He might therefore have had the same philosophy if he had lived before Kant and Hume. But we cannot say as much of the three men whom he really admires: Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza. Plato, especially, is woven into the very texture of his thought. I do not know what his outlook would have been if he had been a contemporary of Heraclitus, but it would not have been the outlook which in fact he has.
So much for the past. As for the future, will it be "the same sky"? In Mr Wells' When the Sleeper Awakes, London has a roof, it eschews daylight, and has only electric lamps; the Londoner never sees the stars, or even the sun and moon; he knows nothing of "the sweet approach of even or morn." Such a man would not have Mr Santayana's philosophy, or any other that is proved by "the stars, the seasons, the swarm of animals." Yet future man will presumably be such, unless industrialism destroys itself.
Mr Santayana's system, therefore, though not bound to the present moment or to any one Western country, belongs to the Hellenic tradition created by Plato and in process of destruction by modern science; it belongs to about two thousand years of Western Europe, and could not have been produced (short of a miracle) in another age or continent. Of course, I include America in Western Europe for this purpose.
Mr Santayana holds—and in this I agree with him—that all our beliefs are matters of faith rather than reason. Applying the method of Cartesian doubt, he finds no reason to stop short at the ego, or any other existing thing; he arrives at last at "essence," which he holds to be indubitable but non-existent. The essence of a thing, in his system, is its character, apart from the fact that it exists; there are innumerable essences which do not belong to any existing thing, such as "golden mountain," "phoenix," "unicorn." There is no room for scepticism here; so he contends, because essence is free, not wedged tight among rivals, like the things that exist. But a philosophy which wholly ignores the existing world is somewhat unsatisfactory; moreover, like Hume's doubts, it must be abandoned when the philosopher leaves his study.
"Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through a long youth, until at last, in
