Aims of this Site: A George Santayana Home Page was introduced in 1996 to honor the work of philosopher and critic, George Santayana. The editor of this site wished in particular to demonstrate the consistency of definition and doctrine found in Santayana's corpus of philosophical writings. As the quotations gathered here tend to show, this level of consistency is remarkable, especially in light of the facts that Santayana published technical philosophical essays and books over a period of almost sixty years, and that his point of vantage varied over time between a frank humanism, a foundational naturalism, and an all-enveloping ontological vision. In the year of his death, Santayana remarked that ". . . I have . . . been surprised to find 'The Life of Reason' so much like my later views." Letters '55 at 429 ("To John Hall Wheelock, February 23, 1952").
While the aim described above dominated the early development of this site, it has not been so strong as to preclude a good bit of straying over the years. A significant number of pages here posted gather quotations that might prove useful to those who are assigned excerpted bits of Santayana's writings in introductory philosophy or western civilization courses. The pages on "Terminology," and on "Isms," for example, fall into this category, as do the quotations gathered under "Law & Government," "Reason and Spirit," "British Philosophy," and "False Steps in Philosophy." On these pages the editor has not consciously presented evidence of consistency between early and later writings, though he is confident that with a modicum of effort continuity could be demonstrated. So long as full-text searchable, critical editions of Santayana's works are not widely available, the editor will likely continue to stray from the main goal of this web site, sporadically posting new topical pages of quotations as the mood dictates.
A George Santayana Home Page offers seventeen pages of quotations falling under five broad categories: definitions, nature of philosophy, mind / body, moral philosophy, and criticism.
Scholarship: Beyond the difficulty faced by all composers of personal home pages of finding time to develop pages and to edit thoroughly those that are "published" to the internet, the editor of this site has faced an additional difficulty that must be confessed to the reader: this site has not been compiled with critical editions of the works of Santayana in hand. Not very many critical editions of Santayana's major works have been completed, and those critical editions that have been published are expensive. While the Triton edition might serve to standardize citations for the bulk of Santayana's writings—at least until the publication of a complete set of critical editions appears and is widely distributed, the Triton edition itself is fairly inaccessible to even the most dedicated student of Santayana, and, of course, it does not reprint a number of Santayana's important later books. Under these constraints the editor has simply gathered his working copies from local used book stores on the theory that these inexpensive volumes will likely be the volumes held by those who still read Santayana for pleasure. In the citation following each quotation, the editor has provided the copyright date of the edition used, and has added parenthetically the chapter from which each quotation has been taken. It is hoped that with this information, even holders of other editions might still have a reasonable chance of locating Santayana's language.
Quotations appearing on chronologically organized pages of this web site are listed according to the approximate date of first publication, rather than by the copyright date of the edition cited.
The editor has not yet adopted the abbreviations of Santayana's works that are recommended by the Santayana Society, though this is certainly an effort worth undertaking at some point. Rather, the editor has posted an inexpert "bibliography" to the site, which serves more as a list of abbreviations than as a scholarly compilation or a dependable finding tool.
Technology: This site is developed using a recent version of WAMP on a Windows XP workstation. The MYSQL table structure used to generate pages is too flat at the moment, but the editor hopes to remedy this ill before the next posting, 17 April 2008. The DTD used in 2007 is HTML 4.01 strict, coded using Notepad. Cascading style sheets are used modestly, and a few "include" files make life easier. Design and navagability are addressed using Mozilla Firefox, and its free add-on, Web Developer 1.1.3. The static pages necessary for posting to America Online are generated from the dynamic site by use of a Visual Basic script.
Recent Developments: At the ten-year anniversary of the posting of this site to the World Wide Web, the main page was redesigned, this detailed description of the site and its history was added, some additional quotations were provided, and various "Editor's Introduction" pages were expanded. Additonally, the guest book was closed due to abuse by spammers. For 2007, the editor has posted pages of "New Quotations," and "All Citations," and revised the page of "External Links." He has also added quotations, expanded some introductions, removed a number of typographical errors, added entries to the bibliography, attempted to normalize citation practices across the site, and cleaned up style sheets. Letters are now sorted by the date each was written, rather than the date published in book form. Eventually the same should be done for posthumously published collections of essays.
Thank You: The editor of A George Santayana Home Page extends his thanks to the viewers who have accessed this site, to those who have submitted comments to the now-defunct guestbook, and to those who have offered constructive criticism and shared so many interesting questions and thoughts by email.