To Charles Augustus Strong
Avila, Spain. July 22, 1890.
As to my plans for the future, they are simply to take up and put up with what offers. I am content to go on with lectures at Harvard indefinitely, if they want me. If they don’t, something else will probably present itself. Harvard has many attractions and advantages, the main one being the great freedom you enjoy. Royce last year annoyed me a good deal. I took a course he gave in Hegel’s Phenomenologic which was appalling, and he seemed to be bent on converting me to absolute idealism nolens volens. But Royce, although sometimes such a bore, is a good and kind man, and very appreciative, and generous to me. With Palmer I get on well. We never discuss anything. I treat him as if he were a clergyman, and he is nice to me. With James I have much more sympathy, both personal and intellectual I think he is beginning to understand that I am not a dreamer and obscurantist, and that, in spite of certain literary leanings, I am capable of facing questions of fact and evidence without repugnance —and or parti pris. Everett has also become a friend of mine.
Peabody is the only member of the philosophical Committee that seems to think me dangerous and highly improper. The President looks upon me with favor, because as I am told, he thinks I may contribute to the college a little of that fresh air and blood of which it stands in so much need. It is really sad to see how mediocrity Germanised rules supreme there. For all these reasons I think my position at Harvard tolerably stable and honorable. I study to keep apart from the Germans. Royce is the only one I cannot avoid. . . . Altogether I had a good time, and enjoyed what I never had cared for before, the air and sunlight, food and drink, and the consciousness of life—rational and irrational—about me.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book One, [1868]-1909. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY