The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

Turning at last to his native United States, Durant finds that one America looks with fondness toward its European (especially English) forebears and sees their own country as an extension of its culture and traditions. The other America fiercely rejects such foreign influences, seeing America alone as a source worth cultivating and preferring the common sense of the average man to the refined wisdom of the continental aristocrat.

Turning first to George Santayana, a Spanish immigrant, Durant presents him as part of a dying breed of Europeanized American philosophers. A poet as well as a philosopher, Santayana came to prominence for his multivolume work The Life of Reason, after which he left the United States for England. In his work Skepticism and Animal Faith, Santayana describes “animal faith” as denoting beliefs which may not be correct, but which are nonetheless valuable in reflecting a universal and ineradicable human impulse. Everyone must rely on all manner of information beyond their sensory perception, or else life is simply impossible to manage.

There can in fact be a happy union between reason and instinct, with science providing “merely a shorthand description of regularities observed in our experience, rather than ‘laws’ governing the world and guaranteed unchangeable” (536).