George Santayana

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George Santayana (Ethics (Ready Reference series))

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A materialist and a gentle skeptic, George Santayana expressed himself as sensitively in his extensive formal and philosophical writings as he did in his poetry and novels. Pushing doubt as far as he could, he ended his explorations believing that everything could be doubted except, possibly, faith. Such “animal faith” sprang, he explained, from humankind’s survival instincts. Santayana’s somewhat Platonic ideal world arose from primitive magic and science and took a higher form in religion. The ethics that he derived from his philosophizing were...

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• George Santayana (Cyclopedia of World Authors)
• George Santayana (Ethics (Ready Reference series))
• George Santayana (World Philosophers and Their Works)

See Also:

• Last Puritan, The (Masterplots Classics)
• Last Puritan, The (Character Profiles)
• Last Puritan, The (Literary Places)
• Life of Reason, The (Philosophy)
• Scepticism and Animal Faith (Masterplots Classics)
• Sense of Beauty, The (Philosophy)