Epifanio de los Santos (1871 – 1928)
Sometimes known as Don Pa?ong or Don Panyong, was a Filipino humanist historian, literary critic, art critic, jurist, prosecutor, antiquarian, scholar, painter, musician, musciologist, philosopher, philologist, archivist, journalist, chief-editor, bibliographer, paleographer, ethnographer, biographer, civil servant and patriot.
Among the new bibliographers, Sr. Epifanio de los Santos, a young scholar with great culture, stood at the head; he possessed more than 2,000 titles, some of them were very rare.
He was, in the early twentieth century, the country's most eminent biographer and literary scholar.
All of us here are servants of the reading public. I am the head of the servants and I must show that I know better than any of the servants where the materials are found. I want to show that our service here is efficient and that we are really working to serve.
Epifanio de los Santos was a genius, with all the great spontaneity and fire, and all the almost analyzable complexity of such a spirit. … His scholarship was profound. … Yet he was no mere pedant. He was never solemn. He was too wise to take life too seriously. He was always jovial and good company. He was something of a sensualist and liked good food and drink. But he had moments of sadness, and there were times when he drank not for pleasure, but for surcease.
He had a passion for historical accuracy, saying that it is useless to write when one is not sure of the facts. It will only be adding confusion to an already confused world.
When I left the University of Santo Tomas, I had but a smattering of Spanish. My friends made sport of me. What keen mortification did I suffer at my ignorance! One day, no longer able to stand the jeerings of my friends, I made up my mind to learn Spanish. I purchased a dozen good novels and began to read. I did not spend hours over a grammar, but just kept on reading, taking care to remember the idioms. In the meantime my library grew. At the end of three years my knowledge of Spanish and of literature in general was far beyond that of my friends. It was then my turn to laugh!
To be a worthy biographer of Senor de los Santos you would have to be his equal, so that remains a thing undone perhaps undoable, but that admiration he feels for his countrymen---the very best--other feels for him and they have crowned him as a leader in the path of scholarship.
He taught us by example to place little emphasis on personal material gain...his aim was to bequeath to posterity the riches of his brain and the wealth of his soul.
( As Assistant Director of Technical Census)...He exhibited his astute powers of observation and astonished all his associates with that endurance for continued effort seldom equalled but never surpassed by men of even younger years.
Epifanio de los Santos, greatest connoisseur of Filipiniana, foremost Filipino historian and biographer, and the first Filipino to become member of the Spanish Academy of Letters.
Religion is one thing, and science another. What if they conflict? Religion is a matter of faith. Faith always gives satisfaction, whereas the truth does not always do so. As for me, I follow Anatole France who enjoins us to keep religion in one compartment of our head and skepticism in another.
One of the best product of the 20th century Renaissance in Philippine arts and letters, Don Epifanio de los Santos y Cristobal exemplified the intellectual gentlemen whose passion for knowledge and the arts paralleled his life long existence.
..we were not aware of this and the seditious character of the poem (Balagtas' Florante and Laura) until Epifanio de los Santos discovered and pointed them out
,,,powerful intelligence, a formidable receptacle of culture and gifted with words.
Lazy geniuses! There are no such men. Laziness and genius never go hand in hand. Each excludes the other. Laziness is the best proof of the absence of genius.
We Filipinos are the most promising people in the world. We have unheard-of-possibilities. There have never been a people similarly situated. Here we are in the Orient with our Oriental thoughts and sentiments, but living amid a civilization more Western than was ever known in The East. The Philippines is the only country where East meets West. The Filipino is a true cosmopolitan. From him the world may expect something new and distinctive.
( ...philosophy is more often the systematization of the prejudices of philosophers than the systematization of nature.) Distrust all generalizations: stick to the concrete.
He was both great, and very, very human.
If by sticking to the moral principles you have followed all your life, you jeopardize your happiness and that of others, throw over your principles. Principles for principles' sake -that is not wisdom; that is obstinacy. Principles should be fluid because life is fluid."
It is not strange that Menendez Pelayo should discover the Filipino scholar because in brains and heart they were the same.