ABSTRACT
With Reason in Society, Santayana is more at ease with his material than in his first volume; he relaxes and enjoys himself, putting to work a sociology wonderfully free of jargon. Love, sex, the family, sport, communism, the inequality of women, warfare, ideal government, materialism, nationalism, miscegenation: these are some of his subjects. Santayana distinguishes between prose and poetry by resorting to his earlier words about music and speech. He bids linguistics goodbye when he writes: "language habitually wrests its subject-matter in some measure from its real context and transfers it to a represented and secondary world, the world of logic and reflection". To most readers, Santayana's assessment of fine art in Reason in Art is perhaps his least satisfactory performance. From the standpoint of his philosophy, fine art is inferior to poetry in that it is not rational, nor capable of rationality, as is poetry.
