Historic Humanist Series

Santayana was a Harvard Professor, philosopher, author, and poet:

• Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
• By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
• Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
• Science is nothing but developed perception,interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
• There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

Santayana, born Jorge Augustin Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana, was a philosopher, poet and novelist. He was born in Madrid and moved to Bosten in 1872. He was educated at Harvard, where he became professor of philosophy (1907 - 1912), while retaining his Spanish nationality.

Santayana's writing career began as a poet with Sonnets and Other Verses (1894), but he later became known as a philosopher and stylist, in such works as The Life of Reason (5 vols, 1905-1906), Realms of Being (4 vols, 1927-1940), and his novel The Last Puritan (1935). He moved to Europe in 1912, stayed in Oxford during World War I, then setled in Rome.