1882 Santayana graduates from Boston Latin School; attends Harvard College in autumn.

1883 Santayana visits his father in Spain for first time since coming to America. Advised by William James at Harvard not to pursue philosophy.

1885 Meets John Francis (“Frank”) Stanley, 2d Earl Russell and elder brother of Bertrand Russell, who becomes a close friend.

1886 Santayana’s Bachelor of Arts degree is awarded summa cum laude and in absentia. Begins study in Germany.

1887 In late March (at the close of the winter semester at Berlin) Santayana and Strong travel to England for a holiday. Santayana spends two days with Earl Russell aboard the latter’s steam yacht Royal, sailing down the Thames from Reading to London. In April Santayana first visits Oxford, where, through Earl Russell, he meets poet Lionel Johnson, then a student at New College. On 18 June Santayana is in London. He visits Winchester, Russell’s school, in company with the young nobleman. On 20 June he views the procession for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee (the fiftieth anniversary of her reign) from a room in Buckingham Palace Road engaged for the occasion by John D. Rockefeller. The company includes Rockefeller’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth (“Bessie”), and Charles Augustus Strong, to whom she had become engaged that spring. During the summer, Santayana makes his third return to Spain. He is in Ávila in July and August. On 2 September he takes a ship from Malaga to meet his sister, Susana, on Gibraltar for a few weeks to tour southern Spain before returning to Germany. From that autumn until the following spring, Santayana continues his graduate studies at Berlin. (His December address in Berlin is Pottsdamerstrasse 123III.) The current German psycho-physiological approach to the study of philosophy is uncongenial to Santayana; also he is apprehensive about writing a doctoral dissertation in German. He decides to return to Harvard to complete his doctoral program.

1888 He joins Earl Russell at Valence, France, on 2 June for a seventeen-day canal journey through Burgundy aboard the Royal. On 18 June they reach Paris, where Santayana leaves Russell. In August, following his summer stay in Ávila, he visits Russell at his house, Broom Hall, situated at Teddington. After over two years abroad, Santayana returns to America, sailing from Liverpool to Boston on the Catalonia. Josiah Royce rejects the suggestion of Schopenhauer as the subject of Santayana’s dissertation, recommending Lotze instead. Until the following autumn (1889), Santayana lives with his mother in her house in Roxbury, Massachusetts, working on his doctoral dissertation.

1889 Santayana completes dissertation on “Lotze’s System of Philosophy” under direction of Josiah Royce; awarded Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees by Harvard University; begins as Instructor in Philosophy at Harvard.