To Sidney Hook
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. December 15, 1935
I write to thank you and Kallen for your book on “American Philosophy” and I address you rather than him, although he is an older friend, because there is something in your paper which interests me very much, namely, your account of your juvenile flirtation with Platonic Realism, and your pragmatic disillusion afterwards. Russell and Moore’s early interest in essences had a great influence on me also; but just as in Plato the Ideas have a theological and zoological dignity which my essences wholly lack, so in Russell and Moore’s “concepts”, there was a strain—strain in both meanings of the word—which is absent from my “baubles”, and from my affection for them. And your very living account of your enlightenment on this subject shows me, as I feel, where the trouble lies. It peeps out in the term “subsistence” (which I never use, except possibly by inadvertence, about the realm of essence); and it becomes obvious when you speak of validity and truth, as claimed by Platonic logic for its structures. Didn’t it become a commonplace some time ago that mathematics, in its own sphere, was not true, but only correct, congruous with itself, and consistent? And wouldn’t the same thing hold of all the internal relations of one essence with another? When you speak of meaning, however, I am a little puzzled, unless you mean applicability and practical importance. A definition seems to me to have meaning, in that it specifies some essence, and distinguishes it from all others; and on those specified characteristics logical relations are demonstrably dependent. But these “meanings” are confined to the realm of essence; and I should entirely agree with you that both Platonic Ideas and mathematical equations have to be exemplified in the world, or at least in human discourse, which is a part of the world, before they can have any validity or truth. The first chapter of my “Realm of Truth”, on which I am lazily at work now, is to be entitled: There are no necessary truths. All truths, in my use of terms, are eternal, but none are necessary; because truth is a synthetic view or description of existence, and all existence being contingent, all truth is so too. But it is eternally true that each accident that occurs occurs when and where it does.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale