The Cool World

PERSONS AND PLACES by George Sanfayana. 598 pages. Scr/bner. $7.50.

SANTAYANA: THE LATER YEARS by Daniel Cory. 330 pages. Braziller. $7.50.

William James looked doubtfully at the frail, pockmarked, rather effeminate Harvard freshman. "You don't really want to go in for philosophy, do you?" he asked George Santayana.

Santayana did, and his reputation eventually rivaled James's. But most of James's contemporaries agreed that Santayana was a fellow who just did not fit in. Born in Spain and brought up in Boston, he was never really at home in Europe or the U.S. At a time when philosophy was robustly assured, Santayana remained a quiet skeptic. Other philosophers wrote a brisk, matter-of-fact style; Santayana wrote a highly poetic one. They were aggressively liberal and believed in the inevitability of progress; Santayana was a hermitlike conservative who yearned for tradition, a settled order, a sense of place.

Portraits of Defeat. Whether idealists or pragmatists, his contemporaries were confident that they were accounting for the universe. Santayana never shared that illusion. Philosophies, sciences and religions were so many human dreams, he felt, that were more or less relevant to reality. The task of the philosopher was to take sympathetic note of all of them, discriminate among them, but never fall into the trap of believing any one exclusively. Santayana loved the spiritual discipline of Roman Catholicism, for instance, but he did not accept its doctrines as ultimate truth. "We must see heaven in the midst of earth, just above it, accompanying earth as beauty accompanies it. We must not try to get heaven pure, afterwards, or instead."

Santayana's autobiography, Persons and Places, now issued complete in one volume for the first time, is less autobiography than a series of biographies of his contemporaries. The ideal human life, wrote Santayana, is an "evolution of a given seed toward its perfect manifestation." Most of Santayana's acquaintances failed to evolve, and this book is a record of their defeats: portraits etched in acid and affection. There was the romantic poet Lionel Johnson, "a spiritual waif who couldn't endure the truth, but demanded a lovelier fiction to revel in, invented, or accepted it, and called it revelation." There was the "brilliant genius" Bertrand Russell, who suffered from "a microscopic intensity that narrowed each of his insights, lost the substance in the visible image, the sense in the logic of the words, and made him, though he might be many-sided, a many-sided fanatic."

Passionate Detachment. Bertrand Russell scoffed at Santayana's detached philosophy as the result of "emotional privation." It is true that Santayana was leary of emotion all his life, especially sexual emotion; he had come from a cold and broken family. But Biographer Cory shows how much passion can be put into a philosophy of detachment. Cory had been Santayana's private secretary and kept in touch with him for 25 years, and Santayana unburdened himself to Cory as to few others. Explaining why his philosophy seemed so cool, he once wrote: "Each passion or hope when alive sees hateful enemies in every other passion and hope, whereas calm insight sees in each the good to which it aspires."

Santayana never seemed more passionately committed to his philosophy than in the last days before his death--a death that, as Cory describes it, had some of the majesty of Socrates'. He was racked with pain from cancer of the stomach, unable to eat or drink. When Cory murmured about "the peace that passeth all understanding," the old rationalist shot back: "If it passeth all understanding, it's simply nothing. I have no faith in a blind, cosmic feeling of peace." In his last moments, Cory asked him if he was suffering. "He replied in a voice so small that it seemed to come from a long distance: 'Yes, my friend. But my anguish is entirely physical; there are no moral difficulties whatsoever.' "

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