To Oliver Wendell Holmes
C/o Brown Shipley & Co London
Seville, Spain. Jan. 21, 1914
Dear Mr. Holmes,
I need hardly say that it is a great satisfaction to me to have your letter and to see that my book pleased you enough to make you write it. I think there is a sort of background of agreement among all men, especially those of the same generation, although publicists often obscure rather than represent it, being taken up with party controversies or special causes. I am not a great philosopher, but in my separation from the world of action, and now even from the academic world (for I have retired from teaching) I feel that I can distinguish the normal and inevitable lines of human opinion from the modish flourishes that overlay it. This is my solid standingground outside and around special systems, of which you speak with an insight which goes to my heart. In “Winds of Doctrine” this fund of human orthodoxy is assumed rather than formulated: but I am trying to give it a more explicit expression in a book on which I am now at work. I daresay you, and most judicious people, would have much to quarrel with and to correct in this systematization of common sense which I am attempting: but after all my training has been that of a technical philosopher, and I feel I owe it to my Fachgenossen1 to put my conclusions into their language, and not retain the unfair advantage of seeming reasonable by not admitting clearly the implications of my suave opinions.
. . . .
It was really very kind of you to write and to give me the encouragement of so much sympathy from so welcome a quarter.
Yours sincerely,
G. Santayana
1. Professional Colleagues
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA