ABSTRACT
The link that Santayana made between natural science and the other disciplines is forged by nature and by his doctrine of dialectic. The prominence of the term "dialectic" derives from his contempt for logic, which he had found to be a tautology, as he remarked, for it proved only what it set out to prove. Dialectic and physics, both based in materiality, thus achieve a common result, Santayana decides; yet we must question whether by his own account they do in reality achieve that common result. Mechanics, he argues, is the "best part" of physics because mathematics predominates and supplies the whole of understanding wherever understanding results. The discussion of "Mechanism" in Reason in Science clears away some of the opacity in Santayana's section on history, and is the occasion for some of his most cogent analysis.
