In this work, Santayana analyzes the nature of the knowing process and demonstrates by means of clear, powerful arguments how we know and what validates our knowledge. The central concept of his philosophy is found in a careful discrimination between the awareness of objects independent of our perception and the awareness of essences attributed to objects by our mind, or between what Santayana calls the realm of existents and the realm of subsistents. Since we can never be certain that these attributes actually inhere in a substratum of existents, skepticism is established as a form of belief, but animal faith is shown to be a necessary quality of the human mind. Without this faith there could be no rational approach to the necessary problem of understanding and surviving in this world. Santayana derives this practical philosophy from a wide and fascinating variety of sources. He considers critically the positions of such philosophers as Descartes, Euclid, Hume, Kant, Parmenides, Plato, Pythagoras, Schopenhauer, and the Buddhist school as well as the assumptions made by the ordinary man in everyday situations. Such matters as the nature of belief, the rejection of classical idealism, the nature of intuition and memory, symbols and myth, mathematical reality, literary psychology, the discovery of essence, sublimation of animal faith, the implied being of truth, and many others are given detailed analyses in individual chapters.

From the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, George Santayana was a highly esteemed and widely read writer of philosophy, poetry, essays, memoirs, and even a best-selling novel, The Last Puritan. After a period of relative neglect, interest in his work has revived. A complete edited edition of his works is in progress and he has become the object of renewed scholarly activity. Contributing significantly to the renewal was John McCormick's 1987 biography, the first full-scale volume to treat an elusive figure's life and thought in the detail they deserve. Santayana's life was rich in its interior and outer associations. There was his birth and early childhood in Spain followed by a move to Boston, where he came under the influence of William James at Harvard. This led to his career at Harvard as a professor, where Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Conrad Aiken, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Walter Lippmann were among his devoted students. We see Santayana in correspondence and conversation with Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Ezra Pound, and Robert Lowell. Predominant in Santayana's life was his philosophical work. Hostile to the dominant empiricism of Anglo-American philosophy, he left the academy and remained detached from both the political and ideological movements of early decades of the twentieth century. McCormick relates his skepticism and materialism to a form of idealism deriving from his classical education in Plato and Aristotle, together with his readings in Descartes and Spinoza. He presents Santayana as a supreme stylist in English, who lived a long life always consistent with his stoic epicureanism.

The great philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist masterfully offers his fascinating outline of Aesthetics Theory. Drawing on the art, literature, and social sciences involved, Santayana discusses the nature of beauty, form, and expression.

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The second of eight books of the correspondence of George Santayana.