To Mary Potter Bush
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. London
Paris. July 4, 1914
Dear Mrs Bush,
Of course, your letter opens up a great subject, but I think the difficulties of it would be cleared up, though not removed, by separating what is due to nature in the aspirations of young people from what is verbal, and due to religious training. To live long, and to have something worth doing to accomplish, is a natural demand; yet the same instinct that makes it is modified by finding satisfaction; and I think this instinct would of itself be perfectly capable, in old age, of accepting death gladly, and of being ideally interested in the larger, but equally definite and terminable, career of the race after them. If we asked the animals I am sure they would say this; and the mathematical dream of living on and on through an infinite number of changes—which would ultimately involve the destruction of all their definite and chosen activities—would seem to them a horrible nightmare; an ideal very disloyal to that of their specific nature. But meantime, of course, they would like a chance to hunt and play after their instinctive fashion; and the way to keep them from discouragement would be to stimulate their natural instincts and to educate them, while giving them as far as possible a chance to be fully exercised. Don’t your young women really desire being loved, pleasantly busy, and well-dressed, rather than absolutely immortal?
I know very well there is something sad in any reality accomplished—heaven would have a certain melancholy about it, as the mind of God surely must have—but there is nothing uninviting in reality untasted and dawning auspiciously upon us. As you say, there are obstacles in bad health and other abnormalities: but these would not be overcome by any teaching. They could only be silenced or made to whine in a different key.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY