To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. February 24, 1918
Your article on free will arrived in due course; naturally I agree: but I am not satisfied with the degree of distinctness which your theory－or your expression of it－has attained. Of course our acts, deliberations, and passions, taken in their concrete biological context, are efficacious effected causes: I mean that the process of nature runs through them. But the questions that people will wish to have answered regard 1st the relation of consciousness taken historically to the other elements in these concrete processes, 2nd the relation of intention and desire takens morally to the direction of those total processes, and 3rd the determination or indetermination of the same. On this last point your answer is definite: but what is your attitude about the other two?
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.