Santayana's Peirce

A considered reexamination of Santayana's exposure to Peirce's thought and a comparison of his views with those of Peirce leads to a cautious acceptance that Santayana was influenced by Peirce, perhaps more than he realized. To what extent and in what respects Santayana was influenced is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine but it is conjectured that Peirce's discussion of icons, indexes, and symbols in a 1903 Harvard Lecture was a watershed moment for Santayana. Kerr-Lawson has speculated that Peirce's lecture may have set Santayana on the path to the substrative ontology of his realm of matter and possibly toward his conception of symbolic knowledge. Yet it seems likely that Peirce's ideas were only prompts and stimulants for Santayana as he followed a path of his own making.