To Show The Fly The Way Out Of The Flybottle

"There is a sense in which [William] James was not a philosopher at all. He once said to me: 'What a curse philosophy would be if we couldn't forget all about it!' In other words, philosophy was not to him what it has been to so many, a consolation and sanctuary in a life which would have been unsatisfying without it. It would be incongruous, therefore, to expect of him that he would build a philosophy like an edifice to go and live in for good. Philosophy to him was rather like a maze in which he happened to find himself wandering, and what he was looking for was the way out." --George Santayana (quoted in Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, 1989)