To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co, London
Cambridge, England. November 13, 1914
I have read your book with interest, in some places with difficulty, in others with chucklings, in still others with lofty satisfaction. You give a clarified idea of James—as it is natural that a disciple should; you make him Christ instead of Jesus. I shouldn’t dispute for a moment that your view of his doctrine and tendency is correct; you seize the ultimate, the latest, the most radical, and interesting phase of his thought; but I can’t help feeling that the James I knew in the flesh was something quite different on the whole—more puzzled, more inconsistent, more infected with überwundenen Standpuncten. I shouldn’t say (though you and he perhaps would) that in reality he was richer. A junkshop isn’t richer than a palace; and what is consistent with one principle, and all in one style, makes to my mind the only true richness of that sort of thing: more, would be matter out of place. If James had been what you give us of him, and no more, I should have understood and liked him better—better as a thinker and even as a man, because his incalculableness and jumpiness sometimes made me uncomfortable.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnatti OH