AN UNHISTORICAL MIND
317
vision of experience. Nor is Santayana, like Adams, attempting to set
his personal history in
contra~t
to the history of his age, and so to
give that age its particular place in history. In contrast with these
writers Santayana is, to repeat, but turning graciously the pages of an
album. The contrast with Adams is particularly illuminating, partly
because they both touch upon somewhat similar themes in Amer–
ican life, but perhaps chiefly because the sense of history which
makes Adams's work important is a quality which Santayana's mind
has conspicuously lacked. What lies behind his extraordinary dislike
of Hegel if not a hatred of historicism? No doubt Hegel, one of the
wildest of the wild men in the history of philosophy, does deserve
every one of Santayana's censures; but we cannot forget either that
Hegel in giving philosophic expression to that particular sense of
history which was born in the early nineteenth century was actual–
ly bringing something new (and in its way
decisi~e)
into philosophy;
and he himself was to bear great fruit in his opposition: without
Hegel, neither Marx nor Kierkegaard. So that what we are today
we are partly because of Hegel: the modern mind (if we have one)
is historical. That is one
rea~on
why Santayana, even in his best
writing, seems-like his style, so consciously a "style," so carefully
weighted and balanced, through which the irregular and living voice
never seems to break- remote from us.
As
compared with Adam'>, there are, of course, special reasons
for this lack in Santayana. Adams was a Yankee of the old ruling
stock, and his isolation from America and his time became the resent–
ment of the heir being displaced. Santayana, on the other hand, was
a complete outsider from the start; a Spaniard brought up in Puritan
and genteel Boston, who cannot suppress even at his present age, an
amazingly romantic sigh of regret that he did not receive his educa–
tion in Spain, which would have been empty, he admits, but at least
full of gallantry and poetry! Did the Genteel Tradition, which he
despised and criticized so sharply, nevertheless really imprison him?
The idea is tempting; we need not support it here beyond citing one
large example; his
R eason in Society,
which, if it is not exactly the
Genteel Tradition in politics, is as near this as an intelligence so
otherwise politically sceptical as Santayana's could come. The so–
ciety it deals with belongs to the academic cloister and not to the
world of 1905, when it appeared. Moreover, in his previous writings
and the present autobiography the observations of American life are
drawn from the middle-class surface or from within the academic
pale; occasionally even, we feel that some of these perceptions are a
little stock. We are really surprised when we read in the autobio-
