The Life of Reason; or, The Phases of Human Progress was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in five volumes between 1905 and 1906: Reason in Common Sense, Reason in Society, Reason in Religion, Reason in Art, and Reason in Science. It was Santayana’s first major philosophical work, written during his years at Harvard, and it remains one of the great monuments of American philosophy.
Santayana’s project is to trace the operation of reason through all the domains of human experience — not the abstract reason of formal logic, but reason understood as the capacity to organize impulse and experience into meaningful patterns. Reason, in this view, is not opposed to feeling but is the intelligent management of feeling: it is what happens when desire becomes purposeful, when appetite becomes art, when fear becomes religion, when curiosity becomes science.
The philosophical position is naturalistic: Santayana rejects all forms of supernaturalism, idealism, and transcendentalism. Human beings are animals whose consciousness is a product of their animal nature, and reason is not a window onto a higher world but a tool for living well in this one. Religion, for example, is not true (there is no God, no afterlife, no providence) but it is valuable — its myths and rituals organize human emotion and aspiration in ways that a purely secular philosophy has not yet learned to replace.
The style is magnificent — Santayana is one of the great prose stylists in the history of philosophy, and The Life of Reason is written with a grace and precision that make its arguments pleasurable to read even when one disagrees with them. The famous aphorism “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” comes from the first volume.
Collecting The Life of Reason
First edition (Scribner’s, New York, 1905–1906): Five volumes, cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, five-volume set, good condition: $300–$800
- Individual volumes: $30–$80 each
- One-volume revised edition (1953): $20–$50