Word: santayana
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Society cf Fellows wherein 24 young superscholars may seek knowledge free from academic or financial care. But thoughtful Harvardmen began to grow uneasy as the Lowell regime lengthened. Columbia was drawing ahead in this department, Chicago in that, Wisconsin in another. Old Harvard faculty giants-Royce, James, Palmer, Norton, Santayana-were dead or retired. Kittredge, Lowes, Copeland, Hocking, Perry were getting on. Where were the men to replace them? President Lowell retired with that question unanswered...
...there is any truth in the Hobbesian maxim that no discourse can end in absolute knowledge of fact, then it is fatuous to paraphrase a philosopher, and reviews of philosophic works are especially futile. Mr. Santayana, furthermore, is the kind of philosopher who seems always to use the right amount of exact words, and thus lends himself to quotation rather than to summary. He needs to be quoted for the vigor of his thought and for the lucidity of his style...
...first essay in this volume is on Locke, "the father of modern psychology," whom Mr. Santayana puts in his place in the history of thought. The second essay is on F. H. Bradley, the sturdy but mistaken moralist, for whom Mr. Santayana, unlike Mr. T. S. Eliot, does not cherish an excessively warm regard. There is, as the third essay, a highly suggestive consideration of the theory of relativity and the new physics. The suspicion is advanced that "even Einstein is an imperfect relativist, and retains Euclidean space and absolute time at the bottom of his calculation, and recovers them...
...essay on Freud, the great Viennese is linked with Hindu philosophy, an astounding, but, it appears, by no means an impossible feat. Mr. Santayana's argument is very plausible and proceeds from Freud's assertion that "the goal of life is death." The concluding essay in this work deals with Julien Benda and the infinite as he propounds it. For his readers Mr. Santayana leaves a query. Are they to think that for Mr. Santayana the infinite is bad, as it was for the Greeks? Answers will vary...
STOUGHTON 7--Both George Santayana, the famous American philosopher, and Charles Townsend Copeland, traditional Harvard character, have lived here...