Winds of Doctrine by George Santayana is a philosophical textbook exploring and debating the ideas of Bertrand Russell and Henri Bergson. Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana, was a Spanish philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Excerpt: "The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The civilization characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet another civilization has begun to take its place. We still understand the value of religious faith; we still appreciate the pompous arts of our forefathers; we are brought up on academic architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, and music."

Excerpt from Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The civilisation characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet another civilisation has begun to take its place. We still understand the value of religious faith; we still appreciate the pompous arts of our fore fathers; we are brought up on academic architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. We still love monarchy and aristocracy, together with that picturesque and dutiful order which rested on local institutions, class privileges, and the authority of the family. We may even feel an organic need for all these things, cling to them tenaciously, and dream of rejuvenating them. On the other hand the shell of Christendom is broken. The unconquerable mind of the East, the pagan past, the industrial socialistic future confront it with their equal authority. Our whole life and mind is saturated with the slow upward filtration of a new spirit - that of an emancipated, atheistic, international democracy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

A critical edition of a classic work by the renowned philosopher George Santayana evaluating key movements in American intellectual history. Winds of Doctrine presents six essays by the internationally recognized critic and philosopher George Santayana. The essays, edited by David E. Spiech, Martin A. Coleman, and Faedra Lazar Weiss, and introduced by Paul Forster, address the broad sweep of intellectual trends—or, as the title suggests, the ever-changing winds of thought—of the Spanish-born American thinker’s time. The topics range from the secularization of American culture to the rise of religious modernism to the “genteel tradition” in American philosophy, the subject of Santayana’s final lecture in America and perhaps his best known essay. The original Winds of Doctrine, published in 1913, was the first book published after Santayana’s 1912 departure for Europe. Santayana had felt stifled at Harvard for some time, and his long-contemplated resignation from academia released him from previous obligations and allowed him a new freedom to think and write. Much later, Santayana remarked on the significance of that choice to step away: “In Winds of Doctrine and my subsequent books, a reader of my earlier writings may notice a certain change of climate. . . . It was not my technical philosophy that was principally affected, but rather the meaning and status of philosophy for my inner man.” An insightful document of American intellectual history, supplemented with annotations and rich textual commentary, Winds of Doctrine is a vital and engaging survey of the religious, political, philosophical, and literary trends of the twentieth century.

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