ABSTRACT
George Santayana's reading of Mrs. Margaret Cory's motives did not interfere with his genuine affection for the man, nor should it blind us to the fact that he relied on Cory to review his manuscripts for repetition and occasional archaisms. In another of the magisterial summary comments that were a positive product of his advanced age, Santayana marked the radical error of British empiricism, namely, having turned 'ideas' from being essences, into being perceptions. Postwar Italy, indeed postwar Europe, was of course in political and economic turmoil, a condition Santayana was acutely aware of and deeply interested in. In 1947 Santayana also read a school of philosophy that distinctly did not influence him: through a gift subscription from an admirer he received Sartres Temps moderne, and proceeded to read French existentialism in that journal and in some of the work of Albert Camus and of Sartre himself.
