The Atlantic Bookshelf: A Guide to Good Books

A SPANIARD, born in Madrid sixty-eight years ago, George Santayana by a turn of the wheel acquired an education whose emphasis was largely in English and philosophy. He graduated from Harvard, studied for two years at Berlin, and still later at Cambridge, England. For a time he was the youngest luminary in that constellation of philosophers, James, Royce, Palmer, and Münsterberg, who shed their radiance at Harvard. Thence he moved to England, and, it is said, divides his time between Oxford and Rome, his philosophy flourishing on either soil. As an undergraduate he was known as a poet (his selected poems were printed in 1923) and certainly this element has imbued his later prose with beauty. Those wishing to make his acquaintance should begin with Soliloquies in England and pass on to Character and Opinion in the United States. The discerning few treasure the five volumes of his Life of Reason and are now absorbed in his recent sequence, Realms of Being.