DURANT DRAKE
1878 - 1933
After eighteen years of devoted service to Vassar
College Durant Drake, Professor of Philosophy, died
at the age of fifty-five in the early morning of
November twenty-fifth. Always frail in body he at
first attached no great significance to the illness
that laid him low in the month of October, and even
when told that the end was near continued a gallant
struggle for recovery. Recognizing at last that
death had come to claim him he accepted the inevita-
ble with courage and perfect serenity.
Durant Drake was of New England puritan stock. It
was in accordance with the traditions of his race
that he went first to Boston Latin school and then
to Harvard University, winning prizes all along the
way and graduating summa ggg laude. A kind fate
gave him close touch with eminent scholars in his
chosen field and fruitful intercourse with them
helped to shape his own ideas into what he himself
called the philosophy of a meliorist. "If," he wrote,
"there is any keynote that has given a kind of unity
to my thinking in diverse fields it is a sense of the
needless unhappiness from which men suffer and a pas-
sionate longing to do my bit in formulating and dif-
fusing a clearer intelligence concerning the art of
living." Thus in his teaching he emphasized primarily
problems of human conduct, drawing his illustrations
fro an extraordinarily wide range of reading. Stimu-
lating class discussions were often continued on
Sunday afternoons when throughout the year he was at
home to his students. Many of those who have gone
forth from Vassar will always remember gratefully
that beautiful and hospitable home.
But it was as a writer that Durant Drake was most
widely known. Eminently in his books he realized his
"passionate desire" to formulate and diffuse "a clearer
intelligence concerning the art of living." Their
titles indicate how practical, in the broad sense of
the term, was the aim of much of his thinking: Pro-
blems of Conduct (1914), Problems of Religion (1916),
Shall We Stand By The Church? (1920), America Faces
the Future (1922), The New Morality (1928). The re-
viewers of these books all praise their lucidity,
vigor, forceful and winning style, and persuasive
sanity. The same qualities of style appear in his re-
cent Invitation to Philosophy. His most abstract
thinking was expressed in Mind and Its Place in Nature
(1925), where he presents his metaphysical system,
DURANT DRAKE (Continued)
related to though not derived from the thought of
Santayana and Charles Strong.
It may truly be said of Durant Drake that his life
and work, despite his physical limitations, fulfilled
to an extraordinary degree its own high aims.
Lucy E. Textor
IX - 188