Author: David Spiech Page 1 of 283

To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 23, 1927

Normal religious experience is the assurance that one is living in a world the economy of which is authoritatively known, so that conduct, sentiment, and expectation have a settled basis. If we distinguish . . . between the true and the illusory parts of such a religion, the illusory part, when it is worth considering at all, seems to me to be poetry: that is, it is an imaginative fiction, rich in emotions, which serves nevertheless to adjust mankind to its fate, and to lend form to it’s relations to things, such as worldly life and eternal truth, which are not easily expressed in commonsense language.

There is a great obscurity, to my sense, in your philosophical first principles. Are you a mere humanist, without any physics? Why then don’t you consider the Catholic church, for instance, as just as respectable and acceptable a view of the world and as good a method of human life, as that of the contemporary Intelligentsia? Certainly the church has the advantage humanly: it is richer in fruits of every description, much riper and of sweeter flavour.

I can’t help feeling that your tartly external and perpetually insulting attitude to this church is founded on your love of truth: you hate her for her very excellences, because you are convinced that they are deceptive. I agree with you there; but then the very naturalism on which that agreement is based, if you steadily accepted it (as Spinoza did, for instance) might lead you to regard those deceptive charms historically with more sympathy and understanding: because the natural predicaments of man and his history made them inevitable and dramatically right.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921–1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Rome. March 22, 1925

I am at this moment struggling with Dewey’s “Experience and Nature” which I am to review for the Whited Sepulchre—a formidable task; but I don’t regret having undertaken it, because it seems that, after intense application and infinite patience in suspending judgement on opinions evidently absurd in form—according to my understanding of words—a certain order and naturalness begin to appear in his theory, which has many elements in it which I like extremely.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. March 21, 1929

I have been reading—mostly in bed, in the depths of night—“Elizabeth’s latest book, called “Expiation”, which is not very amusing (for her) but rather dramatic. It might make a good play.

Cory has developed a great admiration for Proust, whom he reads in the English translation: simply carried off his feet by the description of an asparagus. The moral turpitudes described leave him indifferent—vieux jeu! I suppose this is the attitude (in both respects) of the young men of the hour.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Mr. Gross
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 20, 1936

Dear Mr. Gross

The reason for calling Oliver the “last puritan” is given in the Prologue. He had reached the ultimate phase of puritanism, when it condemns itself. That doesn’t kill it, but it kills the man who has it. Of course, most modern descendants of the Puritans, with some remnant of superstitious conscience, become ordinary business men and hardly less robust socially than other people—more robust than their historical enemies the Anglican Catholics. But Oliver is meant not to be a puritan by accident only—but or by inheritance, but by nature. And he “peters” out because his austerity rejects the ordinary religious and moral shams that satisfy most idealistic souls, while at the same time he can’t identify himself with the life of the world. He is like the rich young man in the Gospel who turns away sadly: not in this case because he wasn’t ready to sell all he had and give to the poor, but because he found no Christ to follow.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To Mary Williams Winslow
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Nice. March 19, 1923

As to politics, I watch what happens mainly with an eye to discerning, if possible, whether the great international socialistic revolution is coming or not. Russia and Italy now make me incline to believe that the cataclysm will not occur, and that things will go on very much as usual, with a change of personnel and of catch-words. Fascism is the most significant thing now: I wonder if in England the decent people will not eventually organize and arm against the politicians and restore the nation.

Much of what people complain of in the world after the war does not worry me; on the contrary, if only the “industrial situation” could remain always bad, and the population could diminish, especially in the manufacturing towns, I should think it a good thing. There are now too many people, too many things, and too many conferences and elections.

I have been reading a new book of Freud’s and other things by his disciples. They are settling down to a steadier pace, and reducing their paradoxes to very much what everybody has always known.

Einstein I do not attempt to read: I am willing to have a maximum of “relativity”; but I wonder if they have ever considered that if “relative” systems have no connexion and no common object, each is absolute; and if they have a common object, or form a connected group of perspectives, then they are only relative views, like optical illusions, and the universe is not ambiguous in its true form.

When I was ill with the grippe (which is what I am supposed to have had) the doctor, I think, gave me some “dope” or other: any how my imagination was very active and I scribbled in pencil four chapters of my novel, including the end: but I have not dared to reread them, for fear they may be pure nonsense.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.