From antiquity to the present, many have written on the subject of beauty, but precious few have done so with the capacity themselves to write beautifully. The Sense of Beauty is that rare exception. This remarkable early work of the great American philosopher, George Santayana, features a quality of prose that is as wondrous as what he had to say. Indeed, his summation remains a flawless classical statement. "Beauty seems to be the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its possibility. If perfection is, as it should be, the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Be'auty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good." The editor of this new edition, John McGormick, reminds us that The Sense of Beauty is the first work in aesthetics written in the United States. Santayana was versed in the history of his subject, from Plato and Aristotle to Schopenhauer and Taine in the nineteenth century. Santayana took as his task a complete rethinking of the idea that beauty is embedded in objects. Rather beauty is an emotion, a value, and a sense of the good. In this, aesthetics was unlike ethics: not a correction of evil or pursuit of the virtuous. Rather it is a pleasure that resides in the sense of self. The work is divided into chapters on the materials of beauty, form and expression. A good many of Santayana's later works are presaged by this early effort. And this volume also anticipates the development of art as a movement as well as a value apart from other aspects of life. The work is written without posturing, without hectoring. Santayana is nonetheless able to give expression to strong views. His preferences are made perfectly plain. Perhaps the key is a powerful belief that beauty is an adornment not a material necessity. But that does mean art is trivial. Quite the contrary, the good life is precisely the extent to which such "adornments" as painting, poetry or music come to define the lives of individuals and civilizations alike. This is, in short, a major work that can still inform and move us a century after its first composition.

George Santayana was one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers. Because of his broad-ranging interests and lack of any permanent home in one particular country, he has often been stereotyped as a meditative philosopher removed from the world, living in what he himself called the "realm of spirit" among eternal essences. While there is some truth in this characterization, it is also true that Santayana was a penetrating analyst and critic of contemporary societies.'Character and Opinion in the United States' is his comprehensive critique of American thought and civilization and reflects the detached cosmopolitan perspective that lent his criticism its characteristic objectivity and strength. Santayana's subject here is the conflict of materialism and idealism in American life. In his view there exists a dualism in the American mind: One side, dealing with religion, literature, philosophy, and morality, tended to stay with inherited, old doctrines-the genteel tradition-and failed to keep pace with the other, practical side and its new developments in industry, invention, and social organization. Santayana traces the first mentality to Calvinism and its sense of sin, an attitude out of keeping with a new civilization and the dominance of practical interests. As a consequence of separating philosophy from everyday life, its study merely served religious and moral interests cut off from the free search for truth. At the heart of the book is Santayana's examination of the influential thought of William James and Josiah Royce, who typified for him the dilemma of American thought. The subordination of thought to social form and custom underlies Santayana's sharp critique of academic philosophy at Harvard where he early on studied and taught. He was disturbed by the very idea of philosophy as an academic discipline. Philosophy, he felt, should be an individual, original creation, "something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be taught" Santayana's analysis of how social imperatives may impede the pursuit of knowledge remains pertinent to contemporary intellectual debate. This volume ill be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, and American studies specialists.

Andri Gide once said that Feodor Dostoevsky "lost himself in the characters of his books, and, for this reason, it is in them that he can be found again." In Dostoevsky: The Author as Psychoanalyst, Louis Breger approaches Dostoevsky psychoanalytically, not as a "patient" to be analyzed, but as a fellow psychoanalyst, someone whose life and fiction are intertwined in the process of literary self-exploration.Raskolnikov's dream of the suffering horse in Crime and Punishment has become one of the best known in all literature, its rich imagery expressing meaning on many levels. Using this as a starting point, Breger goes on to offer a detailed analysis of the novel, situating it at the pivotal point in Dostoevsky's life between the death of his first wife and his second marriage. Using insights from his psychological training, Breger also explores other works by Dostoevsky, among them his early novel, The Double, which Breger relates to the nervous breakdown that Dostoevsky suffered in his twenties, as well as Notes from Underground, The Possessed, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, and so forth. Additionally, details from Dostoevsky's own life - his compulsive gambling, his epilepsy, his philosophical, political, religious, and mystical beliefs, and the interpretations of them found in existing biographies - are analyzed in detail.

Andri Gide once said that Feodor Dostoevsky "lost himself in the characters of his books, and, for this reason, it is in them that he can be found again." In "Dostoevsky: The Author as Psychoanalyst," Louis Breger approaches Dostoevsky psychoanalytically, not as a "patient" to be analyzed, but as a fellow psychoanalyst, someone whose life and fiction are intertwined in the process of literary self-exploration.

Raskolnikov's dream of the suffering horse in "Crime and Punishment" has become one of the best known in all literature, its rich imagery expressing meaning on many levels. Using this as a starting point, Breger goes on to offer a detailed analysis of the novel, situating it at the pivotal point in Dostoevsky's life between the death of his first wife and his second marriage. Using insights from his psychological training, Breger also explores other works by Dostoevsky, among them his early novel, "The Double," which Breger relates to the nervous breakdown that Dostoevsky suffered in his twenties, as well as "Notes from Underground," "The Possessed," "The Idiot," "The Brothers Karamazov," and so forth. Additionally, details from Dostoevsky's own life--his compulsive gambling, his epilepsy, his philosophical, political, religious, and mystical beliefs, and the interpretations of them found in existing biographies--are analyzed in detail.

From antiquity to the present, many have written on the subject of beauty, but precious few have done so with the capacity themselves to write beautifully. "The Sense of Beauty is "that rare exception. This remarkable early work of the great American philosopher, George Santayana, features a quality of prose that is as wondrous as what he had to say. Indeed, his summation remains a flawless classical statement. "Beauty seems to be the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its possibility. If perfection is, as it should be, the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Be'auty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good."

The editor of this new edition, John McGormick, reminds us that "The Sense of Beauty is "the first work in aesthetics written in the United States. Santayana was versed in the history of his subject, from Plato and Aristotle to Schopenhauer and Taine in the nineteenth century. Santayana took as his task a complete rethinking of the idea that beauty is embedded in objects. Rather beauty is an emotion, a value, and a sense of the good. In this, aesthetics was unlike ethics: not a correction of evil or pursuit of the virtuous. Rather it is a pleasure that resides in the sense of self. The work is divided into chapters on the materials of beauty, form and expression. A good many of Santayana's later works are presaged by this early effort. And this volume also anticipates the development of art as a movement as well as a value apart from other aspects of life.

The work is written without posturing, without hectoring. Santayana is nonetheless able to give expression to strong views. His preferences are made perfectly plain. Perhaps the key is a powerful belief that beauty is an adornment not a material necessity. But that does mean art is trivial. Quite the contrary, the good life is precisely the extent to which such "adornments" as painting, poetry or music come to define the lives of individuals and civilizations alike. This is, in short, a major work that can still inform and move us a century after its first composition.

In what must be ranked as a foremost classic of twentieth-century political philosophy, George Santayana, in the preface to his last major work prior to his death, makes plain the limits as well as the aims of Dominations and Powers: "All that it professes to contain is glimpses of tragedy and comedy played unawares by governments; and a continual intuitive reduction of political maxims and institutions to the intimate spiritual fruits that they are capable of bearing." This astonishing volume shows how the potential beauty latent in all sorts of worldly artifacts and events are rooted in differing forms of power and dominion. The work is divided into three major parts: the generative order of society, which covers growth in the jungle, economic arts, and the liberal arts; the militant order of society, which examines factions and enterprise; and the rational order of society, which contains one of the most sustained critiques of democratic systems and liberal ideologies extant. Written at a midpoint in the century, but at the close of his career, Santayana's volume offers an ominous account of the weakness of the West and its similarities in substance, if not always in form, with totalitarian systems of the East. Few analyses of concepts, such as government by the people, the price of peace and the suppression of warfare, the nature of elites and limits of egalitarianism, and the nature of authority in free societies, are more comprehensive or compelling. This is a carefully rendered statement on tasks of leadership for free societies that take on added meaning after the fall of communism. The author of a definitive biography of Santayana, John McCormick provides the sort of deep background that makes possible an assessment of Dominations and Powers. He permits us to better appreciate the place of this work at the start no less than conclusion of Santayana's long career. For the author of The Life of Reason himself admits to having led a life in unreason deeply impacted by the war of 1914-1918,^and then again, 1939-1945. McCormick provides in his opening essay a careful story of Santayana's exile from his Anglo-American homeland, a deeply embittered figure in search of options to annihilation at the military level and an alternative to false and fatuous ideologies at the spiritual level. We know better now how to cope with this profound, yet disturbing classic in political thought.

George Santayana was one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers. Because of his broad-ranging interests and lack of any permanent home in one particular country, he has often been stereotyped as a meditative philosopher removed from the world, living in what he himself called the "realm of spirit" among eternal essences. While there is some truth in this characterization, it is also true that Santayana was a penetrating analyst and critic of contemporary societies.'Character and Opinion in the United States' is his comprehensive critique of American thought and civilization and reflects the detached cosmopolitan perspective that lent his criticism its characteristic objectivity and strength. Santayana's subject here is the conflict of materialism and idealism in American life. In his view there exists a dualism in the American mind: One side, dealing with religion, literature, philosophy, and morality, tended to stay with inherited, old doctrines-the genteel tradition-and failed to keep pace with the other, practical side and its new developments in industry, invention, and social organization. Santayana traces the first mentality to Calvinism and its sense of sin, an attitude out of keeping with a new civilization and the dominance of practical interests. As a consequence of separating philosophy from everyday life, its study merely served religious and moral interests cut off from the free search for truth. At the heart of the book is Santayana's examination of the influential thought of William James and Josiah Royce, who typified for him the dilemma of American thought. The subordination of thought to social form and custom underlies Santayana's sharp critique of academic philosophy at Harvard where he early on studied and taught. He was disturbed by the very idea of philosophy as an academic discipline. Philosophy, he felt, should be an individual, original creation, "something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be taught" Santayana's analysis of how social imperatives may impede the pursuit of knowledge remains pertinent to contemporary intellectual debate. This volume ill be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, and American studies specialists.

In what must be ranked as a foremost classic of twentieth-century political philosophy, George Santayana, in the preface to his last major work prior to his death, makes plain the limits as well as the aims of Dominations and Powers: "All that it professes to contain is glimpses of tragedy and comedy played unawares by governments; and a continual intuitive reduction of political maxims and institutions to the intimate spiritual fruits that they are capable of bearing."

This astonishing volume shows how the potential beauty latent in all sorts of worldly artifacts and events are rooted in differing forms of power and dominion. The work is divided into three major parts: the generative order of society, which covers growth in the jungle, economic arts, and the liberal arts; the militant order of society, which examines factions and enterprise; and the rational order of society, which contains one of the most sustained critiques of democratic systems and liberal ideologies extant.

Written at a midpoint in the century, but at the close of his career, Santayana's volume offers an ominous account of the weakness of the West and its similarities in substance, if not always in form, with totalitarian systems of the East. Few analyses of concepts, such as government by the people, the price of peace and the suppression of warfare, the nature of elites and limits of egalitarianism, and the nature of authority in free societies, are more comprehensive or compelling. This is a carefully rendered statement on tasks of leadership for free societies that take on added meaning after the fall of communism.

The author of a definitive biography of Santayana, John McCormick provides the sort of deep background that makes possible an assessment of Dominations and Powers. He permits us to better appreciate the place of this work at the start no less than conclusion of Santayana's long career. For the author of The Life of Reason himself admits to having led a life in unreason--deeply impacted by the war of 1914-1918, DEGREESand then again, 1939-1945.

McCormick provides in his opening essay a careful story of Santayana's exile from his Anglo-American homeland, a deeply embittered figure in search of options to annihilation at the military level and an alternative to false and fatuous ideologies at the spiritual level. We know better now how to cope with this profound, yet disturbing classic in political thought.

THIS 54 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy, by George Santayana. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 0766162753.

Masterfully written discussion of nature of beauty, form, expression; art, literature, social sciences all involved.