Santayana and the lessons of history

This "Notes from the Field" feature by Rodney Carlisle, Rutgers University, appeared in The Historian (subscription required), quarterly journal of Phi Alpha Theta National History Honor Society. In it he wrote,

"For a generation or more, historians and statesmen appeared to agree on one famous aphorism, a quote from the Spanish philosopher, George Santayana (1863–1952), one-time professor at Harvard (1889–1912). The oft quoted phrase was: 'Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it.'
...
"Many historians writing major works during the period from the 1920s into the 1980s (and even later) found it appropriate to quote Santayana’s now famous aphorism, as it articulated the historians’ belief that history was 'relevant' even as times changed.

However, through these decades, no statesman, nor any historian of whom I am aware, actually provided a specific citation to the works of Santayana, making it exceedingly difficult for the reader of a work or the listener to a speech to review what it was that Santayana had said by examining the phrase within the context of the philosopher’s remarks. ..."

My own online searching likewise found no example of the phrase being quoted with its context.

Professor Carlisle tracked down that context to Santayana's The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905–1906), Volume I: Reason in Common Sense, Chapter XII: "Flux and Constancy in Human Nature" online at Project Gutenburg. He then consulted a print edition to find its page numbers. The relevant passage apparently is in a "Sidenote: Continuity necessary to progress" at the end of that chapter, pp. 290-91.

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical, repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp."

After reading Professor Carlisle's piece, it struck me that while he did an internet search, he did not specifically check Wikiquote. Nor had I. It turns out that the entry for George Santayana includes the quote and indicates its source. As for context, the two preceding sentences are included. That Wikiquote page's revision history pages indicate it has attributed the quote to this volume by Santayana since at least 4 September 2003. It still appears no one repeating the oft-quoted sentence on the internet had provided any citation or put it in context prior to Professor Carlisle's Note.

See Santayana, Lucretius and Goethe's Faust from Three Philosophical Poets, at Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) volume 10.