To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller
22 Beaumont Street
Oxford, England. August 4, 1915
Dear Fuller,
First, as to your letter. Without knowing the new people in the philosophical department at Harvard it is hard for me to judge whether you would be happy with them or they with you. I have preached to you by example; but example is really no maxim, since cases are different, and trying as I can well see that you might find professing for life, it would have the advantage of justifying your existence before Mrs Minerva Grundy, and of keeping you in contact with old habits and old amenities—for there are amenities at Harvard, at least while you are there. But I can’t take the teaching of philosophy seriously in itself, either as a means of being a philosopher or of teaching the young anything solid: they merely flirt with that for a year or two instead of flirting with something else. Philosophy is not a science; it might be a life or a means of artistic expression, but it is not likely to be either at an American college. So that, substantially, I shouldn’t feel that you were missing anything if you abandoned the whole thing. You could still read and think and write, if you had anything to say; and you could still live with your friends and be an ornament to Sherborn. When the war is over I may go on a visit to America, and then I will knock at your gate, and we can talk all this over at leisure.
Is your “primer” to be a work of art—the first chapter on “What is philosophy” rather suggests that—or is it to be a hand-book for cramming on the day before an examination? In the latter case, I shouldn’t introduce any views of my own, for they will be learned by heart and deposited on the examination paper like a chemical precipitate of your best thoughts. I should begin with Thales and water which is refreshing, wholesome, and unforgettable.
I too am writing a book—or rather three books, but the Realms of Being are in abeyance until the noise of explosives subsides—and bits of it are appearing in The New Republic; also other articles, for somehow the war, in making me very unhappy, has made me very prolific in a miscellaneous way. I have even attempted to write verses again, but in this I have failed. However, I spend my whole time over books and papers, hardly seeing anyone or opening my lips for weeks and weeks. I don’t suffer from solitude, but I have suffered a good deal—less lately—from the war. You may say, “why less lately, when things have been going from bad to worse?” Because I am weary of it all, my feelings blunted, and my mind resigned. The cries of this camp or that are folly: what does it mean to fight for “our very existence”, or what to “crush militarism?” That is all rot. Germany will annex more or less land; England will be safe enough at home with conscription and a lesson in the futility of liberalism and the shocking incompetence of politicians. Every body will be poorer—not a bad thing altogether—and we shall be able to travel about untorpedoed until the next scrimmage. Voilà.
Yours ever, G.S.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript:The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.