To Charles Raymond Bell Mortimer
22 Beaumont St
Oxford, England. April 10, 1918
Shall I like you the less for being a Catholic? I shall like you much more, and feel that I have a new avenue of approach to your feelings, and a sort of double insurance (besides instinctive sympathy) against misunderstanding you. The question is rather whether you will like me as well, or rather, whether you will feel as comfortable in my company as you did before you gave me this mortgage, so to speak, on your reactions. I shall insist on your being quite orthodox: if you hedge at anything I shall laugh at you, and put you down for an amateur. Amateur Christianity is what you ought to escape by the step you are taking: you ought to live hereafter in the settled belief that the world of the Catholic imagination (a very articulate and realistic world) surrounds us in deadly and sober fact. It is a hard belief to keep vivid and consistent in this age, and for the matter of that in any age: but it is not impossible, and I will go further and say that it is not impossible that that belief should be true; I mean, not inwardly or logically impossible. It is plainly contrary to fact, as it seems to me: but fact or truth, when it lies beyond the most immediate material realm, naturally interests most men very little: and nature has not given them either the wish or the power to discern it. By choice, when we can, we live histrionically, intent on the eloquent embroideries we make upon things and people; it is a sort of dream or play which we wrap our actual life in. And the Catholic Hypnosis is a very nice one, fitting the facts in a very acceptable wise way when one has decided that the facts themselves are not decent, and can’t be allowed to go about naked. I like civilized artifices of this sort.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ