To Charles Augustus Strong
Glion-sur-Territet, Switzerland. August 29, 1929
The other day we had a casual discussion about “knowledge” and the immediate, and he became surprisingly intense, saying he had a sort of religious conviction that “knowledge” could only be of immediate data. This, in a supposed disciple of mine, was a bit disconcerting: but he said afterwards that it was only a question of words, that he preferred to call “knowledge” with Russell, what I call intuition: because what I call knowledge, being admittedly only “faith mediated by symbols”, was only belief; and belief is not knowledge. You see he is after certitude: and I tell you about it because possibly you may get into trouble together and misunderstand one another on this crucial point, if you are not forewarned of this thirst for certitude in the young mind. I don’t think his divergence from me is a matter of words only: it rests on the axiom that “experience” is of fact, and that its objects are existent states. This, of course, is in part your own contention, so that you may find him, on this point, in agreement with you against me: but I am afraid that in another aspect of the question, he will be recalcitrant to your doctrine, because while you say that the existence of the object is given immediately, you admit, I believe, that its given characters are for the most part only essences imputed to it by the psyche in view of her own reactions. This, if granted, would destroy the axiom of immediate certitude of fact: and I can’t see why the existence of the object is not imputed to it by the psyche as much as its essence.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Four, 1928–1932. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY