ABSTRACT
Santayanas first obeisance to academic demands for extended scholarly work was The Sense of Beauty of 1896. The title may have derived from John Keats, from Lotze, or both. In working out his ideas about aesthetics, Santayana applied certain findings of recent psychology to aesthetics, a novel and even startling procedure in 1896, particularly in his suggestion that sex and aesthetics are allied. When Bernhard Berensons sister, Sanda, remarked that "she thought Santayana's idea of beauty in his The Sense of Beauty was 'an overflow from the sexual passion/ Bernhard lectured her that the true source of beauty was the muscular association of the 'tactile imagination' that he had set forth in his Florentine Painters." Santayana's rationalism took him to the familiar paradox of an anti-rational position, in which it is asserted that human reason is no better equipped to sort out the astonishing flux of nature than is the insect that lives for a single day.
