Sprigge, Timothy L. S.  "George Santayana (1863-1952)." Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought Vol. II. Edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond. Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2008. 517-523.

Abstract

George Santayana (1869-1952) and A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947) were almost precisely contemporary philosophers each of whom developed a complete metaphysical or ontological system, the affinities and contrasts between which are of considerable interest. The two had met in Cambridge, England in 1897 (Letters 1955, 38), but were not in personal contact later. Santayana read PR and MT and spoke of them in correspondence. He thought their solid intellectual content to be spoiled by a certain effort to be "uplifting" (Letters 1955, 326). But their philosophies may be compared in ways which illuminate the thought of each. Both developed their metaphysical systems quite late in their philosophical career, having previously worked in somewhat different veins. Thus Santayana's earlier work consists in philosophical comment on human life rather than constructive metaphysics or ontology, while Whitehead's is devoted to the foundations of mathematics and the analysis of scientific concepts. The most important statements of Santayana's later system are Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), and the four books of Realms of Being - The Realm of Essence 1927, The Realm of Matter (1930), The Realm of Truth (1938) and The Realm of Spirit (1940). Santayana was born in Madrid but spent his early childhood in Avila. His Spanish mother before marrying his father had been married to an American and after his death believed herself obliged to bring up their two children in America. For this reason when Santayana was seven she left him with his father in Spain and emigrated to Boston with the two children by the earlier marriage. When Santayana was eight his father brought him over to join them there, but himself returned to Spain. Santayana was never an American citizen but stayed in America (he graduated at Harvard and eventually became a professor in the Department of William James and Josiah Royce) until 1911. Both Whitehead and Santayana are rightly counted as figures in the history of American philosophy but their relations to America are in striking contrast. While Whitehead found that he could only develop his final system satisfactorily after having left Europe in 1924, Santayana, who lived in the U.S. from the age of nine until he was nearly fifty, had to leave America to do so, leaving it in 1912 to live first in England until after the first world war, and then in Rome with an income derived mainly from the royalties on his books. (He visited his relations in Spain from time to time throughout his life). His resignation from Harvard (and departure from the U.S. for ever) was the source of some distress to American philosophers who had regarded him as one of the leading figures in a distinctively American tradition. Baptized a Catholic, Santayana had great sympathy for the poetic richness of the lives of the faithful but soon entirely rejected its doctrines (unless in the most metaphorical of senses). His last years were spent in a Convent Nursing home in Rome which has encouraged the false idea that he finally found his home in the bosom of Catholicism. In fact, he resisted attempts to reconvert him quite vigorously. His vision of the world was essentially atheistic but celebrated a spiritual life of "pure intuition" though not more than the life of reason in which a harmony was obtained between all the varied satisfactions available to humankind.