Author: David Spiech Page 1 of 283

To Nancy Saunders Toy
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. April 2, 1940

William Lyon Phelps says that I don’t love life; and here I am enjoying life almost uninterruptedly, in spite of old age with its little ailments, in spite of solitude, and in spite of the alarms and inconveniences of the troubled times. I ought to love life and you ought to hate it, but la raison n’est pas ce qui règle l’amour whether of life or of anything else. And we have to suffer for loving. I say in my new book (I am now correcting the proofs) that the spirit prefers to suffer rather than not to care; and that happens to you for having too much spirit—I mean more than can nestle comfortably in our mediocre world.

. . . My whim in spending the winter in Venice couldn’t have been more ill-timed; the winter has been horrible. . . . The sun has hardly shown its face: and what is Venice without sun-light? However, I have stuck it out and on the whole have done pretty well: better than last summer. I have finished The Realm of Spirit, written a . . . good part of my contribution to Schilpp’s book (about my philosophy) and also scribbled away at my autobiography, describing the Sturgis family in the old days. But this entertainment is now interrupted by proof-reading and the gradual arrival of the critical articles that I must reply to in Schilpp’s symposium. I have also not had much to read: little but war books announced in the Times Literary Supplement; but in the shop windows here, although Venice is such a non-literary place I have spied and fished out Montaigne and Nietzsche’s Gaia Scienza (this in a French translation), both excellent stop-gaps. Montaigne is of course a capital rogue: prose still decorative and eloquent; but Nietzsche on the whole inspires more respect: more incisive, braver, more unhappy.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937–1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

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.