Word: santayana
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...somehow he managed to come out of it all. He got his Ph.D. at 18, and did graduate work in philosophy under Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Josiah Royce and George Santayana. For a time he vacillated between mathematics and philosophy, finally chose math, with brilliant results. Looking back on his youth, Norbert Wiener tries hard to strike a judicious balance. He still admires the standards of scholarship and devotion to intellectual matters he learned from his father. He cannot help agreeing with papa that it was worth learning geometry, Greek, Latin and German "at an age when most boys...
...Things Have Their Day." In summing up his time, Santayana judged it no more charitably than he had judged persons and places: "The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably . . . The peculiar malady of my times . . . was . . . vacant freedom and indeterminate progress: Vorwärts! Avanti! Onward! Full speed ahead! without asking whether directly before you was not a bottomless...
That modern civilization was headed straight for the pit, Santayana had few doubts. From his contemplative seat on the sidelines of life, he issued a mixture of cool wisdom and cold comfort on the subject: "Things have their day, and their beauties in that day . . . Ruins give ground for hope; for although nothing can last forever, now and then good seasons may return...
With the publication of My Host the World, only a set of poems which Santayana once described as "pagan" has yet to join his 27 other books on the printed shelf. When it does so (probably next fall), Santayana's name, like his life, will have settled down into its narrow,' and perhaps predestined, niche...
Commenting on Santayana's aesthetic and moral values, Alken pointed out that the philosopher had a lack of fundamental warmth, but possessed a quality of complete detachment...