To John Francis Stanley Russell
Avila, Spain. July 29, 1910
Dear Russell,
The cuttings you enclose interest me only as justifying an old saying of Goethe’s: “Die Engländer haben keine Intelligenz”. All this sort of gossip is worthless, and this sort of controversy ridiculous. The Catholic Church is intolerant on principle, and the expression of this intolerance is limited only by the influence she is able to exercise over the civil power. She would repress, and exterminate, all heresy and schism, if she were able. To talk about persecutions inspired by her as due to individual irritation or hot temper is pure nonsense; and if English Catholics indulge in it, it is because they must be ignoramuses, or cowards.
But what is the use of talking about anything when what guides events, and people’s opinions, is not justice or the facts in the case, but a certain party instinct, or sense for the direction in which they would wish things to move? Now, I am entirely able to feel that the whole society of Christendom (compared with that of Greece, or even with that of Islam) rests on a false and artificial basis; and I can share the hope of those anarchists, or other rebels, who dream of some future more naturalistic system of thought and life—say with free love, and without individual property.
But it is one thing to see the arbitrary and ultimately unstable character of a civilization (every civilization is essentially unstable) and another to set about destroying it by blind force. This latter system is hateful, because inspired only by hate: it has no ideal of a positive sort to inspire it, nor, if it had, could it attain that ideal merely by destroying what now exists. The want of intelligence is immense, that does not see that everything we have that makes (or might make) life worth living is an incident to the irrational, traditional civilization in which we have been reared. All things are like language, which we must use, beautify, but not worship; and your anarchists are mere blundering dumb beasts, that sputter and howl, because they find the rules of grammar absurd and inconvenient. So they are, for people who are too stupid or too ill-bred to use them: but that does not make these people martyrs, or heralds of progress. It only makes them fit to be exhibited naked in cages, like other wild animals, and fed on raw meat through the bars.
I didn’t mean to write a long letter, nor have I the least idea of modifying your opinion on these subjects. Only, I wanted to save you the trouble of sending me the chance thoughts of the provincial correspondents of the Daily News—Quakers or others.
Yours ever,
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Unknown