George Santayana

George Santayana was born in Madrid, raised in Boston, taught philosophy at Harvard beside William James and Royce, and at forty-eight, on receiving a legacy, resigned and left America for good, living in England, Paris and finally a convent hospital in Rome. The Life of Reason is the five-volume naturalist account of how reason grows out of instinct; Skepticism and Animal Faith the later, more austere system; Persons and Places the memoir. A materialist who loved the Catholic Church as poetry, he wrote the most elegant philosophical prose in English, and a bestselling novel at seventy-two.