Santayana, George
Santayana, George ( 1863 – 1952 ),a Spaniard brought up in Boston and educated at Harvard, where he taught philosophy from 1889 to 1912 ; he then came to Europe, living in France and England and later in Italy, where he died. He was a speculative philosopher, of a naturalist tendency and opposed to German idealism, whose views are embodied in his The Life of Reason ( 1905 – 6 ). He holds that the human mind is an effect of physical growth and organization; but that our ideas, though of bodily origin, stand on a higher and non-material plane; that the true function of reason is not in idealistic dreams but in a logical activity that takes account of facts. He analyses religious and other institutions, distinguishing the ideal element from its material embodiment. Thus the wisdom embodied in the ritual and dogmas of religion is not truth about existence, but about the ideals on which mental strength and...
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