Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/280

 262 Later Philosophy philosophy is religion rationalized, and those (a smaller but perhaps growing number) to whom philosophy is a scientific method of dealing with certain general ideas. To the former a combination of atheistic Catholicism and anti-puritanic, non- democratic, aesthetic morality, lacking withal in missionary enthusiasm, typifies almost all that is abhorrent. To the scientific group Santayana is just a speculative poet who may value science very highly but does so as a well-groomed gentle- man who knows it at a polite distance, afraid to soil his hands with its grimy details. ' These judgments illustrate the great tragedy of modern philosophy. In view of the enormous ex- pansion of modern knowledge and the increased rigour of scien- tific accuracy, the philosopher can no longer pretend to universal knowledge and yet he cannot abandon the universe as his province. Genuinely devoted to philosophy's ancient and humanly indispensable task of drawing a picture or unified plan of the world in which we live, Santayana is willing to abandon the pretension to scientific accuracy and to face the problem as a poet or moralist. But whether because interest in a unified world view is weak and the possession of poetic faculty such as Santayana's uncommon, or whether because philosophy has been too long wedded to logical argumentation and scientific pretensions, the marked tendency is to make philosophy like one of the special sciences, dealing with a limited field and definitely solving problems. As philosophy is thus abandoning its old pretensions to be the sovereign and legislative science — it is no longer taught by the college presi- dent himself — all the fields of concrete information, physics, economics, politics, psychology, and even logic, are parcelled I out among the special sciences and there is nothing left to the I philosopher except the problem as to the nature of knowledge ' itself. On this problem Santayana has some suggestive hints, but no completely elaborated solution. Hence his essential loneliness. But perhaps every true philosopher, like the true poet, is essentially lonely. The latest movement in American philosophy, opposing •, ' Santayana himself speaks of that virtual knowledge of physics which is enough for moral and poetic purposes (Reason in Science, pp. 303-304). Such virtual knowledge does not save him from absurd statements such as that Plato had no physics.