Author: David Spiech Page 101 of 283

To Otto Kyllmann
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. October 22, 1935

Dear Mr. Kyllmann,

In regard to the Canadian edition of The Last Puritan and the Book-of-the-Month Club any arrangement that you think suitable will satisfy me. I abandon all hope of understanding the mysteries of the book-trade in the U.S. but I bow piously to its dispensations, at least in this case, since I understand I am to receive 5,000 dollars in a lump to begin with, which is much more than I had expected in the end.

I don’t subscribe to the Press-Cutting agencies, preferring to let my consciousness of my books fade naturally into the past; but I have seen the Times review and one other (both sent to me by these Press-Cutting Bureaus, as advertisements) and I quite understand the tendency of the criticisms to be, as you say, “muffled”. They don’t like to venture on dangerous ground, or to risk an opinion about a book that doesn’t quite fall into the usual categories. Both these reviews were rather favourable; yet neither of them mentioned humour, as you were kind (and perceptive) enough to do in your note printed on the jacket. To me the humour, the fun, makes the soul of any description of human society that can be read for pleasure. If people don’t hear the scherzo in the symphony, no wonder they find the andante tedious and long.

Somebody some day will probably attack this book furiously on moral and religious grounds, but for the moment the critics seem to be benevolent, or else shy.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia PA.

To Robert Shaw Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. October 21, 1946.

You seem to be beset by pessimistic people in regard to public affairs and the future; and as responsible editor and representative of healthy public opinion, you feel bound in any case to be hopeful and encouraged. Now what I feel is that there is never any occasion to deprecate bad omens or unpleasant possibilities. If the apprehension is groundless, it may be disregarded or laughed at—refuted by good sense; but if it is well-grounded, that fact does not undermine your moral principles or opportunity to live up to them. You can do just as much good in bad times as in prosperous times, perhaps more. There is no occasion, therefore, for being confused by the uncertainty of the future. You may be able, when things threaten to disappoint current hopes, the better to revise your borrowed opinions and discover what you really value, even if it should not be destined to prevail. There is something else, perhaps, in your feeling: a sort of obligation to believe certain matters of fact, about the triumph of democracy, for instance, even if the evidences were against it. In a little book written by Julien Benda (a French Jewish philosopher) in New York during this war, I have found a clear statement on this point, given in a quotation from our Harvard sage Perry. Democratic principles, says Benda, are dictated by the conscience, not by experience or custom. And he quotes Perry to the effect that a 100% American cannot admit the possibility that democracy should disappear. Any suggestion to that effect causes “bitter resentment”. This, I should say, is particularly true of those in whom (as in Perry, a Princeton man, and Pres. Wilson, another) Puritan and Jewish sentiments are still prevalent. Politics rests on a Covenant with God, so that fidelity to a special revealed law and everlasting, prosperity and victory are inseparable. This is what in the book I am now writing, “Dominations and Powers” I call a militant as against a generative society; that is, one intentionally chosen and imposed, rather than one that has grown up by an unintended concourse of circumstances and interests. In this respect democracy is intolerant and totalitarian: that is, it claims exclusive rightness for its system regardless of natural growths and diverse ideals. Benda, who is a doctrinaire, doesn’t mince matters on this point. Nor do the Russians. I am very happy with a lot of new books, but my work advances slowly.

Yours affly G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Robert Shaw Sturgis, Weston MA.

To Constable and Co. Ltd.
Address:
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, S.W.1
Paris. October 20, 1921

Messrs Constable & Company
London.

Gentlemen,
I am sorry that the American tariff is likely to place further obstacles in the way of the sale of English books in the United States; it is a clear case of protecting a local trade at the expense of the education of the country and the preservation of the English language. In respect to my book, however, I am not much concerned: the American sale of Soliloquies in England would in any case not be so large as that of Character & Opinion in the U.S. as the book is longer and does not entice the American reader with the almost irresistible bait of hearing himself discussed.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia PA.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Cambridge, England. October 18, 1923

Your book arrived yesterday, and I have just finished it. The general impression I receive is that of a pleasant, mellow, personal conversation; you say various things, some technical, others simple, because they are in your mind (or on your mind) and they all have the agreeable quality of wise observations, boiled down to their essence. The quotations complete this impression: they are very good in themselves, apt enough, and give evidence of wide sympathies and good taste. I think you will probably leave in your readers’ minds a trace of your doctrine, not necessarily by converting them, but by making them aware that here is one more sage with a hypothesis about the universe which it is interesting to record, if not as a scientific possibility at least as a proof of the ingenious diversity of human opinions.

As to making your view plausible to me personally, your book doesn’t advance matters at all. I find no arguments at all for it, the assertion that if substance were not feeling knowledge would be unconscious being purely gratuitous. Reaction and adaptation, without consciousness, could be called knowledge only by a behaviourist: and if you say in one place that behaviourism is absurd, in other places you seem to adopt it. But my chief difficulty, as always, is with your fundamental conception of “immediate experience”. As I told you not long ago in conversation, I think the phrase unfortunate; it will perhaps win over some critics but it will be only in order to attack the other elements of your system. They will understand, in spite of your warnings, that you mean elementary consciousness. The arguments you invoke to show that consciousness and knowledge must be secondary, apply to experience too. Experience, even conceived in behaviourist terms, seems to demand the affection of one thing by another. Would you perhaps say that it is the mutual tensions between the points of substance that make the essence of that substance into experience—into responsive modification? But then you would need a deeper substance to have or to undergo the experience. I cannot conceive how atoms of feeling (changeless ones, I understand) can facilitate the genesis of experience by changing their order, even if an order of atoms of feeling can be conceived at all, which I doubt strongly. Moreover I am convinced, as you know, on general grounds, that feeling is just as much a symptom of vicissitudes in a complex organism as are consciousness and knowledge. You do not feel without organs or occasions; you do not experience without being in some predicament and undergoing some organic change. The notion that the substance composing your organism is feeling in its elements, is simply a bit of surviving idealism: the only plausible ground for it is the theory that only consciousness can exist

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.