To Curt John Ducasse
Rome, May 2, ’25
Thank you very much for your two articles. I agree with the thesis of the one on Teleology; a movement culminating in some interesting phase must be either a result of various automatisms or an instance of automatism. Mechanism, if we value the issue, may always be called teleology. The teleology that is impossible is only that which represents the result as a cause. As to your Liberalism in Ethics, although I agree with every part of the argument, I feel some dissatisfaction with the general conclusion. You seem to leave out the authority of a man’s own nature over his casual preferences, in other words, self-knowledge. I entirely agree that different natures have no moral authority over one another; but folly in judgement and action is nevertheless possible if a creature ignores the interests or the facts which he would wish to take into account if he remembered them.
G. Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence RI