Word: santayana
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...LETTERS OF GEORGE SANTAYANA (451 pp.)-edited by Daniel Cory-Scribner...
Philosophy was George Santayana's shop, and after hours he liked to linger on at the café tables of the mind, sipping moments of beauty and watching the passing show with its persistent drama and recurring vanities. Even if building towers of systematic truths had been congenial to him, Santayana banished it with his basic premise, i.e., "Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything." His letters, edited by his longtime confidant and disciple, Philosopher Daniel Cory, cover 66 years, from the year of his Harvard graduation through the teaching days and European travels to the comfortable room...
Hasty-Pudding Lady. Just how finicky, the 22-year-old Santayana makes plain in the collection's very first letter, as he announces to a friend that he is starting out "avowedly with no other purpose but that of living in order to observe life." Perhaps this spectator role might not have appealed to Santayana so much if a New England chill had not entered his Latin blood when he was transplanted as a boy of eight from his home in Avila, Spain to Boston, Mass. Boston seared his youthful psyche with the indelible brand of the outcast...
...soul immortal? Is Christianity just a passing fad? Is Freud God? Assistant Professor Alston of the University of Michigan will not answer these questions in "Philosphy 190," but he will examine some of the ways in which the phenomenon of religious belief can be interpreted. St. Thomas Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Santayana, and Freud had various views on this topic, and the ideas will all come out in Emerson...
...answers to the question, 'What is religion?' have come trippingly in the 20th century. It is a species of poetry (Santayana); it is a variety of shared experiences (Dewey); it is ethical culture; it is insight into man's nature. (The last is the view of a group that might be called 'Atheists for Niebuhr')." All these views, says White, have one thing in common: the desire "to avoid identifying religion with any claim to knowledge that might have to run the gauntlet of scientific test." Most contemporary thinkers want "to make religion fill...