Author: David Spiech Page 100 of 283

To Polly Winslow
[Late 1913] • [Ávila, Spain]

. . . . For to do great things with pea-green half-moons on a zebra skin, it is perhaps necessary not to know too much as yet about that dreadful thing which grown-up people call the world. The world is a very imperious, absorbing, jealous master: and the Kingdom of Post-Impressionist art is not of this world.

Dear me, Polly, I have written you a very long letter; but as you have now reached a literary age, you won’t mind how long it takes you to read it. The worst of it is I haven’t said any of the things that I meant to say, such as to thank you for writing, and to thank your Mamma for the pho- tos, and say the one of little Fred with you standing behind is the one that reminds me most of him in his crib, when he looked so much like the lit- tle Child in a crib which we see every where (at least in this Christian country) on Christmas Day. The others of him, and all yours, don’t seem to me good enough to be memories, and of course they are not very important as absolute forms in absolute colours which is the only “art” Mr. Roger Frye now allows me to like.

I am very very cold in this southern climate, and am going farther south still (very illogically) to see if that will mend matters. I am going to a romantic thriftless old city called Seville, to see if (having past fifty) I can still write poetry and fall in love. You don’t think that is very likely, I know, and can almost see you laughing at me. The fact is I don’t think it very likely myself; but it is sometimes amusing to expose oneself to the dangers from which one is perfectly safe.

If I find any Post Impressionist pictures in Seville I will send you one to see if you can be converted too.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. October 26, 1917

Dear Strong,

Yesterday I received—and sent on—your reply to the criticisms on your paper. I have never read anything of yours that I liked so much, it seems as if your long illness had led you to concentrate and clarify your thoughts more than ever. It was particularly welcome to me to find what you say about essence so entirely what I think, because I will confess that until now I had some suspicions that your conception of essence tended in places to become too psychological, something like “image”.

My enthusiasm for your exposition is so great that I feel a fresh desire to come to an agreement with you on the chief point on which we still differ, namely, the difference between a “psychic state” and the “brain-state”; in other words, whether things-in-themselves (or substance, as I should prefer to call it) “is are material or psychic” I am not sure that we need disagree even on this point. The essence of a green-feeling, according to you, is not (or need not be?) the essence of green. Yet, in order to bring the essence of green before us, it must have, if I understand you, some affinity or intelligible relation to green. Does this affinity require any similarity? How is a green-feeling akin to the essence of green? Not (I understand) by intuiting green, for a green-feeling is not aware of anything. Is it that green, or something like green, can be truly predicated of it? But can a green-feeling be looked at? Can it look green?—and I don’t see how else anything could have green for its attribute. If you were willing to say that what made a green-feeling an intelligible ground for the intuition of the essence “green”, was its natural, normal, habitual sufficiency (as the world and life are constituted) to make green appear, just as this is what makes a greentree, or the spring-time, have an affinity to the essence “green”—then I should not feel any but a verbal reluctance to accept your doctrine. The ear has a natural affinity to sound, the eye to colour; and so (more minutely and intimately) the brain-state that immediately evokes any essence must have to that essence: but not by having that essence, or any similar essence, but by the laws of evolution and superfoetation—as marriage “evokes” children. If so much were granted, I should gladly call the central sensitive formative governing elements in the body the psyche, and the particular states of the psyche the “sensations”, “passions”, or “affections” productive of our sensible, passionate, or emotional data: it is an ancient and perhaps inevitable practice to call these things by the same name, as anger, according to Aristotle, means dialectically a desire for revenge, but physically a boiling of the humours. In other words, the ground of a given emotion is called by the name of that emotion, especially when its own essence is not at all known. Mind-stuff, or even feeling, would on this principle be a good or at least inevitable name for substance, so long as we know nothing about substance except that it is the organ of mind and feeling.

However, we now do know something more about substance—especially its distribution and methodical, measurable transformations. Would you be willing to predicate of mind-stuff, not merely its affinity with mind, but the laws of physics? If so, it would not differ from what I call matter, which I don’t imagine to be exhaustively described by physical chemistry, nor even described from within at all: its external relations position, motions, fertilities are known to us, not its intrinsic nature: and as of these fertilities that in respect to mind is one of the most remarkable, and to us the important one, we might call it mind-stuff par excellence, although it is the stuff of everything else also.

This is all old: we have discussed it often: yet I feel the impulse to put it to you again with a sort of new hope, because I think we ought not to allow words or old associations to blind us to what is, perhaps, a substantial agreement, even in this matter.

I shall be curious to see what they make in America of your rebuttal: it wouldn’t surprise me if some were converted: but Drake is so entangled in the notion of “mental facts” or small living ideas breeding one another in the mind like mosquitoes, that I am afraid he will never come round. If they put our two contributions by themselves at the end, in a water-tight compartment, or in the quarter-deck, the ship will either sink or rise by the stern—I don’t know which, but certainly she won’t go on an even keel. However, I should be glad of the honourable isolation: and I should deprecate the use of “essence” by them, because they will twist it horribly and the whole doctrine, which is open enough to misunderstanding at best, will be hopelessly befogged. What do you think of Drake on O, Op, Op, etc, etc.? He wants to call essence O, i.e. object! O?no!.

I am afraid the censor may think this a code, so I will stop.

Yours ever

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Carl Sadakichi Hartmann
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.
Rome. October 24, 1931

Dear Mr. Hartmann,

Your Mohammed didn’t shock me, much less offend me. Certainly your taste, your diction, and your whole literary atmosphere are very remote from mine, but that is not in itself a reason for disregarding you in your ill-fortune, and I have not disregarded it. In spite of the fact that I have never seen you and that there isn’t much artistic or philosophic sympathy between us, your figure appealed to me by virtue of its composite character—somewhat like my own, but running deeper, since it concerned blood as well as circumstances. And I am really sorry for you, not only because you are not well or rich or famous, but because in one sense you couldn’t be well: because the divine curse of seeing more than one side of things had pursued you. But, having yielded more than once to that impulse of imaginative sympathy, I don’t like to be dunned. You must have friends and acquaintances who know your case and—in generous America—will come to your assistance. I must therefore ask you to excuse me from helping you further: because the distance between us, material and moral, makes me feel that it is not for me, in this instance, to be more than an occasional and fantastic helper, coming out of nowhere and disappearing into nothing.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH.

To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. October 23, 1925

Dear George,

It is a good idea of yours, if you can leave your children and your business in safe hands, to come with Rosamond for a trip to the Old World, but I wish it could have been in the Spring or summer, rather than in February and March. When the time comes, I will see if it is feasible to leave Rome in order to meet you: the Riviera is not very far away, but once there I should hardly feel like returning to Rome, so that my working winter season would be sadly cut short. That is the chief obstacle which I foresee to joining you. On the other hand, all would not be loss to you if you decided to come to Rome, because there is no place better worth seeing, and you would find the climate far better than that of Avila or of the Loire at that season. It is a pity that you shouldn’t both come and stay here at least a week: but I understand that your time is short, and your trip to Avila will take up a good deal of energy—not speaking Spanish—as well as of time. In France, on the beaten track, you will have no difficulty in getting on without much command of the language, because at the hotels you can speak English and on the road everybody will know what you want without much explanation. But the family in Avila, except your two aunts, will be reduced to pantomime—as you know from your previous visit, which I suppose you remember distinctly.

I am established here in a little suite quite luxuriously, and am enjoying a warm Indian summer after the chills of Paris. It is a mere continuation of my way of life, such as it was during the last two winters, and I find the routine of it very pleasant. As yet no friends have turned up: but I saw Onderdonk (with his queer gay mother) in Paris, and American professors turn up at intervals with letters of introduction, and give me a chance of playing the part of ancient sage visited by inquiring pilgrims.

Yours affectionately G Santayana.

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.