To Victor Francis Calverton
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Venice, Italy. October 5, 1934
Dear Mr. Calverton,
Your book has interested me so much that I have read it in its entirety. If you had begun with the last complete sentence on p. 306, you would have saved me some moments of bewilderment. All mind is individual; but an individual mind, in its interests and thoughts, may range all the way from perfect subjection to tribal tyranny to a morbid rebelliousness and self-worship. That point cleared up, I think your analyses and descriptions, while partisan, throw an instructive light upon things, so complicated and various, that we are always imperfectly informed about them, and in danger of rash generalizations.
What has most interested me, and given me most new light, is your chapter on Religion and American Culture. I don’t know the “frontier”, but I do know Boston; and I should say that the Puritan tradition there, preserved on its moral side among old-fashioned Unitarians, had become lay and merely respectable: be respectable, be upright, and some day you will be cultured and rich. But where a religious sentiment was mixed in with this morality, it was Evangelical: so that Puritanism and Evangelicalism actually merged in many instances.
With many thanks, Yours sincerely G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The New York Public Library, New York City