To Logan Pearsall Smith
Address C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, S.W.1
Paris. August 30, 1920
My early books were written too much under the pressure of American public sentiment—I don’t mean that this influenced my opinions, or even my style, very much, but that it made me write to justify my existence and make sure to myself that I did have an intellect: but I should have had more, perhaps, if I hadn’t been in such haste to exhibit it. My comfort is that . . . I am not yet too old to recast the more theoretic parts of my reflexion into a system that may be better articulated and more closely knit than my old divagations.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Library of Congress, Washington DC.