Reginald C. Robbins

Reginald C. Robbins prepared at Noble’s School in Boston and graduated from Harvard, summa cum laude, with highest honors in political science, in 1892. Thereafter he studied philosophy in the Harvard Graduate School. In 1896 he became treasurer of the Waltham Watch Company, in which his father had large investments, but he was wholly unsuited to business and finance, which he found a bewildering burden. His main interest was philosophy; by 1920 he had written and published nine volumes of philosophical poems. About that time he discovered that he had a pleasing baritone voice, and he began writing songs for himself to sing; he published 150 of them.

The range of his interests and activities was amazing, and he remarked himself that at one time or another he had become engrossed with civil service, philosophy, poetry, music, botany, forestry, conservation, ornithology, yachting, steeple-chasing, travel, and lecturing. He lived in Boston and in Pride’s Crossing, and this doubtless accounts for the curious admixture of the learned and the sporting fife. Philosophy, however, was his point of return, and his absorption with this field led him to found the Robbins Library of Philosophy and Psychology at Harvard. He also authored a definitive work, Outline of a General Aesthetics, wherein he told what he knew about beauty, poetry, music, and art.

Robbins lived to be eighty-four years old. This last decade he lived at Santa Barbara, but to the end of his life he continued a member of the Beverly, Manchester, Eastern, and Corinthian Yacht Clubs and the Myopia, Norfolk, and Middlesex Hunts, so strong were his early ties with the civilization of the Back Bay. He was a small, gnomish-looking man, and used to wear a high, stiff collar and the clothes of an earlier day. He was extremely pleasant and polite, and sometimes disconcertingly learned. In whatever he undertook he developed an admirable technique, and he pursued his ends with a single-minded intensity that glowed within him like a hidden fire.

George W. Martin
1956 Century Association Yearbook