Santayana's Concept of Sympathy and Literary Tradition

Starting from same reflections that Santayana addresses to the literary critic William Bysshe Stein in one of his letters, the aim of this paper is to show that the relationship between Santayana’s concept of sympathy and the concept of sympathy as it was treated in Anglo-American literature is multifaceted and, for this reason, stimulating. This line of comparison leads to the conclusion that Anglo-American literature inherits the major fault of modern philosophy, that one of projecting into the nature concepts and words which do not express the real meaning of sympathy.