ABSTRACT
George Santayana's motives for writing his treatise were mixed. Authoritative gossip had informed him that his instructorship at Harvard was at risk unless he produced a book. He had published many essays and reviews, as well as Sonnets and Other Verses, but the sages of the department of philosophy wanted a book. Santayana's narrative in The Sense of Beauty has a way of turning up nuggets of meaning in soil that might seem barren and foreign to his central concerns. Santayana insisted that the aesthetic sense should know its place in the world. He implies that a sense of beauty is an adornment, not a basic necessity, but an adornment essential to a full life and to a civil populace. Santayana's reputation has suffered in the tin-eared school of discourse, to which grace is foreign, cliche habitual, and history inimical.
