Author: David Spiech Page 1 of 283

To William James
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts. [Easter 1900]

I see that you have discovered me in the Poetry & Religion more than in my verses or the Sense of Beauty although I fancy there is no less of me in those other books. But there is more to come, and although I daresay you won’t like the Life of Reason much better than you like my attitude hitherto, I think you will find that, apart from temperament, I am nearer to you than you now believe. What you say, for instance, about the value of the good lying in its existence, and about the continuity of the world of values with that of fact, is not different from what I should admit. Ideals would be irrelevant if they were not natural entelechies, if they were not called for by something that exists and if consequently their realization would not be a present and actual good. And the point in insisting that all the eggs at breakfast are rotten is nothing at all except the consequent possibility and endeavour to find good eggs for the morrow. The only thing I object to and absolutely abhor is the assertion that all the eggs indiscriminately are good because the hen has laid them.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To William Soutar
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123, Pall Mall. London. S.W.1.
Rome. March 31, 1931

Your title “Conflict”, and the sentence you quote from me as a motto, suggest love vs. dissatisfaction with love. Is that the end? Your powers of spiritual reaction and recuperation are evident: you have doubtless found, or will find, that which you seek in turning away from love with dissatisfaction: the light of “Dawn”. I myself have found it in a rather humdrum, intellectual, old man’s philosophy: your temperament will discover, I expect, something more vehement and sublime.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: National Library of Scotland.

To John Hall Wheelock
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Hotel Bristol. Rome March 30, 1936

So long as you ask me to do nothing, you will always easily persuade me.

I continue to hear flattering things about The Last Puritan, and from the most various quarters. It is gratifying and a little surprising.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933–1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. London
Seville. March 29, 1914.

I came to this attractive town of Seville in January, after a delightful term spent at Cambridge—where I found that Russell has relapsed into a most British state of intellect—nominalism, atomism, practically empirical idealism, with minima sensibilia for metaphysical elements.

Seville is like a provincial Rome, with three personalities in one carcass, one Moorish, one Spanish, and one modern. The people are very attractive, and the one park is a paradise.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910–1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH.

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
Cambridge, England. March 28, 1915

Of course, reading the papers and thinking about the war takes up a large part of one’s time and energy. Until it is over I can’t expect to resume my ordinary manner of life.

Something Josephine said in her letter made me suspect that she is thinking of America again for the autumn. Unless the war is over (which is hardly likely) we might have some difficulty in coming through France, and might be torpedoed (although so far no good liner has suffered, partly because they are too fast to be caught and partly because the Germans don’t want to exasperate the U.S. by giving the tourists a salt bath)

I went to dinner with the Carlino Perkins’s the other night—my first dinner-party for years—and didn’t like it at all. Old frowsy people with nothing but conventional chit-chat and thread-bare sentiments about the war. Bessie Ward herself is animated and doesn’t look very old, but she talks of one thing and thinks of another—a horrid trick—and is always changing the subject and being facetious, which also is a bit tiresome. However, I should have forgiven it all if they had had champagne, but they didn’t.

There is no doubt that the English climate and way of life suit me admirably. Perhaps, when I settle down, it will be here after all, although I no longer feel the same positive pleasure in being in England which I felt twenty years ago. The positive pleasure now is to be in the South—Rome, Seville, the Riviera, the bay of Naples. But England makes a good “home.”

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910–1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville.