To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. October 3, 1916
How distressing it is that you should be laid up in this way by a mysterious weakness, without any immediate prospect of relief! As I wrote to Margaret the other day, I have little faith in the diagnosis of doctors, or in their prescriptions. At Harrogate—a dreadfully dull place—I had a vivid sense of the fact that the practice of medicine is a ritual and not a science. My doctor, or rather Mrs Morrell’s, to whom she sent me, was a sort of fashionable clergyman who had missed his vocation—impudent, too. In the treatment he prescribed he was evidently guessing; and when I represented that sulphur-water was nasty, and seemed to swell me without doing any good, he replied that it was absolutely the right thing for my “membritis”, or disease of the white membrane; and five minutes later he ordered me to take Kissingen water instead! Your doctors are undoubtedly better, but your trouble is also worse than mine has yet become, so that I do not envy you their ministrations.
I hear that the difficulties about passports are worse than ever, and that there is no chance of getting through to Switzerland at present. I wish I could reach you by wireless, and explain to you my latest discovery, that the three vices of European philosophy are egotism, humanism, and worldliness.
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