Peirce’s concise review of santayana’s the life of reason

Charles S. Peirce reviewed the first two volumes of George Santayana’s The Life of Reason for the June 8, 1905 edition of The Nation. Santayana’s publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, advertised the five-volume series of The Life of Reason as having a place in the line of American Pragmatism. Peirce’s review penetrated basic tenets of The Life of Reason and discounted Santayana’s Pragmatist credentials. His concise Nation review followed upon a handwritten manuscript (R 1494) in which he addressed Santayana’s Pragmatism in critical perspective on the philosophic life of the times. These two Peircean texts, the extant portions of which are presented here in full, came in the aftermath of his Cambridge and Lowell Lectures that expanded his earlier Pragmatism to Pragmaticism in tandem with innovative speculations on the normative sciences and a grammatology of semiotics. Santayana attended the third Cambridge Lecture; years later he commented on Peirce’s “unacademic personality” while waffling on Peirce’s possible influence on his doctrine of symbols.