To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome, May 12, 1937
I am reading Emerson with pleasure. Apart from a few oddities, his English is good and there are flashes of intuition and eloquence. I also feel that the skeleton of his philosophy is discernable, in spite of a hopeless inconsecutiveness and literary freedom on the surface. He is still a fanatic at bottom, a radical individualist, with a sort of theism in the background, to the effect that the individual must be after God’s or Emerson’s heart, or be damned. I have read his English Traits, and see he admires England (as my father did) for being successful materially, but has no love for what is lovely there. Emerson is not really free, but is a cruel physical Platonist.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY