To Robert Seymour Bridges
22 Beaumont Street
Oxford, England. December 23, 1916
Your address is full of wisdom and I have read it with great pleasure keeping in mind what you said about not agreeing with me about reason. I see that you use it here as a synonym of intelligence: perhaps I tend to think of something else, when I use the word; but I don’t discover any material divergence between us as to the good, which is the root of all important differences between people. As to the machinery of reasoning instinct, etc. we are all in the dark, and our philosophies move in the region of rhetorical symbols. When we speak of reason governing an animal or governing the world, do we mean simply that the good is being realized somehow, or that abstract terms and discourse are running meantime through somebody’s head, or do we mean something further? It seems to me all a chaos of conventional phrases and verbal psychology, by which we describe variously the same undisputed facts.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England