Santayana and the Genteel Tradition

“A Californian whom I had recently the pleasure of meeting observed that if the philosophers had lived among your mountains, their systems would have been different form what they are. Certainly very different from what those systems are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the center and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert.” (George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” speech presented at the University of California at Berkeley, 1911 – taken from from Deep Ecology, pg 47)