Philosopher and critic. Reacting against the promotion of RB as a philosophical guide at the end of the nineteenth century, Santayana argues, influentially, that he is essentially irrational. His work is based on passion rather than intelligence, superficial realism rather than an ideal, selective assertion about religion rather than a coherent religious view. He engages the reader ‘by the pithiness of his phrase, the volume of his passion, the vigour of his moral judgment, the liveliness of his historical fancy’; but it is ‘no less true … that we are in the presence of a barbaric genius, of a truncated imagination, of a thought and an art inchoate and ill-digested, of a volcanic eruption that tosses itself quite blindly and ineffectually into the sky’ (Santayana [1900], p. 115). The style is ‘weighty without nobility’, the metaphysical discussion shows ‘confused prolixity and absence of result’ (pp. 115–16). His heroes are usually ‘blinded by passion and warped by circumstance’, a fact that he ‘does not describe … from the vantage-ground of the intellect. … On the contrary, his art is all self-expression or satire’ (p. 117).