To Wendell T. Bush
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123 Pall Mall, London
Cambridge, England. Jan. 28, 1916
Dear Mr Bush,
As you may judge by the enclosed article,1 Holt’s book arrived in due time. I read it with greater pleasure than his older one2 (written ten years ago, I believe, although not published till lately) and his style, too, is less uncouth, although still crabbed and common; common beyond words are his illustrations, they make one writhe. But my feeling is that Holt is a man of force and ability: I wish he were geniessbar.3
A propos of Holt I have been reading Freud;4 also common, and I can’t help thinking fantastic, but certainly very penetrating and unforgettable.
1.Two Rational Moralists, Philosophy 13 (25 May 1916): 290-96. Review of John Erskine, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, and Other Essays (1915), and Edwin Bissell Holt, The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics (1915).
2.The New Realism: Cooperative Studies in Philosophy (1912).
3.Palatable.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY