To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 12, 1927
I am sorry that Dewey should have been so much enraged by my article: I meant to be friendly and sympathetic, but magis amica veritas. Yet I am not sorry that he wrote his reply, because I have gathered something from it, partly from his denial that he thinks the immediate alone real, and partly from his assumption that by substance I understand something not in space and time and not distributed as things are distributed, in other words, that I don’t think it is matter but is some metaphysical being. Would you have got the same impression from my book (Scepticism) or is it merely Dewey’s extraordinary intellectual deafness and blindness? He can’t think: he can only see things move: and for that reason he wonders how I, who sometimes see things moving too, can also think about them and see the dialectical and eternal relations of their essences.
Cory, my unknown disciple, has turned up. He is tall, nice, and only 22, but not very clever—a sort of agreeable “grind”. He will come to see you in a month or so, when he goes north.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.