To Stuart Gerry Brown
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123, Pall Mall, London.
Rome. May 14, 1934.
I think the Platonic-Christian theology necessary to defend the moralistic position. Kant and the German idealists can’t do it, because their position, though subjective, is not humanistic; and the absolute self may turn pantheist or even materialist, or in the other direction, perfectly anarchical, as in Nietsche. But that theology seems to me an evident fiction, made to defend a moralistic prejudice.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933–1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Postcard: Syracuse University Library, Syracuse NY.