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A PHILOSOPHY ANCIENT AND MODERN M. M. KIRKWOOD TWO works have recently heen published which call fresh attention to their author, George Santayana: his third and final volume of autobiography, My Host the World, and a one-volume edition of the early Life of Reason. These round out the picture of his life and mind. Should the intelligent reader have neglected Santayana so far, he might start from either of these volumes and reach into the body of the philosopher's thought. Few authors supply such generous material for the understanding of their message. For his autobiography sets forth the influences which made him what he was; he has produced lyrical poetry that is most revealing; he has written a novel, The Last Puritan, with significant autobiographical elements; and most important, he has at different points in his literary life provided prefaces and introductions to certain books which should furnish short, plain answers to the questions about right and wrong, beauty, and being and reality which recur throughout his work. Most of those who admire this writer are so bewitched by the penetration and sophistication of the writing that they abandon themselves to enjoyment without caring about the puzzles. But Santayana would not have it so. From the first prose volume, The Sense of Beauty (1896), to the last, the revised Life of Reason (1954), he has spoken with the same note-a note of earnest desire to understand the world, and of clear intent to press his understanding home to the reader's mind. The facts of Santayana's life may be briefly reviewed. He was born in Madrid of Spanish parents in December, 1863 (his mother having had children by an earlier marriage to an American husband), and remained in Spain with his father when his mother took the first family to live near her first husband's people. His father brought the little boy at the age of nine to rejoin his mother in Boston where, after the strikingly different social and religious background of Avila, he was educated at the Latin School in Boston and at Harvard University . He renewed his European roots by visits to Avila where his father lived till his death; he later studied in Germany and visited friends in England; he lectured at Harvard from about 1889 until 1912; and lived in Europe from 1912 on- in France, in England, in Spain, and finally in Rome where he died in 1952. I It is perhaps impertinent to comment on the character of this most highly civilized human being, but certain features need stressing if 146 Vol. XXIV, no. 2, Jan., 1955 A PHILOSOPHY ANCIENT AND MODERN 147 the significance of his thought is to be grasped. An interesting light is thrown on Santayana by an early passage in Persons and Places (1944), in the chapter called "I am Transported to America." Here he describes the trip from Bilbao to Cardiff, and comments: I love moving water. I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the con~ centrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humanity and true religion. Our world is a cockleshell in the midst of overwhelming forces and everlasting realities; but those forces are calculable and those realities helpful, if we can manage to understand and obey them. This passage indicates the serious, almost devout cast to the naturalism which dominates Santayana's thought in its every phase. Later in the same chapter, there is an amusing account of how he learned English under the tutelage of his loved half-sister Susana. He memorized verses by rote from a moral book for young children, including He writes: You must not in play Steal the birds away And grieve their mother's breast. The moral of this was wasted on me. . .. I was not a young child ... and if I had an impulse to steal any bird's nest or...

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