To Ezra Loomis Pound
Grand Hotel
Rome. January 4, 1941
Dear E.P.
Aren’t you wasting your time in looking for proofs? Proofs must rest either on tautology, because you have granted the conclusion in conceiving your premises, or on stupidity, because you are incapable of conceiving anything different from what happens to suggest itself. Mathematics and logic are tautological; any given essence has essential relations which are seen to be inevitable when once pointed out. Proofs there are therefore interesting because the deepen apprehension; but they prove nothing about matters of fact. I don’t know how you define “substance”: Spinoza could prove that there was only one substance because he conceived it as the essence and truth of all things lumped together. If there were two universes or two attributes the true universe and the total essence would evidently be the sum and system of those two universes and of those two attributes. But in calling this inevitable totality God or natura naturans, he identified it with a dynamic unit or source; something not subject to proof or argument of any kind, but imported into the system by religious tradition or vitalistic myth.
I can’t reply to your suggestions and diagrams because I don’t understand them.
Existence comes in pulses, in strokes. I see no reason for not stopping, or for stopping, anywhere in that flux. Existence has as many centres as it happens to have, as many moments, feelings, assumptions, questions—all in the air and with no power over one another. But if we have time and patience to study a natural world, posited as the source and common continuum in all this existence, we assume that it has dynamic unity: otherwise from one point in it we could never justly infer or posit any other point in it. This is my argument for materialism.
G S.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Seven, 1941-1947. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.