To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. May 9, 1939
Spiritual union cannot be union with another spirit, but union between spirit in one instance, at one moment, and all things as felt from that point. These “all things” may of course include other spirits; but in conceiving them there is already a sense of separation, such as I feel at this moment, between you and me; and agreement even in everything would not remove that duality, because it would have to be an agreement by confluence, an agreed agreement, and might lapse at any time, or discover itself to be illusory, since two real persons were concerned. So that it seems to me that utter and perfect union has to be momentary and internal to the life of a single soul. It is then not properly union but unification. One becomes really one.
I am sending you Dewey (hope he won’t make you more unhappy, as he might if you believed what he says) and I will not send you Guignebert, though he is not a sentimentalist, like Middleton Murry, for instance, who tries to retain the emotions of Christianity without the dogmas. He is simply a historian; and I can make a cynical laughing philosophy out of his reports. I have always liked understanding views with which I did not agree—how else could one like the study of philosophy? But the emotions incident to that study are not those of the persons or beliefs described; far from it. They are dramatic, tragic, or comic emotions at seeing their fate.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.