Santayana also rejected the attempt to justify the human interest in beauty, especially the often costly interest in artistic beauty, by claiming that it contributes to morality; for Santayana, morality is concerned with the removal of the evils of life, and thus exists only to facilitate the wider enjoyment of the positive pleasures of life, epitomized by beauty. In his second main work on aesthetics,
Reason in Art, the fourth volume of his 1905–1906
Life of Reason, Santayana added that by the ability to adopt an aesthetic attitude and thus find beauty almost anywhere in nature, on the one hand, and by the ability to create art, on the other, we can augment our positive pleasure in life. In this work he also emphasized that the various arts have all arisen from the ordinary and natural activities of human beings, thus adding a pragmatist element to his naturalism and preparing the way for the later work of John Dewey.
Santayana's thesis that morality exists to remove the evils that stand in the way of the enjoyment of the positive pleasure of beauty anticipates the famous statement of G.
