Some Key Moments in Santayana’s Philosophy of Transcendence and How These Relate to James

One of the great fallacies that permeates previous scholarship on Santayana and James involves concentrating exclusively on James’s Palmer letter and how Santayana reacts to it in a letter of his own. This chapter begins by examining how the Palmer letter relates to Santayana’s implicit allusions to James in Interpretations, something James clearly perceived. I then move on to examine some of the ways in which Santayana continues to use this approach in Three Philosophical Poets, Scepticism, and Realms. This chapter also further expands on the ideas of the last chapter by explicitly contrasting some of James’s statements about Saint Teresa and Saint John of the cross in Varieties with those of Santayana in Realms. Santayana’s distinction between “psyche” and “spirit” along with his coining of the term “literary psychology,” all allow him to develop a critical perspective on James that also preserve the latter’s great insights in psychology.