Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy

George Santayana is the author of Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy, which carries the subtitle Five Essays. One essay, Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense, is a paper read before the Royal Society of Literature, and another essay, Fifty Years of British Idealism, offers reflections on the republication of Bradley's Ethical Studies. One essay says that in Locke the central presuppositions, which he embraced heartily and without question, were those of common sense.

A discussion of pleasure says that a pure hedonist ought to be rather relieved if all images lapsed from his consciousness and he could luxuriate in sheer pleasure, dark and overwhelming. The text describes the condition of Bradley's Absolute as feeling in which all distinctions are transcended and merged. A passage about M. Benda says natural interests and sympathies may expand indefinitely, so as to embrace a family, a nation, or the whole animate universe.