To Ezra Loomis Pound
Grande Albergo
Rome. November 19, 1940
Dear E. P.
You see where I am, and when you return to Rome I hope to be established in a little apartment, larger than the one I had in Venice, and promised to me for mañana three weeks ago, and it will be interesting to hear what the sequence of your mental planets has been since last winter. Mine hardly move, except that I lose sight of them when asleep or distracted by Care (about getting money) and Clouds (about getting MS safely to America, for publication at Evanston, Illinois). Both Care & Clouds are now gone, and I am writing a sort of autobiography to while away the time and turn old memories into compositions.
If the sequence to which Mencius reduced causation was physical, like that of the position of planets, it would be a different reduction from that of Hume, who reduced causes to sequence in ideas. If the sequence remains physical, it does not remove derivation from the total cosmos. [Interrupted by telephone. New apartment ready at last. Removal effected.]. Day and night follow one another; but they do so for a physical reason, namely, that the earth, constantly bathed by the light of the Sun, constantly turns on its axis. Would Mencius have acknowledged sequence in this case to be a result, and not a primary fact? Hume, if consistent, would have had to say that the sequence of day and night had no possible explanation, the astromical one being due to a tendency to feign (a cause?) innate in astronomers.
How much pleasanter this war, seen from Italy than the other useless one seen, as I saw it, from England! I feel as if I were living in great days, and witnessing something important. Or is it a mere sequence with no causes and no promise?
G. Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT