In his room last week at a hospital run by the Blue Sisters in Rome, George Santayana died in his sleep. He was 88, and had lived to become one of the great names of the century. His last illness was brief. Though he had lived among the nuns for eleven years, with characteristic ambiguity Santayana never officially returned to the Roman Catholic Church in which he was baptized; he did not receive the Sacraments on his deathbed. His body was taken to a chapel in Rome's Catholic Verano Cemetery, and left there without ceremony until it is decided where and how he will be buried.
GEORGE SANTAYANA was one of the three immensely old wise men of the West, though his influence in philosophy and affairs could not be compared to that of his fellows and contemporaries, Benedetto Croce or Bertrand Russell. He never played their part in public life: as a man and a philosopher he was one of nature's exiles. Taken by his Spanish father at the age of eight from the mournful and austere town of Avila in Spain and set down among American relations in the intellectual Boston of 1872. Santayana became an American by his education at Harvard, but retained a strong yet not orthodox Spanish cast of mind. His family had been rationalists in a fiercely Catholic country; he reacted by leaning towards the esthetic side of Catholicism, and, at the same time, was skeptical about the faith. He was a man distracted between two spiritual homes. Latin hedonism disputed with American puritanism in him, Spanish asceticism and pessimism with American optimism; he took up the part of the detached, aristocratic spectator in philosophy and life. He settled for some years into a brilliant reign as a dissenting and discursive professor of philosophy at Harvard, but after 1912 he migrated once more, this time to France and Spain, then England and finally Italy, where, internationally famous, he was venerated as a melodious hermit and a beguiling sage.
If his upbringing had forced upon Santayana the mind of the wandering student, it had also made him a solitary. As a boy he played no games, and in all his life he never used a typewriter, or drove an automobile, or danced. He never married. An esthete and a skeptic, a materialist and a poet, a hedonist but of few pleasures, Santayana's mind might have been paralyzed by its conflicts had he not built for himself a sort of monastery of beautiful prose, which was greatly admired by the literary if it was sometimes suspected by philosophers. Santayana's first work had been a volume of sonnets, and poetic intuition was at the bottom of his first important work, The Life of Reason. This appeared explicitly when he modified it by Realms of Being, where knowledge is held to be "faith in the unknowable," and where he expounded the mysterious and accommodating "theory of essences" for which he became noted.