Santayana, Not James

Long, long ago the Mazeppist traded the confused, crypto-theologizing of William James for the imaginative naturalism of George Santayana (who named his thought "wistful materialism"). On rare occasions, I have entertained second thoughts about that choice, but they are quickly dispelled as soon as I review James on "the will to believe."

Santayana was first a student of James at Harvard and later his colleague in the philosophy department. He quickly saw Jamesian wishful thinking for what it was and steered his own thought clear of those shoals.

Unfortunately, the academic study of religion in the United States remains enamored of James and hardly knows Santayana at all. The ghosts of theology continue to haunt American classrooms and professors' studies, just as the American civil religion of divine election and exceptionalism continue to infect our politics.

The "romance" of the Mazeppist's "Romantic Humanism" is rooted in Santayana's appeal to the imagination in such works as Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900):

...profounder minds...commonly yield to the imagination, because it is these minds that are capable of feeling the greatness of the problems of life and the inadequacy of the understanding, with its present resources, to solve them. The same minds are, moreover, often swayed by emotion, by the ever-present desire to find a noble solution to all questions, perhaps a solution already hallowed by authority and intertwined, inextricably, for those who have always accepted it, with the sanctions of spiritual life. Such a coveted conclusion may easily be one which the understanding, with its basis in sense and its demand for verification, may not be able to reach. Therefore the impassioned soul must pass beyond the understanding, or else go unsatisfied; and unless it be as disciplined as it is impassioned it will not tolerate dissatisfaction. From what quarter, then, will it draw the wider views, the deeper harmonies, which it craves? Only from the imagination. [6]

Santayana was an acute critic of Romanticism--as all the great Romantics have been. He spearheaded the "left wing" of Romanticism's "second wave" as it crested in the United States at the close of the 19th century. Wallace Stevens was, perhaps, his truest heir. The Mazeppist has always aspired to stand upon the shoulders of both giants.