To Mary Williams Winslow
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall
London, S.W.
Nice, France. March 19, 1923
I have been reading a new book of Freud’s and other things by his disciples. They are settling down to a steadier pace, and reducing their paradoxes to very much what everybody has always known.
Einstein I do not attempt to read: I am willing to have a maximum of “relativity”; but I wonder if they have ever considered that if “relative” systems have no connexion and no common object, each is absolute; and if they have a common object, or form a connected group of perspectives, then they are only relative views, like optical illusions, and the universe is not ambiguous in its true form.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA