Word: materialist
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...forced upon Santayana the mind of the wandering student, it had also made him a solitary. As a boy he played no games, and in all his life he never used a typewriter, or drove an automobile, or danced. He never married. An esthete and a skeptic, a materialist and a poet, a hedonist but of few pleasures, Santayana's mind might have been paralyzed by its conflicts had he not built for himself a sort of monastery of beautiful prose, which was greatly admired by the literary if it was sometimes suspected by philosophers. Santayana's first...
THERE was really nothing mysterious about Santayana's line: he was a psychologist rather than a philosopher. Like the early Greeks, he was a strict materialist who used philosophy to organize the world in a practical way. He had the profound Spanish belief in the vital part to be played by custom. What he aimed at was the discovery of a civilized and permissible attitude toward life. So he saw religion as a useful myth, not because it makes men moral, but because it civilizes them. He enjoyed mocking American. English and German Protestants for their rigid dismissal...
Second, readers Viglielmo and Russell may applaud "the unseating of secularism," but there are many others--some of whom approve preaching materialist philosophies, and some who detect no signs of such preaching in public schools--who prefer to sit on their hands. The question, however one answers it, concerns a highly private matter, one's philosophy of life, and there are almost as many answers as there are citizens. Why, on such an issue, should the state decide for each individual that a spiritual vacuum actually does exist, that there is only one thing that can fill it, and that...
...which, by your terms, public education is best carried on. In making this assumption you seem to forget that by excluding the influence of religious values in public education you are, in effect, advocating the further extension of that philosophy which now dominates the public school system, namely: materialist secularism. It is ironic indeed that the CRIMSON should be concerned lest other philosophies intrude into a system of public education in which one philosophy, the same secularism, already has free rein. Is not this a limitation of freedom...
Third, there is the accusation that public schools are preaching a materialist philosophy. If they were, we would oppose such an action just as strongly as we oppose encouraging religion by means of public school machinery. But the logic in suggesting that the absence of one philosophy necessarily means the presence of another escapes us. In fact, it would be a great surprise to find that secondary education, which after all deals with elementary subjects, deals with so large and advanced a topic as philosophy of life at all. One can teach English, Mathematics, Languages, History and so on without...