To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Marini
Rome. January 18, 1922
You change my thought slightly, yet profoundly, when you represent me as expecting that “philosophy” will soon become scientific. I said I hoped that a scientific philosophy might soon appear: I didn’t conceive that it would unite everybody for ever. In philosophy there is always a moral element, a view of life, which will make the scientific element subordinate.–I have been to hear the Meistersinger, and liked it very much–shed romantic German tears over it in my poltrona, thinking of 1886 in Dresden when I heard it first. That sort of thing gives me inspiration for the Realms, because it shows how breadth lifts up a work and make the details memorable.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY