The Realm of Essence: Book First of Realms of Being
by . New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1927. 8vo. xix+183 pp. $3.50.
HAS anyone ever adequately expressed the debt of present-day readers to George Santayana? Has anyone ever paid fitting tribute to his wonderfully illumined mind, to the books into which he has poured unexcelled beauty of language and moving profundity of thought? His influence has been great, but it seems to have been the influence of parts and fragments of his work rather than of the whole; of an aspect of his writings— the wonderful richness of poetry, wisdom, subtlety, which informs page after page — rather than of the considered philosophical position which his writings exist to define.
Few philosophers have contributed so bountifully to literature, or have offered so much to the reader of general tastes. In his Poems, in Soliloquies in England, in Dialogues in Limbo, are incalculable treasures for any sensitive and reflective mind. But it is only natural that severe difficulties should be presented by the exposition of his philosophy — the matured views of a mind of great spaciousness, acute in the particular problems and methods of the must subtle and sublimated of all human inquiries, the inquiry into the validity and means of knowledge itself and of the universe which it reveals. And the difficulties are at their sharpest in the present volume. The Realm of Essence is the systematic and highly technical discussion of what seems fitted to prove the most difficult and the most remote of all the elements of Mr. Santayana’s philosophy to the general educated reader of to-day. Incidental passages and aphorisms of wonderful discernment, of beauty, or of wit are present in the volume; it would not otherwise be a book by Santayana. But although passages in Mr. Santayana’s poetic and general vein have their part in the book, what has been said of its difficulties as a whole will be illustrated on all but every page.
In the last analysis, Mr. Santayana is a philosopher of ’common sense.’ In Scepticism and Animal Faith he declared, ’I think that common sense, in a rough dogged way, is technically sounder than the special schools of philosophy,’ In the preface to the present volume, he says, ‘The world is old, and can have changed but little since man arose in it, else man himself would have perished. Why, then, should he still live without, a sure and sufficient philosophy? . . . There is actually a dumb human philosophy, incomplete but solid, prevalent among all civilized peoples. They all practise agriculture, commerce, and mechanical arts . . . and they necessarily possess, with these arts, a modicum of sanity, morality, and science requisite for carrying them on, and tested by success in so doing. Is not this human competence philosophy enough? Is it not at least the nucleus of all sound philosophy?' When Mr. Santayana addresses himself to the elucidation of this common sense, he seems, at least to this reviewer, profound, wise, and governed by an exquisite sense of reality. But the metaphysical doctrine of essence, to which the present volume is devoted, seems often at a far cry from this ‘nucleus of all sound philosophy,’ and the reader may not be able to regard it — as much as he understands of it — with the same credulity.
THEODORE MORRISON