LPPM MMV Grossman & Santayana

[Terrance]

Circumstances from the beginning had prepared me to feel this limitation
of all moral dogmatism.  My lot had been cast in different moral
climates, amidst people of more than one language and religion, with
contrary habits and assumptions of their political life.  I was not
bound to any type of society by ideal loyalty nor estranged from any by
resentment. In my personal contacts I found them all tolerable when seen
from the inside and not judged  by some standard unintelligible to those
born and bred under that influence. Personally I might have my
instinctive preference, but speculatively and romantically I should have
been glad to find an even greater diversity; and if one political
tendency kindled my wrath, it was precisely the tendency of industrial
liberalism to level down all civilizations to a single cheap and dreary
pattern.  I was happy to have been at home both in Spain and in New
England and later to have lived pleasantly in England and in various
countries frequented by tourists; even happier to have breathed
intellectually the air of Greece and Rome, and of that Catholic Church
in which the world and its wisdom, without being distorted, were
imaginatively enveloped in another world revealed by inspiration.  All
this was enlightening, if you could escape from it; and I should have
been glad to have been at home also in China and in Carthage, in Baghdad
and Byzantium. Had that been possible, this book could have been written
with more elasticity. It is a hindrance to the free movement of spirit
to be lodged in one point of space rather than another, or in one point
of time:  that is a physical necessity which intelligence endeavors to
discount, since it cannot be eluded.  Seen under the form of eternity,
all ages are equally past and equally future; and it is impossible to
take quite seriously the tastes and ambitions of our contemporaries. 
Everything gently compels us to view human affairs scientifically,
realistically, biologically, as events that arise, with all their
spiritual overtones, in the realm of matter. 

Santayana transcended the chauvinistic claims of the American tradition,
yet he was and American pragmatist.