To Nancy Saunders Toy
Hotel Bristol
Rome. March 5, 1939
Genuine thought is solitary, and as Emerson said, we “descend to meet.” That is, in the direction of comforting opinions and the latest thing in science, gossip and not truth. We might ascend to meet, if we were in pursuit of repentance and not of self-congratulation.
The terms of a science are not parts of things, but only ideas of things; and just as one sense gives us one idea, say colour, and another sense another idea, say hot or cold, so one science may give us a classification into genera and species and another science a mechanism of a geometrical or atomic kind. These sciences may all be true; they will none of them be the whole or even a part of the material reality. They will be theories, just as our experience will be ideas or sensations. And both science and experience are only languages in which, for human purposes, nature may at times be described.
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.