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George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

  Born in Madrid, Santayana lived in America for many years (teaching at Harvard and writing) before sojourning through Europe and settling in WWII Italy.  He philosophized about imagination, poetry, religion, reality, reason, and existence.  Mind, Santayana thought, derived from material.  He wrote that "the defect of sense calls in imagination, the defect of imagination calls in reasoning, the defect of reasoning divination."  Though a humanist,  he recognized the imaginative merit in religion, particularly religion beyond Paganism.

 

 

Online text of THE LIFE OF REASON (1905)

 

(great authors main page)

 

 

List of Works

 

The Sense of Beauty

 

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

 

Reason In Art

 

The Life of Reason

 

Reason and Art

 

Scepticism and Animal Faith

 

Dialogues in Limbo

 

The Last Puritan

 

The Idea of Christ in the Gospels

 

Platonism and the Spiritual Life

 

Persons and Places

 

Dominations and Powers

 

 

 

 

(not a complete list)

 

 

 

The imagination, even when its premonitions are not wholly justified by subsequent experience, has thus a noble role to play in the life of man.

 

 

 

 

Without poetry and religion the history of mankind would have been darker than it is.  Not only would emotional life have been poorer, but the public conscience, the national and family spirit, so useful for moral organization and discipline, would hardly have become articulate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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