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profundity is no more than the set of popular attitudes associated with
terms like "real," "basic," "nature," "universal," "eternal," "fundamen–
tal," and with elementary logical forms like the dilemma and the dis–
guised tautology.
The payoff, of course, is in the definitions, upon which the structure,
with its patches, rests. These, where they are more than simple identities,
are ordinarily compounded about equally of nonsense and reactionary
prejudice. They summon us away from experimental science and the
historical world with which it deals, back-or forward is it now?-to the
; aim of moral, metaphysical and theological absolutes, to the land, that
is, where conduct is imposed by the command of the mighty announced
as "natural law," where thinking for yourself is a sin against the eternal
verities.
Let me display the method by a final quotation:
"Men are by nature born for such freedom [of citizenship], but
nothing else than liberal education can discipline men for the political
use of freedom which is the meaning of citizenship.
"The dilemma we face is as onerous as it
is
inescapable.
Either
all
men who do not have to be put into asylums for their own and the
public welfare can be liberally educated
or
all men do not have enough
intelligence to discharge the duties of citizenship."
This silly dilemma-which, besides, is formally obscure, since the
second half can correctly mean only "some men do not have enough
intelligence to discharge the duties of citizenship," which is not such a
startling possibility-is self-constructed. It is just another way of saying
what is already said in the arbitrary, dogmatic, and unmotivated preced–
ing sentence. But it is offered with all the flourish of some devastating
intellectual discovery.
And, when you think it over, what the whole sequence amounts
to is simply another plug for St. Johns College.
JAMEs BuRNHAM
IDEAS AND MEMORIES
PERSONS AND PLACES: The Background of My Life.
By George
Santayana. Scribners.
$2.50.
S
ANTAYANA speaks in an early chapter of this book of the ironic appro?
priateness of the fact that his own ancestors and those of Spinoza
both lived in the same region of northern Spain. His debt to Spinoza
is indeed very great, and has often been stressed, both by himself and
his commentators. But it is primarily an intellectual debt, like his debt
to the Greeks, and to that extent, perhaps, largely verbal. His decisive
moral tendencies, antedating his philosophic speculations and surviving
his philosophic doubts, have a cultural source. Their prototype is to be
found not iri Spinoza but possibly rather in Cervantes, who, in the very
