ABSTRACT
Santayana's first vivid sense of the war reached him in London. Santayana remarked repeatedly that the war had so upset him that he could not work properly. He was abandoning The Realms of Being for the duration; yet despite distraction, he finished what many another writer would consider a lot. The heightened emotion resulting from the war caused him to revert to his favorite poetic form, the sonnet. Santayana's most substantial war work was Egotism in German Philosophy; begun in 1915 and completed in 1916, together with Soliloquies in England, many of which were published in periodicals during the war, then collected with Later Soliloquies in 1922. Santayana reserves a special irony for Fichtes theory of race. For Fichte, "The present age stands precisely in the middle of earthly time, between the era in which men were still self-seeking, earthly, and impulsive, and the coming era in which they will live for the sake of pure ideals.
