Author: David Spiech Page 103 of 283

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. October 13, 1945

I see that you take kindly to my ugly ducklings. This morning I left at Miss Tindall’s the MS of one of the two plays, Philosophers at Court, which is long, in blank verse, and represents the visit of Plato to Sicily, to reform the government of Dionysius—the Younger, in my non-historical arrangement—and his discomfiture there. I am satisfied with the form this play has now taken, and will send you a copy as soon as Miss Tindall has typed it. I don’t think it will be much liked, although symbolically it is not without application to the present state of affairs: it is pessimistic—but gaily pessimistic, which perhaps makes it worse. I believe I have already written to you about some complaints I have received about Persons & Places, to the effect that I don’t say how good all my friends were, in spite of small defects in them which I ought not to have hinted at. Lyon Phelps made the same criticism about The Last Puritan, that there was not a single good person in the book: and this, by the same criterion, will be doubly true of Philosophers at Court. And somehow the same fatality—the absence of goodness in everybody—pursues the other play: The Marriage of Venus. This is short, and in rhymed verse after the manner of my Lucifer. The plot and the principal scenes seem to me all right: but there are horrible lax, flaccid passages and superfluous “poetic” expressions. I think, however, that without trusting to any positive new inspiration at my age, I can trust my experience to make negative corrections, chiefly omissions, and substitution of terse for conventional “poetic” language in various places. For instance, I can make these Olympians call one another you instead of thou and thee; and I can change their names from Greek to Latin, which is more intelligible in English, and lends itself better for comedy. I mean, then, to rewrite this play: otherwise I should be ashamed to publish it. You must therefore be patient, if you want the two plays to appear together. Meantime I shall be curious to see what you think of Philosophers at Court.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To George Rauh
Via S. Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. October 12, 1950

Dear Mr Rauh,

My chief divergence from American views lies in that I am not a dogmatist in morals or politics and do not think that the same form of government can be good for everybody; except in those matters where everybody is subject to the same influence and has identical interests, as in the discipline of a ship in danger, or of a town when there is a contagious disease. But where the interests of people are moral and imaginative they ought to be free to govern themselves, as a poet should be free to write his own verses, however trashy they may seem to the pundits of his native back yard. I think the universal authority ought to manage only economic, hygienic, and maritime affairs, in which the benefit of each is a benefit for all; but never the affairs of the heart in anybody. Now the Americans and OUN’s way of talking is doctrinaire, as if they were out to save souls and not to rationalize commerce. And the respect for majorities instead of for wisdom is out of place in any matter of ultimate importance. It is reasonable only for settling matters of procedure in a way that causes as little friction as possible: but it is not right essentially because it condemns an ideal to defeat because a majority of one does not understand its excellence. It cuts off all possibility of a liberal civilization. And it is contrary to what American principles have been in the past, except in a few fanatics like Jefferson who had been caught by the wind of the French Revolution. Americans at home are now liberal about religion and art: why not about the forms of government? I mean to send you or Lawrence Butler my new book on “Dominations and Powers”, when it appears, where all this is threshed out naturalistically. Glad to know that Lawrence is well. Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
London. Sunday, October 11, 1914.

It is quite intelligible that the Catholic party should hail the decline of Masonic France, heretical England and schismatic Russia. A new Holy German Empire, even if the Emperor was nominally a Protestant and had to be tolerant to his 200,000,000 Moslem protégés, would give the Church a great backing. Politically and morally she would be countenanced and respected everywhere as she has not been since the Reformation. In other ways, too, a universal German ascendancy would not be without its splendours, and I am by no means sure that this development of things is not as desirable as any other. Things cannot remain as they are, and the Americanization of the Universe would be even a worse fate. But my heart, I confess, is with the French, English, and also with the Russians, because they all three, in various ways, make for individual freedom, and for the security and delightfulness of life. They are the peoples who wish to be left alone, because they know how to make themselves comfortable and happy. The German system is one of strain and of artificial aims: it is a sort of orderly night-mare. For this reason I can’t help thinking that the Mediterranean countries would obey their true instinct in sympathizing with the allies, as the liberal and paganized parties in them actually do. And that need not involve any disloyalty to Christianity. The German spirit is very anti-Christian at bottom, although in its demand for order and discipline it may find an alliance with Christianity useful for the moment. The German spirit, however, is that of “Absolute Will”, as their philosopher call it. It is unregenerate. It trusts, like the heathen Northmen, in strength, will, and inward instinct or illumination. It has no consciousness of sin, or of the vanity of the world or the passions. The Cross never had, and never can have, any meaning for it. In its heart it never believed in another world, but always looked forward to a sort of heroic suicide or twilight of the gods: for the very people who are now planning a great German era for the whole world are perfectly conscious that that era, too, must pass away in time. It will be merely a beau geste, lasting a thousand years ending in the tragic and romantic extinction of the race and its glorious “Kultur”. This is a heathen ideal, not a Christian nor even a pagan one, as the Greeks and Latins conceived paganism, which meant a modest and permanent alliance with the gods of nature, and a life as pleasant and intellectual as possible.

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.

To Boylston Adams Beal
1 Silver Street
Cambridge, England. October 10, 1896

I left Oxford early in September . . . and went to Haslemere to visit young Bertrand Russell at his father-in-law’s, Mr Pearsall Smith’s. This is a family of Philadelphia Quakers long settled, or unsettled, in England. When the old lady, who delivers temperance lectures and now has Armenia on the brain, goes off to Evangelize something, the old man at home takes the opportunity to disevangelize himself, and declare he is not a Quaker at all, but a Buddhist. For, he says, the suffering in the world is appalling, and the best thing we can hope for is extinction and peace. He has accordingly removed himself as far as possible from earth already by building a hen-coop, covered with glass, up in a tree, where he squats, and, I believe, spends the night. He directed me to the place through the woods, and I had the curiosity to climb up to it, not without imminent danger of transmigration. There are wires stretched all around a circular ladder, by way of balusters in which one is sure to get caught. Perhaps they symbolize the Veil of Maya. However that may be, the family is not uninteresting, and Bertrand Russell himself is very clever and nice. He is writing a book on the history of the fourth dimension, or, as he calls it, the “Foundations of Geometry”. Everything now-a-days turns out to be founded on its latest development. This I suppose is what is called final causes, or ends that are beginnings, or putting the cart before the horse. . . . From Haslemere I went to Maidenhead, to the wicked Earl’s, where I stayed some four weeks. It was a very happy time. I was much alone, as Russell is busy and often goes to the city; I read a good deal, wrote a little, and took long walks, as I believe I told you I did at Oxford. I made friends with Tubby the Dog, who was my constant companions on these peripatetic occasions. Among other things, I read George Merideth, The Egoist and Evan Harrington, and like them. The style is not good in the former book, nor the plot, but the characters are well drawn: the latter reminds one in places of Thackeray and true wit. Russell’s affairs have been getting more and more perplexed. The Scotts, beaten at every point, have finally exploded, and sent out 350 copies of a circular, full of most filthy and ridiculous details, printed out, charging Russell with b—I mean, abusing all his servants ten years ago. Two of them have actually been bribed to sign the papers, and one to have a summons for an assault, committed at Winchester nine years ago, issued against Russell. This summons came as a surprise, and everything had to be prepared for the defence in a great hurry. It turned out, however, that at the time selected, June 18, 1887, both Burke and I were with Russell at Winchester, and he was staying at the College with Mr & Mrs Richardson. With the testimony of other servants, that have remained faithful, it would have been possible to prove an alibi, and expose the malice of the accusation. The Scotts either got wind of this, or their counsel refused to act for them, for when yesterday we had all gone to Winchester, to the trial, and the Rev. Mr. Dickens, Vicar of St John’s had come in his trap for us and driven us to the court, which was packed, and we,—a dozen of us a least,—had crowded it still more, the representative of the prosecution got up and said that to save the time of several gentlemen in the court, he would announce that the action against Lord Russell had had to be abandoned, for it had been found that the spot where the offence was alleged to have been committed lay outside the limits of Winchester, and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of that court. Matthews, Russell’s counsel thereupon got up melodramatically and with fearful grimaces and pregnant inflections of the voice, said he would make no comment, etc, but he was not surprised, not in the least surprised, etc, that the prosecution had dropped the case like a hot potatoe. Meantime Russell’s solicitor had got hold of the publishers of the libels, who are willing to swear that Lady Scott paid them and instructed them, and have produced the list of 350 names, peers, judges, relations, and academic people, in Lady Scott’s own hand, on her own scented note-paper, to whom the libels were sent. This connects Lady Scott with the publication, and a warrant for her arrest has by this time, I suppose, been issued. We now hope to get her at least two years’ hard labour.

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 Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont Street, Oxford
Oxford, England. September 21, 1917

The notes on your paper (which but for the Censor—I hope, you would have already received) seem to me rather discouraging. Some of our prospective collaborators are evidently nominalists of the dull-thing-eating school; but Lovejoy is intelligent, and I imagine his opposition to “essence” is more a matter of bad temper and egotism (the doctrine is not his own!) than of incapacity to distinguish; he speaks of universals and of principles of individuation; and a person who is so scholastic as that is sure to be saved, or at least savable. Essence has made such a row that it almost seems as if I ought to plunge in with my whole exposition of the subject—a large part of my opus magnum. But, apart from the fact that the manuscript is not finished, there are two reasons for holding it back on this occasion: one, that it is impossible, and would seem presumptuous, to press a complete new ontology on a set of more or less mature—I mean aged—colleagues, and the other, that it is not necessary for the immediate subject of realism to distinguish essence very particularly. In my paper on Literal and Symbolic knowledge, for instance, although I use the word essence, I didn’t feel it necessary to explain or defend the concept in order to make my argument persuasive. Of course, fundamental clearness and soundness will not be achieved without it: but this volume is one of local and momentary importance only; it is merely controversial and instrumental. Both your theory and mine are to be set forth elsewhere in their true context and proportions.

There are some points made in those notes with which I am in agreement. “Essence has nothing to do with existence”: “semi-existence” is not an ultimately acceptable phrase. As I told you long ago, I like the frankness and descriptiveness of that phrase: one sees what you mean, and that you are reporting the facts honestly; but these are literary merits, not implying necessarily a correct or ultimate analysis. Essences have not semi-existence when they are given: they, even then, have no existence at all: but the intuition of them exists, and with the intuition (since the animal mind expresses a reaction, a presumption, and therefore projects its data, and takes them for things) there is probably a belief in the existence of an object having the given essence. This object, or essence hypostasized, has an alleged or imputed existence: whether it exists or not is a matter of fact to be decided by further investigation. But what is obvious, patent, indubitable, and really given is not an existence at all: it is an essence; a homeless, dateless, qualitative, self-identical, self-sufficing theme or motif, a universal, in that there is no knowing how often or where it may not recur, how many things it may be predicable of or how many minds may be acquainted with it in the course of infinite time. Examples of essences are: nausea, jealousy, a particular shade of violet, any poem or musical composition, any noise, the multiplication-table, the straight line. These may, with literary propriety, be said to exist or, “as it were, exist”, whenever, and for as long as, they are felt, conceived, or embodied in material things: but in truth it is not they that exist, but the feeling, thought, or thing which in one case intuits, and in the other case embodies them. In the first case they are given, in the latter they are predicable: in neither case do they, in themselves, acquire any hypostatic or real existence.

As to the definition of existence, that is a large question, involving the definition of matter (or psychic substance) and of consciousness.

I approve (as you know) of the use of “object” for whatever is or becomes “correlative to an organism that perceives or desires”.

“Object” is an egotistical and adventitious name given to things, and also to essences. It is proper to them only on occasion of their being noticed by us. Things become objects when somebody thinks of them; they are never objects in themselves. This is the equivocation on which idealism (in the Aesthetik of Kant’s Critique, for instance) is founded, since it is quite true that objects, “as such”, are relative to “subjects”, as such, which in turn are relative to objects “as such”: etc, etc. so that, if you imagine that things, essences, because sometimes called objects, are objects intrinsically, you are able to turn the universe into an “egocentric” whirpool and maze of relations in which all the terms are abstractions from the relations, and nothing exists except thinking, and that doesn’t.

What is true of “object” is equally true of “datum”: and I fear our friends in America are not sure, when they say “datum”, whether they mean that which is, by chance, given, or that whose whole being and existence is to be given. If they mean the latter, the retort would be that there is no such thing. Things and essences, whose being is not to be given, become data.

I am still working, in a desultory fashion, on my second realistic paper, with the excursus on “existence” which has grown out of it: but my mind is rather attracted to other subjects, nearer to the war, on which I am also writing more or less. I have been to Bath, to London, and to Chichester, to stay with the Russells. “Elizabeth” has returned from her Californian garden, and is having a second honeymoon with her wicked Earl. “Bertie” lives with them now in London but he was not at their place in the country when I was there.

I have seen the first American soldiers in Oxford from an aviation camp not far off. Their uniforms seemed tight (they wear stiff white collars) and their smiles excessive, but otherwise they seemed very fit.

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.