Author: David Spiech Page 1 of 283

To Henry Ward Abbot
Oxford, England. April 23, 1887

While at Oxford I hope to meet some more specimens of the English race, thanks to Lord Russell, who has been a godsend to me. I don’t tell you anything about my adventures with him because I have to maintain with you my reputation as a philosopher, and in this respect I have quite lost my reason. When I am safely in Spain again, and can treat the matter objectively, I will make a full confession of my fall from grace and self-control I mean and not into the Thames, although this also is mortifying enough. Herbert Lyman can tell you about it, if you care to know.

Truth is the form of our judging imagination just as space and time are forms of our perceptive imagination. It is as impossible to make a statement without postulating a real objective truth, as to conceive a figure without implying indefinite space. But it is precisely on account of this necessity of postulating truth, that I claim respect for such systems as Christianity—not mere courtesy, but the sincere recognition that it stands on the same footing as our own system. I protest against the solipsism of creeds. I demand that just as a sane man recognizes that his neighbors are centres of reality for themselves just as much as he is a centre of reality for himself, and that he appears to them as a mere object with as good right as they are objects to his own consciousness; so I say should a system recognize that it appears as a psychological fact in other systems with as much justice as other systems appear as psychological facts to itself. I do not propose that we should give up the postulate of absolute truth (although I may sometimes seem to say so, owing to the difficulty of expressing oneself): I only propose that we should abandon the assertion, implied in any claim of the exclusive right of our own system to be considered true, that absolute truth is postulated once only—in one consciousness—instead of being postulated in many separate acts. This is not clear—I can’t make it clear. But my conception is that we must believe our beliefs to be absolutely true, just as we believe ourselves our feelings to be perfectly real; but that this necessity no more excludes our admitting other beliefs as absolutely true for themselves—from their own point of view— than our belief in the reality and subjectivity of our feelings excludes our belief in the reality and subjectivity of other people’s. The advantage which you try to give beliefs founded on “reason and logic” is illusory, as it seems to me, because reason and logic are internal to systems, not external to them. You don’t get your convictions through reason and logic, but build reason and logic on your convictions. The coercive force of logic depends on the similarity of the structure of human minds, on which the necessity of logical axioms also depends. The sanction of logic is in psychology, not vice versa. That reasons must be given is a fact, but there can be no reason why facts, why the world at all, should be given.

As a matter of fact, I agree with you that Christianity is becoming untenable, because the firm and unshakable convictions in our minds are no longer Christian doctrines, but scientific ones. . . . There are certain convictions which cannot be exiled from the mind, convictions about everyday practical matters, about history, and about the ordinary passions of men. A system starting from these universal convictions has a foothold in every mind, and can coerce that mind to accept at least some of its content. The same is not true of systems founded on extraordinary and exceptional experiences, because these simply may cease to exist, in which case the system loses its hold. This is what is happening to Christianity. So I should say that the criterion by which one system is judged to be more tenable than another is not logic but necessity—not the greater reasonableness of believing its facts but the greater impossibility of disbelieving them.

. . . I can’t help my philosophical passion. If I were not to generalize and preach I should have to stop thinking. . . . I am certainly mediocre as a whole, and in the important human qualities—courage, serviceableness, and honesty— sadly deficient. I have of course my strong side—a strip of greatness, as it were—but I am altogether too poor a specimen of humanity for this to tell in the long run. Don’t bet anything on my turning out well. I don’t care enough about it myself to work for success. What I crave is not do great things but to see great things. And I hate my own arrogance and would worship the man who should knock it out of me.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Wincenty Lutoslawski
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. April 20, 1949.

Dear Sir,

It was a pleasure to hear from you after so many years, and to know that you, too, have weathered these times of war and ruin. As for me, I had already retired from “the world” when troubles began, and was put to no great inconvenience, and to no positive loss, by events; I merely moved from the hotel in the city, where I had lived for many years, to this hospital-refuge kept by an Order of English-speaking Sister, called the “Little Company of Mary” or “The Blue Sisters”, from the colour of their veil. I am happy in my cell here, and do not expect to move again.

The just impression that you got of me in the first instance, that I was a sceptic and sincere lover of beauty, I think is still true of me in spite of the pretentious titles to some of my books. My system is only a system of categories or grammar of human imagination, not claiming any scientific or literal or exclusive validity. But modern philosophy was always alien to me, and I could never accept the dogmatic side of Platonism or Hinduism or Christianity as anything but a moralistic mythology. But I am perfectly content that language and thought should remain symbolical and merely human, even in the most objective possible science. “Reality” can take care of itself, and of us.

Writing has been a pleasure for me, not a means to any other end than that of a poet and I have doubtless written too much. Nevertheless, I can’t stop, and I am still at it, composing a big book about Government. I will very gladly send you (from the publishers’ in New York) any one of my books that you may care to see: but which? There is even a novel, “The Last Puritan” and two short parts of a kind of autobiography, called “Persons & Places” of which the second part, published separately, was given the temporary title of “The Middle Span”. These books would give you the best account of my life and religious opinions, if they interest you. But I have properly no religious opinions, only historical and psychological views about religion. Nevertheless, in my own terms, I could accept your conviction about pre-existence, in that, without any belief in transmigration of souls, I do believe in a profound existent potentiality in psyches; not indeed, in my view, infinitely old or infinitely transmissible, but like Karma, dominating our passage through human society, which is not at all a favourable environment for the spirit which the psyche is capable of developing. I have even written a book about “The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, or God in Man”, a piece of psychological Christology, not a “Life of Jesus.” Perhaps the best book to send you would be the one volume edition of “Realms of Being” containing the four volumes on Essence, Matter, Truth, and Spirit. My own favourite, however, and best written book, is “Dialogues in Limbo” of which there is a fresh edition.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Brookline, Massachusetts. April 19, 1900.

Dear Strong

I am delighted beyond measure that my little book should please you. Thank you very much for all you say. It encourages me very much, coming from a person of your solid judgment and religious nature and education. If you find my book good, it can’t be rotten. But I must attempt to answer your criticism, so as to set myself right both with you and with my own conscience. When I said that religion should give up its pretension to be dealing with matters of fact, I meant, as you doubtless felt yourself, that the religious machinery (gods, hell, heaven, grace, sacraments etc) was not in the plane of fact but in the plane of symbols. But symbols are symbols of fact; and in a sense poetry deals with matters of fact, and the better and more poetical the poetry the more real and fundamental the facts with which it deals. It is not artificial in the sense of being arbitrary. It is a representation of reality, according to the requirements of a part of reality, the human imagination. And yet there is a plain sense in which it is right and obvious to say that poetry does not deal with (I should have said, perhaps, does not contain, does not constitute) matters of fact. Apollo is not a fact in the same plane as the sun: yet the religion of Apollo “deals with” the fact “sun”. Otherwise the religion of Apollo would be impossible; it would have no basis and no subject-matter. So that all I mean by relegating religion to the sphere of poetry is to distinguish, as we should all do in poetry, between the reality represented and the fiction by which that representation is made. Painting does not deal with flesh and hair, but with pigments; yet by its manipulation of those pigments it represents, and, if you like, deals with, hair and flesh. Possibly the whole ambiguity might be removed by saying deals in, instead of deals with. But my book was not meant to be a creed, even for skeptics, and its definitions are not meant to have theological precision. They are “thrown at” ideas.

. . . You can’t sum up the moral values of the parts of the Universe and say the result is the moral value of the Universe itself. For these moral values cancel one another and disappear into merely physical energies when you trace them back to their source. The good and evil in the world are not the world’s merits and demerits, because by the time you have traced them back to the general laws from which good and evil alike flow, the laws have forfeited those moral characteristics. I disagree, then, with what you say about the credit for what is fair and good being due rather to the Universe than to us. It is as if you said vision belonged rather to the Universe than to the animals in it, because of course the Universe gave the animals eyes, and not they to themselves. The Universe deserves no credit for our virtues until it acquires them—until it becomes ourselves. When the sympathy with moral ends begins to be a principle of action, moral values arise; there are none in the mere conditions of goodness, and the rain and the corn and sunshine are not moral objects. To regard them as such is really to make them gods; it is mythology; and to my mind your awe- inspiring, amiable, sympathetic and admonishing Universe is a mythological object. I value it as such; as such it is a religious idea, and a true one; but it is not a matter of fact.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.