To Victor Francis Calverton
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. November 2, 1936
Dear Mr. Calverton,
Your mysterious book is being laid aside until some future moment when I may be less occupied and preoccupied, but I have dipped into it, and in thanking you for sending it I can already say that it has started a train of thought in my mind which might lead to radical conclusions. Suppose that by “hypnotism” we understand those biological tides which produce mass-conversions, religious epidemics, and climaxes or collapses in civilization, such as the “intellectual barbarism” that made Germany uninhabitable for your friend in the book. There is a nation hypnotized for good or ill, at least temporarily: but who did the hypnotizing, and what determined the kind of hypnotic suggestion to be induced? Hardly Hitler; he is too slight a personage; hardly even Nietzsche or Treitschky or Houston Stewart Chamberlain. But suppose it was they, or one of them: who shall un-hypnotize the hypnotizer? Who shall hit upon the blessed prescription that might liberate, instead of constraining, the “man inside”? Does your book contain a fresh discovery of human nature, so that not only the machinery for imposing a regimen, but the character of the regimen to be imposed, could recommend itself to mankind in the long run? I happen to be reading Lao Tse at odd moments. I wonder if we have any better solution to propose than he proposed long ago.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The New York Public Library, New York City