| George Santayana, whose reputation suffered a temporary eclipse during the thirty years following his death in 1952, appears to be resuming his position among the important philosophers of the twentieth century. Ten years ago no decent biography of Santayana existed; fortunately, as it turned out, John McCormick had been occupied for some time with just such a work, which appeared in 1987 and which proved to be somewhat more than merely "decent"; I would call it the best biography of the decade about anyone. By that time the Santayana Project was well under way, the basic scholarship for which had been put into place by Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., William G. Holzberger, and others. Studies by John Lachs and Anthony Woodward appeared the following year (1988), with more specialized treatments continuing into the 1990s: papers, monographs, an increasing number of theses and dissertations, and Henry Levinson's Santayana, Pragmatism, and the Spiritual Life. Other studies touch substantially on Santayana, such as Robert Dawidoff's The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage. A solid foundation had been laid even at the nadir of Santayana's posthumous fortunes by Timothy L. S. Sprigge's thorough and sympathetic study, Santayana: An Examination of His Philosophy, published in 1974 and reissued in a revised and enlarged edition in 1995. Since 1986, the Santayana Project has, in steady increments, made individual works available in definitive editions issued by the MIT Press. Santayana was nothing if not prolific, however, and there remain more than two dozen works to be edited, not to speak of thousands of unpublished letters. |
| Despite the relative neglect between 1950 and 1980, so much has been printed about and by Santayanaalready filling many linear feet of library shelvingthat it might seem that further discussion would be superfluous, at least for the time being. But I have identified a few things that deserve more careful attention. The Last Puritan has never been accorded the analysis that would bring out the themes and patterns that Santayana repeatedly hinted were to be found in it. Enjoyed by numerous readers, it seems to have escapedperhaps fortunatelythe scrutiny of all schools of literary criticism in vogue since the 1950s. The present study, accordingly, focuses primarily on the novel; those more closely familiar with Santayana and his thought than I am may not wish to agree that everything revealed by my microscope is actually present, or pres- |
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![Santayana - The life of reason, [or], the phases of human progress](/uploads/posts/book/233706/thumbs/santayana-the-life-of-reason-or-the-phases-of.jpg)
