To Robert Shaw Barlow
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 3, 1936
Yes, of course I am concerned about the war in Spain, and some of my connections there may be actually fighting—of course on the nationalist side. I have no inside knowledge of the affair: but reflecting on it from a distance, I have a notion that it may be very important: a sort of turning point in history, which in my thoughts I call The Revolt of the Nations. Since the triumph of Christianity, and again after the Reformation and the English, American and French revolutions, our part of the world has been governed by ideas, by theories, by universalistic sects like the Church, the Free Masons, the Free Trade Industrial Liberals, and last of all the Bolshies. Such influences are non-natural, non-biological; whereas the agricultural, military, and artistic life of nations is spontaneous, with ambitions that impose morality, but are not imposed by morality of any sort. Now isn’t that perhaps what the world is returning to after two thousand years of hypnotization by medicine-men and prophets?
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA