To Warren Allen Smith
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 9, 1951
Dear Mr. Smith,
My philosophy would have had to be prophetic if it had contained views on what you call “Naturalistic Humanism,1 which seems to be a product of strictly contemporary opinion. You tell me that it is “described in Ferm’s Religion in the Twentieth Century2 and supported by John Dewey, Julian Huxley, Thomas Mann, Erich Fromm and numerous liberal “religionists”. And you add that you have “already received comments on it by Thomas Mann, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Henry Hazlitt, Lewis Mumford, Joseph Wood Krutch and others in the literary world”. If any one of these persons has given a clear definition of “Naturalistic Humanism,.” I wish you had quoted it for my benefit, but I am sure it cannot be the same in them all.
In my old-fashioned terminology, a Humanist means a person saturated by the humanities: Humanism is something cultural: an accomplishment, not a doctrine. This might be something like what you call “classical humanism”. But unfortunately there is also a metaphysical or cosmological humanism or moralism which maintains that the world is governed by human interests and an alleged universal moral sense. This cosmic humanism for realists, who believe that knowledge has a prior and independent object which sense or thought signify, might be some religious orthodoxy, for idealists and phenomenalists an oracular destiny or dialectical evolution dominating the dream of life. This “humanism” is what I call egotism or moralism, and reject altogether.
Naturalism, on the contrary, is something to which I am so thoroughly wedded that I like to call it materialism, so as to prevent all confusion with romantic naturalism like Goethe’s, for instance, or that of Bergson. Mine is the hard, non-humanistic naturalism of the Ionian philosophers, of Democritus, Lucretius, and Spinoza.
Those professors at Columbia who tell you that in my Idea of Christ in the Gospels I incline to theism have not read that book sympathetically. They forget that my naturalism is fundamental and includes man, his mind, and all his works, products of the generative order of Nature. Christ in the Gospels is a legendary figure. Spirit in him recognizes its dependence on the Father, and not monarchical government; i.e., the order of nature; and the animal will in man being thus devised, the spirit in man is freed and identified with that of the Father. My early Lucifer, which you mention, has the same doctrine.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana
- Smith wrote Santayana on 4 February 1951: “I am at a loss to know what your views on naturalistic humanism might be. Neither can the faculty at Columbia University help me. All agree that The Genteel Tradition at Bay discussed the moral adequacy of naturalistic humanism and attacked neo-humanism; also that in the tradition of naturalistic humanism were Lucifer; Three Philosophical Poets; and The Unknowable. However, all also agree that The Idea of Christ in the Gospels is along the lines of theistic humanism. (Letters, 401).
- Vergilius (Ture Anselm) Ferm (1896.1974), an ordained Lutheran minister, was a philosophy professor, author, and editor. Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948).
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown