,beastly, vicious intoxication? Was obedience to convention and custom andpublic opinion perhaps only an epidemic slavery, a cruel supersti t ion . . . ?"(171) Mu ch later, on his voyage ar ou nd the world, he will no te how m uc hbe t te r the ocean ' s empt iness"represented the true condition of a l iving spiri tthan did the constra ints and compuls ions and fa lsehoods of human socie ty!"(501) Among the escapists, in Oliver's eyes, are all those who refuse torecognize the disproport ion between thetrans-human powers of nature and

the powers of man, and therefore invent tales of a beneficent Providencedesigned to comfort man 's inf i rmity. Thus had his Cousin Caleb, for example ,condemned society with a dogmatist 's insistence that his own sense of the goodmust and will prevail. In this way, Oliver reflects, the crippled mancompensa ted fo r his deformity and served his private need: "He wanted thewhole world to be sick, in order that he might pretend to be well . As if in thehealth of the world his own sickness were more than a fleabite! What was theuse of having a mind at al l , i f not to recognize this disproportion, and l ive, asfar as your spiri t can, in sympathy with the health of the universe? But peoplewere cowards. They were so frightened at the truth that they shut their eyes

an d ke pt saying their pray ers . . ." (203) .It should be apparent by now that the boy Oliver 's sharp dist inction

between the sunny and the shady roads to knowledge yields several bipolari t ies:the metaphor of sun-and-shade, l ike the kindred metaphor ofsea-and-land,divides the sciences and the humanities, the practical and the theoretical , thenon-human and the human, nature and the world of men, sol i tude and socie ty,con templa t ion and op in ion , p ie ty andhubris. These were, for Oliver, deeplyfelt opposit ions, and although he would in the course of his reflections qualifyin many ways the "versus" which lay between them, he would always be sure that

his own affinit ies m igh t be fou nd in the first term , no t the sec ond . Of cou rse hewas not himself a scientist or ship 's captain- al though these remained in hisview admirable and privileged beings by reason of their t ies to matter. No,Oliver was first an d last a philos oph er, seeking to locate a n d n am e on hiscosmological map the nature and worth of humanity 's miscellaneous str ivings.To his dismay - and this is no small part of his tragedy- he was to discover that


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14 OVER HEAR D IN SEVILLE

his own map usually extended well beyond the terrain inscribed on the maps ofhis ea rth- bo un d fellows.

T ha t is n o small pa rt of Santa yana 's tragedy in th e first half of his life - th etragedy, I m ea n, of being steadily m isun der stoo d by tho se of the world, worldly,of not f inding in his fated environment a way of thinking, a tradit ion, to whichhe m ight whole hearte dly subscribe - t ha t is a thesis I do n o t pro pos e ton igh t.But I hope that in my tracing of a few of the implications for Oliver of hissun-and-shade metaphor, you will have heard the voice of Santayana in his ownperson. Let me suggest a few of the t ies that bind him to his young Puritan inthese di rect ions .

In August, 1911, at Berkeley, California, in an address to the Philosophical

Union, Santayana gave his valedictory to America. He must have reflected thatthese would be pe rha ps his las t words to an Am erican au dien ce. H e would t ryto make them count . He would a t tempt to summarize his sense of theAm erican m ind, past an d present , and venture a word of coun sel . Th at c ounsel ,in the event, was a moving plea to all those yoked to thestill-dominant gentee lt radi t ion, a summons back to thoughts of ul t imate th ings , a counsel that weraise ou r eyes from o ur plan ted gard en s to the wilderness bey ond :

When you transform natur e to your uses ... you cannot feel th at na turewas made byyou or for you, for then these adjustments would have been pre-established. Much

less can you feel it when she destroys your labour of years in a momentary spasm.You must feel, rather, that you are an offshoot of her life; one bravelitde forceamong her im mense forces. When you escape ... to your forests and your sierras, Iam sure again tha t you do not feel you made them, or that they were m ade for you.They have grown, as you have grown, only more massively and more slowly. In theirnon-human beauty and peace they stir the sub-human depths and superhumanpossibilities of your own spirit. It is no transcenden tal logic th at they teach; and theygive no sign of any delibera te m orality seated in theworld. It is rather the vanity andsuperficiality of all logic, the needlessness of argum ent, the relativity of m orals, thestrength of time, the fertility of matter, the variety, the unspeakable variety, ofpossible life ... . It is the irresistible suasion of this daily spectacle, it is the dailydiscipline of contact with things, so different from the verbal discipline of theschools, that will, I trust, inspire the philosophy of your ch ildren .11

Surely it inspired Oliver 's . Is the re a wo rd of this that h e m igh t no t have writ tenhimself, had h e l ived? T he sense of disprop ort ion b etwee n t he powers of natu reand the powers of man, the tr ibute to the authority ofthings, tha t innocen t andcrucial axiom of Santayana's materialism and an axiom which, as Oliver says,l iberates the reason, the salute to protean nature 's fert i l i ty and a courageousacquiescence to her changes , contempt for opinion and argument , for logic

and language when these are apprehended in the ful l l ight of the sun, and askept ic ism about anthropomorphic metaphysics a t leas t as great as that ofH u m e ' s Philo: these are motions of Oliver 's mind - and also of Santayana's in

11 Windsof Doctrine (New York and London, 1913), 213-4.


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the articulation of his own first p rinciples.Midway in the novel, Santayana gives a striking delineation ofOliver's

thoughts after his conscientious return to Williams College. It is striking (for

one reason) because what the novelist says of his protagonist repeats whatSantayana said o fhis own frame of mind during his"somnambulistic"period atHarvard early in the century. H e writes of Oliver: "A curious film of unrealityand worthlessness now seemed spread overhis daily life. Even school work,when he took it up again, occupied him only north-north-west. When the windwas southerly there was a strange void in his bosom. He understood now theold notion that the soul had had previous lives, and was not really at home inthis world. The rou tine of the day seemed a fiction to which he condescended,as if he were playing in private theatricals. The characters wereassumed, andno t very well done ; yet, you m ust p reten d to be in dead earnest, till you actuallyforgot tha t you werenot" (227 ). How very close those words lie to Santayana'sacco unt of his own submission to professional rou tine.

But reasons are not wanting for Oliver's feelings of alienation, and I wouldask you to no tice how exactly they conform to the circumstances of the Spanishprofessor of philosophy surrounded on all sides by the practitioners andadherents of the genteel tradition. For Oliver, we'retold, "a trap door hadopened into the cellarage of this world's stage, which other people seemed sostrangely to tread all their life long as if it were the bedrock of na ture. Yet everystep you took on those shaky boards revealed some old folly, some ramshackle

contrivance which once may have produced conviction in children watching aChristmas p antom ime- children who long since had died ofold age" (227).These words, couched in the m etaphor of the thea tre which Santayana so ofteninvoked when he spoke of the relation of experience to nature, can well serveto define the genteel tradition. Wholly absorbed in appearances, preoccupiedto th e exclusion of all else by the social drama of which they found themselves apart, or lost in the fog of self-consciousness, its adherents had forgotten thesubterranean ground and reference of experience. Americanphilosopherswere declaring experience to be the only reality, and the dominion over ourlives of the h um an foreground an inescapable necessity. Religious thinkers, fortheir part, continued to look to the sky but found there only the countenanceof man. Calvinism, systemic transcendentalism, philosophic idealism,pragmatism: "these systems," Santayana said to his California audience,"areegotistical; direcdy or indirecdy they are anthropocentric, and inspired by theconceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinctionbetween good and evil, is the centre and pivot of theuniverse."And then headded, "That is what the mountains and the woods should make you at lastashamed to assert," 12

What does Oliver oppose to the genteel tradition? Not the mountains and

woods but the sun and sea - in either case, nature. Oliver's first voyage on theBlack Swan once and for all widened his horizon: "a ray of sunlight hadpierced" the "torn hangings and dingybackdrops" of his American theater.

12 Ibid., 214.


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The sun "had gilded a beam of atoms in the thick dust he had beenunconsciously breathing: it had disenchanted the pasteboard castles anddaubed forests ofhis artificial world. But itwas not romance thatwas shattered;

it was slavery, drudgery, superstition. That vital air outside, that freedom, thatsimpleness, that natural light - how much more romantic they were than anymoral melodrama invented by the frightened dreams of mankind! ... It wasenough to go to sea" (227).

Is this exalting of nature and the consequent derogation of man 's workingsa Puritan perspective? In one essential, central respect it is. Crucial in Puritanfeeling, and a recurring theme for Puritan sermons and meditation, was thegreatness of God and the litdeness of man. Submission, acquiescence in theways of inscrutable power, humility- these were the constant admonitions ofthose early Protestants, and in them Santayana found a sensibility accordantwith his own. In hisApologia he notes that his philosophy is religious "preciselyin the Protestant sense of religious faith; for if in other respects Protestantsentiment often seems to me a religious cloak for worldliness, as to the natu reof faith it seems to me admirable and profound. For whereas faithamongCatholics (except for the mystics) means intellectual assent to traditionaldogmas, among Protestants it means an unspoken and sacrificial trust in anunfathomable power ... ,"13 In this light, as Santayana had observed earlier inhis Apologia, "materialism coincides with pan theism, or even with theism of thatIslamic and Calvinist kind which conceives God asomnificent." 14

If Oliver and Santayana were alike Puritans in this sense, did they also sharethe faith that universal might makes for right? that the Good shall one daytriumph? that if we align ourselves with the powers that m ake for righteousnesswe shall, with them, prevail? Santayana, of course, did not. His naturalism positsnature, or matter, as the ground ofall moralities, but it guarantees the victoryto none. How did Oliver stand on this question? In his "Prologue" to the novel,Santayana observes that the old Calvinists, in the face of rampant evil in theworld, "cut the Gordian knot by asserting that since the Fall, the spirit hadceased to rule over the world and over their own passions, bu t that neverthelessit was secretly omnipotent, and would burnup the world and their passions atthe last day." Oliver, he notes, "suffered from no such delusion." (10). Or, asthe novelist says ofhis hero in the Triton "Preface," Oliver's "late birth relievedhim of any horrid uncertainty about the truth of traditional myths and dogmas.Like the Stoics and Spinoza he found his moral demands face to face with auniverse that inspired but did not sanction them."15

Oliver's story does in fact bear out these pronouncements. In hisconversation and in his soliloquies wediscover Oliver returning repeatedly tothoughts of the mythical and symbolic status of Platonism and Christianity and

13 "Apologia p r o Mente Sua," in The Phifasophy of George S a n t a y a n a(Library of Living Ph i losoph ers ,New York, 1940), 58 8.

14//>*., 509-10.

15 Dialogues in Umbo, (New York, 1926), 44.


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all religions. He sees that such systems make intelligible and are deeplyexpressive of man's moral nature, yet in transposing that nature to the cosmos,humankind transparently seeks to placate i ts fears, underwrite i ts aspirations,

insure success for its local ideals. Such systems, Oliver observes in one of hislate soli loquies, express "mythically the revolt of ma n's mo ral n atu re against theactual world." And he protes ts , "Why nurse this unhappy moral rebell ion withall sorts of fables and sentimental regrets?" (520) Better, much better, hethinks , to confront courageously the t ruth about the human condi t ion:"Truereligion must recognize the power actually at work in the world and study itsworkings honestly" (427). Such study will yield no reassurance that the ways ofn a t u r e are the ways of moral man. The study of history freed from moralism,study of the natural sciences, or simply honest daily observation go in the sun;"C hristia nity ," Olive r says, "walks in th e sha de ... , sees every thing from th epo int of view of the soul, an d n ot as i t really ha pp en s and h as to hap pe n" (447 ).

Oliver often feels thedanger of religious presumption, of moralism becomemilitant, as in this reflection: "It wasn't religion, in any sober or manly sense, torun amok over some passionate fancy of your own, and be ready to tortureyourself and ot he r peo ple r at he r than adm it it was all froth" (427 ). His sense ofabsolutistic religion "as a reform ing polit ical force" ready to dom ina te o the rs inthe name of the Good is central to Oliver 's "purification of Puritanism." Andsince his rejection of a deity with moral attributes is inpart carried out onmoral grounds, i t may be called a rejection of Puritanism on Puritan grounds.

Bu t if we call i t that , we should add that jus tdo did Santayana reject Puritanism,and for a l ike reason. Too often, he observed repeatedly, the hypostasis of thego od ha d m aske d "a secret aggressive worldliness" which br ou gh t oppression inits wa ke.

Obvious to Oliver is the work of impassioned fancy or a merely momentaryinspiration in the religions of the world. His refusal of their comforts is aninstance of what Santayana calls his "metaphysical austerity." That austerity isapparent in Ol iver ' s f requent contempt for a l l the works of mereimagina t ion .The dreams and t ransports , the epiphanies and vis ions of the poets ,philo sop hers , an d art ists - ar en ' t they, lock, stock, and barrel ,"all froth"? "mereescape and delusion"? (413) Perhaps if men were willing to face the facts,re no un cin g fictions, they wou ld be happ ier, for "if m enhad no imaginat ionthey could feel no discouragement. Perhaps all this religion and philosophyan d p oetry a nd art were a disease to be kil led off presently by nat ura l selection"(413) . May we say, the n, th at he re , at least Oliver and Santayana pa rt co mpan y?After al l , the Spaniard, from his boyhood on, found wonder and delight ins tor ies and poems, the pageantry of the church, ar t and archi tecture ,philosophy and cri t icism.

Several things may be said in reply. Oliver is by no meansimpervious to

works of the human imagination, despite his occasionally ruthless posit ivist icmoods. He attentively absorbs the German songs and prayers and verses whichIrma teaches him; he shows himself keenly responsive to Plato, Shakespeare,Goethe, Schopenhauer, Whitman; and whi le he cannot share the Vicar ' s fa i th ,he understands deeply the spiri tual wisdom of his message. When Oliverexpresses contempt for the imagination, his complaint almost invariably


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registers his sense that imagination too easily and too often exceeds its properbounds, takings its fables for fact. And I needn't remind you of how oftenSantayana in like vein protested against the incursions ofla fonciion fabulatriceinto the territories of science or a sober philosophy, against all theories inwhich the universe is made to dance to the tune of the poet's or thephilosopher's personal music box. Sometimes, in his war against the worldly,Santayana imagined a world without imagination: from the vantage of theunnameable ultimateX, of the atoms and void, man appears as the conceitedpopinjay whose "chief and most lasting illusion ... is the illusion of [his] ownimportance."16 We will in our dreams and babblings concoct a thousandfictions - featherings of our precarious hum an nest - bu t all are alike the worksof norm al m adness - norm al, to be sure, but m ad, still.

Perhaps you will grant that Santayana's mature philosophy is coherent inthese ways with the young Oliver's philosophic gropings, yet deny any likenessin the moral complexion of the fictional son and hisnovel-writing father. Didnot this last of the Puritans have a severe case of consc ience, of m oral cramp? Ifby conscience is meant a dutiful subservience to social values and expectations- responsibility to friends, teammates, mother and father, or commitment tothe idea of being married, serving the public good, or the democrat's wish tobe commonplace - I think it can easily be shown that Oliver moves from anunquestioning commitment to these to aclear-eyed question ing of them all. Herejects some on examined grounds, accepts others as imperatives of his ownsympathetic nature. And, in Santayana's case, is it possible to imagine a greaterdedication than his to personal social ties and responsibility? As a son heattended his mother faithfully despite his resentment of her coldness; as abro the r he was steadily attentive a nd loving; to friends he was touchingly loyal-even to the egregious Stanley, even to Strong; his hospitality and kindnesstoward students have been remarked in a hundred reports; and as a teacher hemaintained to the end a scrupulous commitment to the task which Oliverwould wholly understa nd .

Not what others expect but his own integrity is what counted most for

Oliver. To be true to his own deepest nature, to his own sense of the just andthe good: this becomes his credo. But there is a worm in this apple: in Oliver'sprou d self-reliance lies the d anger of egotism an d t he seed of moral absolutism.Santayana tellingly sketches his young Emerson/Oliver: "Living, real, andself-justified" in the boy's eyes"was only ... the inn er spring ofhis being, the centreand judge of all that unaccountably went on. ... Though almost everythingmight be wrong, the inneroracle that condemned and rejected was sure ofbeing itself right... " (77-8). An older Oliver can still feel, when confronted byalien virtues, "how inevitable and rig ht his own practice was" (412). Oliver'smoral intensity, his resolute "integrity of purpose and scorn of allcomprom ises," threaten s to becom e at any mom ent mo ral ferocity. O r so weare told in the "Prologue," where Santayana observes that Oliver"would havebeen capable of imposing no matter what regimen on us by force.../Be like

mT/ie Later Years, 168.


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OLIVER'S IAST SOLILOQUIES 19

m e, o r d i e ' " (8). And then we are told that Oliver's is "the tragedy of the spiritwhen i t 's not content to understand but wishes to govern" (10).

Th ese har d jud gm ent s I f ind incomp rehensible , and prop ose here to enter

for litigation th e case of Ald en vs. Santayana o n g ro un ds of slan der . It is as iftwo Olivers were present to the mind of the narrator, incompatible beings. Thefirst Oliver, perhaps the Oliver of Santayana's first conception of him in the1890's, "demanded some absolute and special sanction for his naturalpre fer en ce s" (32 0), an d presum ably after finding it wou ld be perfectlypr ep ar ed to impos e his preferen ces on o thers. T he second Oliver is a youngman with a radical spiritual vocation who refuses the intoxications ofwill andall part isan hea ts. Can th e two Olivers be unde rstoo d as one? I think not.

When Oliver condemns his Puritan forbears as narrow, vengeful moralistssure of their own Tightness, he discerns shrewdly that their needto be on thewinning side was parent to their metaphysical claims (318-19). And he goes onto reb uk e th em for their wilful blindn ess to virtues oth er th an their own. Jimand Mario especially, by their steady demonstration of attitudes and viewsforeign to Oliver 's nature, have led him to see the many forms in which thegood may come - the divergence and incommensurabil i ty of human virtues."You know ," Santayana said to m e, "a good boy does ne ed correc tion."

Charity, sympathy, openness of mind become, for Oliver, the counsels ofreason and truth. What he vaguely calls his pursuit of "higher things" centrallyinvolves this resolute hospitality toward others, a recognition of the diversity

and relativity of human ideals. It also becomes clear to Oliver that his relativiststance entails a dogmatic social and political prescript: the good society willacc om m od ate th e largest nu m be r of different, even rival, good s, and bringth em into harm ony . Believing that man 's "general stupidity an d cruelty anddisorder" are correctable, he concludes in one of his later soli loquies that "theright direc tion for a m oral m an would always lead to ult imate ord er an dkindness; an order i tself kind; an order harmonizing all sympathies, as far assuch a har m on y was possible .. ." T he m an of reason as social eng ine er will n otsuffer "the ignorant energies of men to waste themselves and neutralize oneanother" but will know how through his poli t ical arts to canalize human nature

(514) .Note how close these suggestions l ie to the young Santayana's sympathy in

The Life of Rea sonfor a me ritocratic form of gov ernm ent, a Platonic oligarchy ofthe wise. But my main purpose here is to ask whether our young Puritan wouldindeed be will ingas th e "Pro log ue" says he w ould b e willing - toput a gun toour heads to enforce order and kindness. I do not believe i t .

I do not believe it for several reasons, but I will cite only one, which seemsto me decisive. Oliver's story, as that story came finally to be told, is in its mainoutline the story of a buddingtranscendentalist's advance toward the discovery

of his true position as an exile in the world, able to live happily only in thespirit, in what Ro se calls "a rap t ded ication to imp erson al th ing s." As a boy th edreamful, solipsistic Oliver presciently recognizes his affinity to Schopenhauer- he learns by heart a passage, as Irma describes i t , about "how everythingbecomes beautiful and as i t were enchanted when we suspend our Will and seethe w hole world me rely as Idea ... " (132). Many years later, following th e


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successive shocks of the deaths of his father, Jim, and the Vicar, and inimmediate response to Rose's refusal of marriage, he achieves in his lastsoliloquy his impassioned transvaluation of values, sublimates his loves,

abandons the ways of will. It is Oliver'smetanoia, strikingly akin to Santayana'sown metanoia, at about the same age. In and through that "change of heart"both gained spiritual freedom, which Santayana once defined as "liberationfrom all allegiance to what is private to each psyche, and love in perfectsympathy with the truth."17

Oliver's anx ious m oral dialecticwas often driven by his need to feel that hisfeelings of being right were right. In the end he abandons that egotist's questand vows that he will be nameless- of no party's color. Listen to his last words:"Shall I decide what ought to be the world's business? Shall I get up animaginary programme, and say ... that the world's real business is somethingthat the world neglects and has never heard of, som ething miraculouslyrevealed only to me or to the sect I happen to belong to? ... Enough if onoccasion I practice charity, and keep myself as much as possible fromcomplicity in wrong" (582-3). This Puritan will pu t no on e in the stocks.

The cautionary moral of my story is this; Listen to Oliver, follow hisdialectic, note his gradual discovery of his own nature; do not listen to whatSantayana says about him in prologue or epilogue, preface or letters. Don'tbelieve the novelist, for example, when he says that a part of Oliver's tragedywas his inability to stand alone. Oliverwas always the self-reliant individualist by

any ordinary measure, and in the end achieved an autonomy and a distance onthe world very like his crea tor'sSuch contradictions might be explained by saying that Santayana wished to

deflect attention away from the sizeable autobiographical cargo his fictioncarried by calling attention to deficiencies in his hero. I doubt it It must berather a result of the desultory, piecemeal nature of the novel's composition:Santayana was not wholly aware of how much the character of Oliver turnedun de r his hand over the span of forty years. In Oliver's later soliloquiesespecially his ever greater and greater sympathy for his protagonistled him toinfuse mo re and more of himself into Oliver's musings - so that in th e end wemay find the m aker in what he made.

Yet there is one great difference we would do well to mark, after all,between the ph ilosopher and his last Puritan- or, I would prefer to say, his lasttranscendentalist. Santayana, not Oliver, tells Oliver's story. Santayana was theartist; Oliver was not. The medium of fiction, more tellingly thanautobiography, enabled Santayana to explore the form and meaning ofhis ownstory. Fiction has this wonderful enabling property; precisely because the tellerof the story is all ofhis characters and yet no ne of them, it allows him repeated

The Ijtter Years, 168.


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forays into uncharted regionsof his nature. The novelist is under cover,and itis just this self-forgetfulness which enables, which breedsout of itself, self-discovery. That path was closed to Oliver. Lacking the power to dominate hiscircumstances by giving them verbal form, lackingthe power to frame his worldin life-giving words, Oliver lackedthe irony and humor, the satiric distance,thequiet contentments of artistic closureso conspicuous in the man who could tellhis story, and so discover his own.

RICHARD C. LYONAustin, Texas


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A Soliloquy in l imbo

Dick Lyon has hadthe rare privilege of discussin g OliverAlden's character withSan t ayan ahimself. Such an advantagebeing impossible to counter, I resolved tovisit Limbo, an d seek a dia logue with Sa nta ya n a. The visit wa sarranged,although not without difficulty; but I was soon disappointed to learn thatSan t ayan a wa s no tprepared to discuss personalities. Many times he had saidthat only hisphilosophy wa s worth preserving, if indeed an ything at a ll shouldbe saved. Becau se this view in factreflected his innermostcharacter, only thisetern al part of his being ha dbeen admitted, after the custom in Limbo.

I was astonished to learn, however, that Oliver himself wa s to be found there,a long w ith a host of other persons from literature whose chara cters weresufficiently definite an dcomplete to permit their entry into Limbo. Anoccasion tomeet him, an d to enga ge indialogue,was quicklyarranged; but the dialoguewith Oliver was not very satisfactory either. As helearned of Lyon 's opin ions, helapsed somewhat intohimself: the dialogue passed in to mon ologue, an d themonologue into soliloquy.

Oliver was quick to deny that he wa s tobe identifiedwith Santayana, eventhe youn ger Sa nta ya n a, in the novel: sounding rather like a professor of

philosophy, he dismissed the thesis a s "sufficiently refuted by the fact that he an dSan t ayanaoccupy different pa rts o f Limbo." Whileconceding tha t he frequent lyexpressed Santayana's opinions, henevertheless insisted that this was true of allthe characters: ea ch is used a s a foil for the ironicexpression or exploration ofthese opinions.Somewhere Sa nta ya na had said that , once having at ta ined hisown solidphilosophy,he liked to test out its maxims by inserting them intodifferentphilosophical settings. According to Oliver, San t ayanawas putting hisown views into the mouths of hisprotagonists,yes; but in eachcase the person'sdifferent chara cter orphilosophy or situation would brin g a bout interesting

changes in that opinion.What Irepeat n ow is taken from mynotes of Oliver's on e further soliloquy.

sje $ jje sje jje

The last puritan: one might anticipate for the hero a sour puritan whoeschews all forms of enjoyment and pleasure, in favour of ha rd duty. Many ofmy relatives were likethis. But my life was a quest for hap piness, at least in myown mind; and yet I seemed unable to define or achieve my happiness. Perhaps

Santayanawas unhappy in his younger days, bu t this seems to have been d ue toexternalities - he was entirelycapable of it In my case, I somehow lacked the

This paper was read to theSantayana Society, Boston, December 28, 1990, in a responsetoRichard Lyon's talk "Oliver's Last Soliloquies."


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A SOIILOQUYIN LIMBO 2$

capacity for be inghappy, although I came to acknowledgeits value.Mr. Lyon flatters m e, when he says that I attained spiritual freedom shortly

before my dea th. Notice, however, that in my last soliloquy, I make n o mention

whatsoever of renunc iation, which is the heart of the matter for Santayana. Myquest for happinesswas to continue, or so I thought, and I was free only in thesense of escaping comm itmen ts. Th ere was arelief, a change of oudook. But 1see it as similar to a programme for himself which Santayana describes, someyears prior to his metanoia ,a "pretty programme** which was"easy for a boy todraw up." However, "Genuine detachm ent presupposes atta ch m en t What canit signify for you to say that you renounce everything if as yet you have lovednothing?"1

This was Mr. Lyon's thesis, was it not? that I represented Santayana's youth.Th ere is surely more truth to this, than in the claim tha t in my few years of lifebelow, the struggle for spiritual freedomwas successful.

Often I ask myself if a long er life would have bro ught m e spiritual freedom- some con tentedness if no t happiness. Certainly I had no dou bts about this atthe time; had not my special vocation for the spirit been the Vicar's prophecy?However, I think now that this was only my youth speaking. Here I have beenstripped of this boyish confidence, and am unclear on this po in t Of theau tho r's intentions, however, I have formed some opinions.

Santayana, I think, would have denied me this freedom and enlightenm ent,even if I ha d lived a lon g life. At least, his original ideas about m e would have

excluded this. Luckily, he allowed my character to develop over a long periodof gestation, according to the inward dictates of his psyche, rather thanfollowing any prearranged superficial plan. Otherwise I should not be here, forno complete person could emerge from rearrangements of a thin veneer ofideas, without allowing free rein to the deeper formative parts of the materialpsyche.

But how much I am sounding likeSantayana,and at the same time seemingto concede M r. Lyon's po in t

Of course Vanny achieved the free expression of his po tential. Hewas open-hearted, ready to kiss all the girls; gallantry in him passed easily into chivalry,and chivalry into religion. Vanny mastered life in ways in which Santayanawould have wished to dohimself. My potential was towards a spiritual life - orso I think . Such a lifewas greatiy admired by Santayana, although he seems n otto have wished it forhimself. Nor, I think, did he feel that Iwas constituted toachieve it

His overt view on this, so far as I can recons truct it, leftlitde chance ofmyconsummating asetded and tranquil freedom.My natural bent for nature, formastery over material things, could not ground a satisfactory life ofcontem plation outside society, for I lacked his epicurean conten tment. And Ilacked the ability to break away from convention and earlier bad decisions. AsJim said, I would dip one toe in the water and then draw back; I dared no t call

1 See page 421 of Persons an d Places, Critical Edition, edited by William C. Holzberger andHermanJ Saatkamp, Jr., Cam bridge, Massachusetts: TheMIT Press, 1986.


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my mind my own and have the courage ofmy conviction. O r as my father said,I abandoned the things which I admitted loving, while I clung to my oldresolution, although I hated it. Not only did I cling to an environment whichwas stifling m e, bu t I did so with pride and the defiance of youth .

Was this failure d ue to my feebleness? my belonging to a declining race? Myfather's weaknesses are well-known; but my mother too, although she thoughtherself superior, had lost the physical courage which is the foundation ofmorality and intelligence. Yet surely this physical decadenc e in my stock, in mygenteel or commercial forbears, signalled moral failings in Santayana's eyes.These stemmed from detaching duty and tightness from its sources inpreference and urgent need. With my mother, with my uncle Nathaniel, thisled to hypocrisy and the substitution ofblatandy false justifications. For in

them, the will to have their own way overwhelmed any tendency towardself-knowledge. My ha tred of any kind of hypocrisy forced me in a differentdirection, and I found myself discrediting my own innocent desires, when theycould no t be construed as duties.

Such is a straightforward account of Santayana's inten tions. In my thou ghts ,I managed to rebel against an oppressive heritage, and to espouse views closelyakin to those of my autho r. I was nevertheless una ble to cast aside this burdenin my actions. I rem ained puritan, notwithstanding my rejection of puritanism.However much my proclamations might reflect the ideas of Santayana's youth,I remained unable to shape my actions towards liberation of my spirit, inconformity with these ideas.

If Mr. Lyon finds fault with this interpretation, and prefers to see me as ahero rather than a failure, I cannot object. I too think that, had my life beenpermitted to continue, my spirituality and Santayana's love for this side of mewould have led to surprising results. For spirituality is not easily found in theutterly selfish Lo rd Jim 's ofthis world; rathe r th e ability to share vicariously in awide range of ideals often springs up in persons whose own ambitions are lessclearly developed. And Santayana was always m ore inte rested in spiritualitythan in puritanism.

* * * * *

My n otes stop at this point. Although the monologue a n d further dialoguecontinued for some time, the topicshifted. Oliver's interest in his ow n personseemed to flag, an d to be n o more important than anyother subject.

ANGUS KERR-LAWSONUniversity of Wa terloo


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W illiam Jam es a nd G eorgeSantayanaT h e Ex tent of a Ph ilosop hic Vision

Santayana wri tes to Will iam Jam es on Dece mb er18 ,1887:

If philosophy were the attempt to solve a given problem, I should see reason to bediscouraged about its success; but it strikes me that itis rathe r an attempt to expressa half-undiscovered reality, jus t as art is, and that two different renderings , if theyare expressive, far from cancelling each other add to each other's value. The greatbane of philosophy is the theological animus which hurries a man toward final andintole rant truth s as towards his salvation. Such truths may be necessary tomen butphilosophy can hardly furnish them. It can only interpre t nature, in parts with

accuracy, in parts only with avague symbolism. I confess I do no t seewhy we shouldbe so vehemendy curious about the absolute truth, which is not to be made oraltered by our discovery of it But philosophy seems to me to be its own reward, andits justification lies in the delight and dignity of the artitself. 1

J am es r e sponded on J anua ry2 ,1888:

What you say of philosophy and your expectations therefrom, interests me. Neitherdo I expect absolute illumination from hum an philosophizing. At most you can getarguments either to reinforce or to protect certain emotional impulses. In any

minute of moral action where the path is difficult, I believe a man has deeperdealings with life than he could have in libraries of philosophizing.2

William Ja m es would say that tru th is abo ut ex perie nce . I t is ab ou t a fact ofna tur e , George Santayana argued . Both agreed that t ruth descr ibes the rangeof relation s bind ing a fact with othe r facts or on e e xperie nce to the ne xt. SinceJames and Santayana considered that knowledge of truth must involve adescription of an array of relations and since we are creatures of f inite reach,l iving for a brief t ime in a world of constant change, any such knowledge mustinvolve a sharing of perspectives. We think and feel and are usually aware of

our thoughts or feelings. Truth cannot be sett led individually, rather i t isdecided only as the relations or meanings of an idea are accounted forcom pletely. Different perspectives, describing relation after relation, have tobe tr ied to draw ever nearer to truth.

The pragmatic rule is tha t the meaning of a concept may always be found , if no t insome sensible particular which it directly designates, then in some particulardifference in the course of human experience which its being true will make. Testevery concept by the question"What sensible difference to anybody will its tru thmake?" and you are in the best possible position for understanding what it means

1 See pages 27-28 of Cory 1955.

2 See page 403 of Perry, 1935a.


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and for discussing its importance. (James1898)3

The word truth ought, I think, to be reserved for what everybody spontaneouslymeans by it: the standard comprehensive description of any fact in all its relations.Tru th is no t an op inion, even an ideally true one ; because besides the limitation inscope which human opinions, at least, can never escape, even the most completeand accurate op inion would give precedence to some terms, and have a direction ofsurvey; and this direction might be changed or reversed without lapsing into error;so that the truth is the field which various opinions traverse in various directions,and no opinion itself. (Santayana 1923/1955, p . 268.)

The troubles we have in knowing the world truly are the result of ideas weform th at are as difficult to define as clouds an d bree zes are to m eas ure exactly,and of ex per ien ce t ha t is l ike a stream in terms of con tinuity an d ch an ge. I t is amat ter of the degree to which we are able to unders tand and apprecia teperspectives that are different from our own. If ideas as they are felt are fieldsof indefinite measure, mixtures of sensations, memories, emotions and will ,and if there is inevitably a distinctive or singular quality about every stream ofexperience, i t would seem that we can know the world only in many ways.Every way of knowing must be singular; no individual way counting, exceptaccidentally, for more than a part of what is true. We might argue that there isa "persistent'' world of skies, seas, soils, cells and organizations of cells, also

the re are fleeting fields of ideas abo ut these things. W e well m igh t ho ld th ereare as ma ny worlds as the persistent o ne tha t will survive ou r know ing i t , an d allthe dist inct f ields of ideas in stream. We might even hold that there must be anover-arching realm of "spirit," an absolute in te l l igence to bind thoughts tothings or bind so m eon e e lse 's thoug hts to ours .

There is comfort but no surety in the idea of an overarching spiri t , anabsolute , that cares to bind thoughts to th ings , and measure your feel ingsagainst min e. Ins tead of posit ing an absolute , Jam es a nd Santayana gaveco m m on sense answers to th e question of how "worlds* of un like sub stance arerelated. Both held that the stuff of thoughts does not have to beidentical to thestuff of things. Sensa tions or concep tions, our ideas, are only the reflections orsymbols of substances other than themselves. That nature is multi- textured,

5 1898/1975, p. 259; paraphrased 1911/1979a, p . 37.)"Slightly edited" will be used in footnotesto mark th e separate writings by James in which an idea has be en expressedin terms that are quitesimilar. James often worked with the same ideas year after year, as he carefully tried to build theminto a philosophy that would be increasingly more coherent. James is, of course, the editor inquestion. Painstaking efforts by which he shaped a philosophy have seldom bee n credited .

"Paraphrased" will note those writings in which an idea is to be found not only in a changedcontext, but restated in terms that are far different.

Concerning the extended quotations in the essay, James often wrote in this vein an d Santayanastrongly recom mended it to intellectual historians (Santayana 1923 /1955, p . 253 ). Readers will beable to use the texts I consider most important and include in th e body of th e essay, to argue muchmore easily with the p hilosoph ic in terpretations. Use of dual dates in citations, it is hoped, will allowreaders to set the citations in historical context,as well as trace a particular research resource, withoutdistracting.


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WILLIAM JAM ES AND GEO RGE SANTAYANA 27

tha t textur es can b e symbolically differentiated, was en ou gh of an epistemologyfor Santayana. To claim th at we m ight learn of allnature's textures *lnthem selves," is bu t a dre am , or conceit , and for scientists is unne cessary. O ur

idea of a kn ar red old pine tr ee is no t the treeitself; no more are we the idea ofth e blue jay perc he d up on a th in branch of the pine, watching us . Th e s tuff ofour thoughts i s symbolically likethe stuff of the pine tree, and herein isun co ve red a m ost wond erful quality of consciousness. We can repr ese nt thin gs,such as w eath er be nt p ine tre es with laughin g blue jays si t ting on th e bra nch es,wi thout being those things .4

The ordinary absolute God is only a description of the fact takenafter the fact, andthen placed behind the fact as its ground . The only absolute thing so far as theintellect goes is history ,... process.

A resdess moralistic world:Yet philosophy's only world.

Peremptorily rejected bymany,games, 1898)5

But what possible advantage is it to the world to be held together by a mentalsynthesis, rather than by space or time o r the truth ofits constitution? A synthesisof worthless facts does no t render them severally better, nor itself a good. A spiritwhose essential function was to create relations would be merely a generative

principle, as the spider is to its web; it would be no better than its work, unlessperhaps it was spiritual enough to grow weary of that vain labo r. (Santayana, 1922,p. 202.)

In th e essay, I refer to several philo soph ical writings by Ja m es an dSantayana. T he u nc om m on boldness to the phi losophical v isions that in teres tsm e , rests on a will ingness to make quite modest claims about the extent andthe "truth'* of their visions. While it may seem that modesty haslittie to do withboldne ss , i t i s th e oth er way ro un d with modesty in phi losophy. Rea ding e i the rphilosopher, there is always the sense that a sharp contrast is l inedbetween

individu al an d gene ral perc epti ons . Individual perspective we usually exp ect tob e blatandy idiosyncratic. W hat else can i t be?

overheard in seville.9.1991

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