SOURCE: "Vaihinger," in Physical Order and Moral Liberty: Previously Unpublished Essays of George Santayana, edited by John and Shirley Lachs, Vanderbilt University Press, 1969, pp. 305-14.

In the following essay, which remained unpublished during the author's lifetime, Santayana discusses Immanual Kant's influence on Vaihinger.

In the year 1888 at the University of Berlin, I remember hearing Georg Simmel delicately describe ten different philosophies, each of which professed to distil the central and only valid meaning of the Kantian revolution. Of these systems perhaps the most incisive was that of Vaihinger, which has now been re-edited and sensationally set before the public as the "Philosophy of the As If," or as we might say in modern English, or rather American, the Philosophy of Bluff.

Vaihinger admits that in the wisdom of the Sage of Koenigsberg bluff was not the only ingredient; but he collects a hundred pages—by far the most...