To Nancy Saunders Toy
Cortina d’Ampezzo
Italy. August 28, 1938
Dear Mrs. Toy,
I am sending your note about Miller to Strong, who is at Valmont, his nursing home above the Lake of Geneva; and very likely he will act on your suggestion. However, he has not had much spare cash of late, most of his securities having stopped paying dividends, and it might be easier for me to help Miller (it would not be the first time!) quite unbeknown to my actual pocket, by asking George Sturgis to send him a cheque. . . .
Your extreme delicacy, vicariously attributed to Miller, amuses me a little. He has been dependent on Strong for long periods, and once, out of a clear sky, he wrote to me asking for a largish sum, (a “loan”) several hundred dollars, to fit himself out in clerical garments suitable for his visits to the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury. He then hoped to get a living in England, so that the investment, though speculative, was a “business proposition” on his part. He was then said to be living on raw spinach—“not exclusively”, he admitted—and being “behind the veil”, whether from inanition or mystic rapture, is also nothing new to him. The trouble is that he is a little unbalanced and difficult to deal with, because he makes his health an excuse for not sticking to anything. Do you remember the quarrel he had with Münsterberg, when the latter wrote to him saying that he (Münsterberg) was a doctor of medicine as well as of philosophy, and that he detected in Miller every sign of incipient paranoia? Poor Miller knew only too well that he lived on the verge of nervous collapse; but such a diagnosis was not only cruel but, as the event has shown, mistaken. Miller’s conversion, which came much later, may have canalized his supersensitiveness a little: but he seems not quite settled even in his religious life. It is a sad career.
Yours sincerely
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.