AN UNHISTORICAL MIND
319
At the age of eight Santayana left his father in Spain and came
to live with his mother in Boston, in the bosom of the Sturgis family,
into which she had entered by her first marriage. What were the rela–
tions between mother and son in this environment foreign to both?
Here the veil is drawn: the mother is presented in her own person
but not the mother in relation to her son. But where the veil is drawn,
the reader, curious and fascinated, is led to his own conjectures.
One notices, for example, in this book written by a man of eighty,
in which Santayana's habitual sharpness and arrogance are mitigated
almost everywhere into an unusual tenderness, that in writing of his
father he cannot escape letting creep in here and there a certain note
of
exasperation.
And one is al<;o led to speculate on the possible con–
nection between
thi~
self-possessed and possessing woman who pos–
sessed two husbands and the fact that no other woman appears so
far in a sexual relation to the author although his narrative carries
him thus far through college into post-graduate study.
Apart from such deeper and more; universal regions of influence
where we must in any case speculate, one detects here and there traces
of the parents in the child. Santayana seems to have some of the
peculiarly Spanish characteristics of the mother: the sombre pride
and arrogance, the self-sufficiency and self-possession; and some of
her cold energy and determination too, considering the solid body
of work he has behind him. It is natural, on the other hand, that
the traces of his father should appear in the more articulate, external
and casu,al aspects of his personality. In his constant profession of
detachment; in the continued disavowal of the drudgery of the pro–
fessional scholar-he tells us here that he has always looked on phi–
losophy chiefly as his own peculiar medium of art, he has loved it
for the poetry of it; and, generally, in the life he has led since leaving
America we are reminded altogether of the refined gentleman, the
amateur in retirement: his father.
It
is not any illicit intent to compromise the philosophy by the auto–
biog~aphy
that leads us grubbing into the philosopher's private life.
The ·intervention of the personality in the philosophy is something
Santayana himself has accepted and indeed exploited as very eloquent
rhetoric. Wllat he believes as a philosopher is given a deep and moving
resonance by being represented as an outcome of the natural man:
being what he ·was, he could not believe otherwise, and opposing
systems were either self-deception or artificial pose. But of what is the
natural man an outcome? "Nothing in the psychic life," Freud says,
"is arbitrary or undetermined." The philosopher who spins his dia–
lectic was once the child that whimpered; which recognition may
