To Lewis Mumford
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London S.W.1
Rome. December 16, 1926
I feel that you are thinking of me, quite naturally, as just a Harvard professor, author of a book called “The Life of Reason”. Your appreciation seems absolutely just, as directed upon that semi-public personage: but I never felt myself to be identical with that being, and now much less than ever. What you say, about my roots being at best in Mrs. Gardner’s Boston, is true of him, not of me: my own roots are Catholic and Spanish, and though they remain under ground, perhaps, they are the life of everything: for instance, of my pose as a superior and lackadaisical person; because all the people and opinions which I deal with, and try to understand, are foreign and heretical and transitory from the point of view of the great tradition, to which I belong.
. . . . The moral world, for me, is a part of the human world, which is itself a detail in nature: variations in the moral world are as legitimate, and may be as welcome, as changes in art or in language: but does the universe change, or can a serious philosophy change, with the moral weather?
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.