Santayana was born in Madrid, but his mother having emigrated to the USA, was educated as a student of James’s at Harvard. James described his doctoral dissertation on Lotze as the ‘perfection of rottenness’ (Santayana in turn described James’s Varieties of Religious Experience as ‘slumming’); in spite of this Santayana taught at Harvard until 1912, when he retired to Europe. In early works such as The Sense of Beauty (1896) and the five volume The Life of Reason (1905–6) he follows a naturalistic, psychological method, but later (in the four-volume Realms of Being, 1927–40) he developed an idiosyncratic combination of Platonism and materialism. He is remembered as much for his works of literature and criticism as for his contributions to philosophy.