To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. June 2, 1916
There seems to be a lull in despatching my proofs, and I am reading Pascal’s Pensées—they are very wrong-headed—and MacDougal’s stupid book on mind and body.
McDougal loquitur:
It would give me a pain
To have merely a brain:
I get all my stamina
From having an anima
S. respondet:
Though that might be less trying
When it comes to dying,
When it comes to thinking
Your anima’s stinking.
The fact is he hasn’t the least idea what mind, spirit, or intelligence is. He looks for it in the wrong place, with the wrong categories, in a sort of psycho-physical materialistic way. It is as if a man trying to conceive beauty looked for it among the kinds of precious metals.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.