SOURCE: "Shelley: Or the Poetic Value of Revolutionary Principles," in Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926, pp. 155–85.

Santayana was a Spanish-born philosopher, poet, novelist, and literary critic. His earliest published works were the poems of Sonnets, and Other Verses (1894). Although Santayana is regarded as no more than a fair poet, his facility with language is one of the distinguishing features of his later philosophical works. Written in an elegant, non-technical prose, Santayana's major philosophical work of his early career is the five-volume Life of Reason (1905–06). These volumes reflect their author's materialist viewpoint applied to such areas as society, religion, art, and science, and, along with Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and the four-volume Realms of Being (1927–40), put forth the view that while reason undermines belief in anything, an irrational animal faith suggests the existence of a "realm of essences" which leads to the human search...