George Santayana Spanish - American philosopher 1863-1952

What novelty my version of things may possess is meant simply to obscure occasions for sophistry by giving to everyday beliefs a more accurate and circumspect form. I do not pretend to place myself at the heart of the universe nor at its origin, nor to draw its periphery. I would lay siege to the truth only as animal exploration and fancy may do so, first from one quarter then from another, expecting the reality to be not simpler than my experience of ot, but for more extensive and complex. I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise. I accept the same miscellaneous witnesses, bow to the same obvious facts, make conjectures no less instinctively, and admit to the same encircling ignorance.


No language or logic is right in the sense of being identical with the facts it is used to express, but each may be right by being faithful to these facts, as a translation may be faithful. My endeavor is to think straight in such terms as are offered me, to clear my mind of can't and free it from the cramps of articficial traditions; but but I do not ask anyone to think in my terms if he prefers others. Let him clean better, if he can, the windows of his soul, that the variety and beauty of the prospect may spread more brightly before him.

... I prize their sharp criticism of one another and their several discoveries; the trouble is that each in turn has denied or forgotten a much more important truth than it has asserted.

My system accordingly, is no system of the universe. The realms of being of which I speak are not parts of a cosmos, nor one great cosmos together. They are only kinds or categories of things which I find conspicuously different and worth distinguishing. I do not know how many things in the universe at large May fall under each of these classes, nor what other realms of being may not exist, to which I have no approach or which I have not happened to distinguish in my personal observation of the world. Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversity of things.

Learning does not liberate men from superstition when their souls are cowed or perplexed; and, without learning, clear eyes and honest reflection can discern the hang of the world, and distinguish the edge of truth from the might of imagination. In the past or in the future, my language and my borrowed knowledge would have been different, but under whatever sky I had been born, since it is the same sky, I should have had the same philosophy.

Exerpts from the obscure essay - on philosophy by George Santayana