Get started

WorkGeorge Santayana

Character and Opinion in the United States

A portrait of America sent from Europe, built around memories of William James and Josiah Royce, his Harvard teachers.

by George Santayana170 passages held

  • English, the original language, and your language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
First published
(aged 57)
Original language
English

Report a rights issue

Overview

Eight years after he left America for good in January 1912, Santayana published a book about the country. At its center stand chapters on the two men who had taught him philosophy at Harvard and then become his senior colleagues: William James, who died in 1910, and Josiah Royce, who died in 1916. The full title promises reminiscences of both men and of academic life in America. James appears as a gifted psychologist whose talent for describing experience led him to treat experience as the only reality; Royce is the idealist for whom the universe was finally one all-knowing mind. Around them Santayana built a diagnosis of the country. American life, he argued, rested on a Protestant conscience carried into a new land and put to work on it; the typical American was an idealist whose ideals were spent on material tasks, which made him look like a materialist. The closing chapter, on English liberty in America, describes a freedom made of cooperation, compromise and consent, workable only among people who already agree on most things. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the book Santayana's valediction to America; he never went back to the country it describes. Scribner's in New York and Constable in London published it in 1920, and Scribner's reprinted it the following year.

Key concepts

What did Santayana think William James actually believed, beneath the pragmatism?

Agnosticism. Santayana insists that radical empiricism and pragmatism were, in James’s own mind, only methods; his doctrine, if he had one, was that beliefs can never be sure they have reached anything beyond themselves. That is why a man who was far from credulous seemed so friendly to credulity in others: the trust he put in people and ideas might betray him, so who was he to condemn theirs?

Why did Royce need the universe to be one all-knowing mind?

Because the problem of evil demanded it. Royce started from the postulate that moral experience is the substance of the world, not an incident in it, so the mere being of truth could not console him; he needed truth possessed. He longed, Santayana writes, for all his troubles and questions to find their solution in some mind he could identify with his own: a victorious knowledge breaking through the clouds of error.

What orthodoxy did American thinkers still share around 1900?

That the universe exists and is governed for the sake of man, or of the human spirit. Santayana says that among American highbrows at the end of the nineteenth century, however liberal they were otherwise, dissent from this was still felt to be scandalous. He reads the belief as an expression of impotence rather than pride, the habit of a soul that began by feeling only the weal and woe of its own body.

What does Santayana mean by calling the American ‘an idealist working on matter’?

That American energy is idealism spent on material tasks, not greed. The American imagination is intense but practical: its future is immediate, and it thinks in number, measure, contrivance, economy and speed. Understanding what things can be made to do, the American is successful in invention, conservative in reform and quick in emergencies, which is exactly why visitors mistake him for a materialist.

What is the ‘absolute liberty’ that English liberty asks people to surrender?

The liberty to be left alone, neither interfered with nor helped: the primeval desire of every wild animal, barbarous tribe, jealous city or religion to go its own way. Santayana calls it impracticable, since you may disregard your environment but cannot escape it. Yet he grants that it created what cooperation can only diffuse: inspiration, uncompromising conviction and the artist’s uncontaminated perfection.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Two Teachers: James and Royce

How much of a philosophy is its author’s temperament? Santayana studied under both men, then taught beside them, and he answers with portraits as much as with arguments.

James appears as a psychologist of genius whose gift for describing experience led him to treat experience as the only reality, so that truth became a matter of what a belief does for the life that holds it. Royce is the idealist for whom the universe was finally one all-knowing mind, a whole that had somehow to take in evil as one of its parts. Santayana, a naturalist, followed neither: the chapters are affectionate, exact and unconverted, and they are the fullest record he left of his teachers before his memoirs.

  • pragmatism
  • psychology
  • empiricism
  • idealism
  • truth
  • epistemology
  • consciousness
  • pantheism
  • problem of evil
  • american philosophy
  • will

Enter a dialogue

The American as an Idealist at Material Tasks

Why does a people so devoted to ideals look to every visitor like a nation of materialists? Because, Santayana answers, American idealism had been put to work.

American life rested, on his diagnosis, on a Protestant conscience carried into a new land and turned upon it. The moral energy survived the crossing; what changed was its object. The typical American spent his ideals on building, earning and improving, so an observer who saw only the results took him for a materialist, when what drove him was closer to a duty. Santayana set the diagnosis down eight years after leaving for good, and the book reads as a valediction: written about a country he knew intimately and never saw again.

  • american identity
  • american culture
  • national character
  • materialism
  • individualism
  • religion
  • tradition
  • education
  • modernity
  • democracy

Enter a dialogue

English Liberty: Freedom Among the Like-Minded

Can freedom work without a deep agreement underneath it? The closing chapter argues that the liberty England sent to America was never the right to do as one likes, but a habit of settling things together.

English liberty, as Santayana describes it, is made of cooperation, compromise and consent. A minority yields to a majority, and nobody treats the defeat as a catastrophe, because the parties share far more than the question dividing them. That is its strength and its limit: such a freedom is workable only among people who already agree on most things. What looks like tolerance rests on a large prior likeness, and the person whose difference goes to the root finds that the arrangement has no room for him.

  • liberty
  • freedom
  • cooperation
  • democracy
  • political philosophy
  • individualism
  • tradition

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
170
distinct concepts
401
by passages held, corpus-wide
#388

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “epistemology” and “truth”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 89 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
epistemologytruth7
democracyindividualism5
epistemologyidealism5
epistemologypsychology5
pragmatismtruth4
epistemologypragmatism3
epistemologyreligion3
idealismpragmatism3
pragmatismreligion3
democracypragmatism2
individualismpragmatism2
pragmatismpsychology2
psychologyreligion2
psychologytruth2
democracyreligion1
idealismreligion1
idealismtruth1
individualismpsychology1
individualismreligion1
religiontruth1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1896 The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory

    The earliest of Santayana's prose books, following a volume of sonnets, and the one he later dismissed most bluntly; the psychological method it relies on is one his later philosophy moved away from.

     EN
  2. 1900 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

    Essays that carry the approach of The Sense of Beauty over from art to religion, and first set out the reading of religion as imaginative truth that The Life of Reason would develop at length.

     EN
  3. 1905 The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress

    His chief work from the Harvard years and the fullest statement of his moral philosophy; the Realms of Being, published two decades later, supply the account of knowledge and existence that lies beneath it.

     EN
  4. 1910 Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe

    Lecture-hall criticism from his last Harvard years, testing on three poets the claim of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion that poetry at its height is philosophy made vivid.

     EN
  5. 1913 Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion

    A companion to Character and Opinion in the United States, which returns to the American subject of its closing essay; the rest of the book weighs the philosophies then in fashion, from Bergson to Russell.

     EN
  6. 1915 Egotism in German Philosophy

    Written in Oxford during the First World War, it turns Santayana's long quarrel with idealism into a charge against a national tradition; the realism behind it gets its full statement in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
  7. 1920 Character and Opinion in the United States you are here EN
  8. 1922 Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies

    The short pieces of the English years, standing between the wartime Egotism in German Philosophy and the system that begins the next year with Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
  9. 1923 Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy

    Announced by its subtitle as the doorway to the late system, it sets out the two terms that the four Realms of Being then build on: essence and animal faith.

     EN
  10. 1923 The Unknowable

    One short lecture, given in the year Scepticism and Animal Faith appeared, that carries the book's theory of knowledge into an argument with Herbert Spencer.

     EN
  11. 1925 Dialogues in Limbo

    His philosophy in dialogue form, published in the years between the introduction to his late system and its first volume.

     EN
  12. 1927 Platonism and the Spiritual Life

    Published seven months before the system's first volume, a first sketch of the spiritual life that The Realm of Spirit would treat at length in 1940.

     EN
  13. 1927 The Realm of Essence

    Here the late system proper begins: the first of the four Realms of Being, giving full treatment to the vocabulary introduced in Scepticism and Animal Faith.

     EN
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works