To Ira Detrich Cardiff
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 5, 1950
The several samples of notices of our Atoms of Thought which you have been kind enough to send me show me how much better you know the present receptivity of the American public than I ever did, and that your labours in choosing and arranging and indexing your selection of “Thoughts” were admirably directed and successful in so far as recommending my works to the part of that public which you had in mind.
Many of these notices are only announcements: such a book exists, at such a price, with so many pages and an index. Others contain a few samples of the contents, and yet others laudatory comments precisely on that side of my “Thoughts” which you had meant to bring forward so as to shield me from passing for a theosophist.
But do these rationalist and positivistic passages give glimpses of those “prehistoric blocks” which I said in my preface formed the substructure of my boroque philosophy? No: they are samples rather of that superficial, if not baroque, play of contemporary party cries which filled the air in my time. The part that I admit and retain in repeating those commonplaces is the appeal to historic or psychological fact which they contain. Without the recognition of those facts the play of imagination and sentiment in other directions would become delusion. Now the part of my philosophy which you pass over is not favourable to illusion, but highly critical; and so my borrowings from the slogans of the Left were always, in their context, protected from being deceptive by a scepticism which showed them too, no less than the fabulations of the Right, to be products of human fancy. My “prehistoric blocks” were what I call the inevitable assumptions of common sense, or “animal faith”, which do not include, but precede, the dogmatic assumptions of common sense….
This is meant as a letter of thanks for your patience with my grumblings.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY