Abstract

Other philosophers have often found dualism in the thought of George Santayana. The have accused him of, in particular, ontological dualism similar to that of Descartes or Plato, and a dualism of ways of life, an incompatibility between the life of reason of the earlier works and the spiritual or contemplative life of the later works. ;I show that these dualities arise out of the division in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought between science, exemplified by Darwin, and Christianity, that within philosophy between realism and idealism, and divisions within his own family. He abandoned Christianity in his youth and did not find Royce's idealism or James's pragmatism satisfactory. ;His solution to the problem developed through his first three prose works. In The Sense of Beauty, he showed the natural roots of art and the aesthetic sense. In Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, he showed the essential similarity of art and religion. In The Life of Reason, he tackled the main task by bringing together naturalistic science and religion in a philosophy of the complete life. ;He did this by reinterpreting modern science as a continuation of Presocratic proto-science, reinterpreting Christianity as essentially Platonic, and using a principle drawn from Aristotle to unite them, that everything ideal has a natural basis and everything natural has an ideal end. He used axiology, especially ethics, to produce his philosophy of completeness, by judging science and religion each in terms of how and whether each contributed to human well-being. There was in his thought a return to a higher form of the Christianity he had abandoned, because he found an improved version of religion essential to human well-being