Author: David Spiech Page 107 of 283

To Logan Pearsall Smith
Address C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, S.W.1
Paris. August 30, 1920

My early books were written too much under the pressure of American public sentiment—I don’t mean that this influenced my opinions, or even my style, very much, but that it made me write to justify my existence and make sure to myself that I did have an intellect: but I should have had more, perhaps, if I hadn’t been in such haste to exhibit it. My comfort is that . . . I am not yet too old to recast the more theoretic parts of my reflexion into a system that may be better articulated and more closely knit than my old divagations.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Library of Congress, Washington DC.

To John W. Yolton
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. August 29, 1951

Dear Yolton,

During the last few days I have not been well, or I should have answered your letter of the 24th at once; for I am interested in your getting my point of view straight, as you are perfectly able to do, no matter how unfamiliar it may be to you.

A moral system, in my opinion, cannot be “bad”, since it is the good as revealed to the Primal Will which that system expresses; that is, if it is the genuine morality of that person or society. Jewish religion and its offshoots are not “bad” for being militant; they have to be militant because their “good” is partly material, such as prosperity, length of life, and personal immortality; and universal domination is a “good” in that system. If it were a spiritual system the question of universal domination would not arise for it, because spiritual goods, like correct grammar in one language, does not interfere with goodness in the different grammar of another language.

Militancy, in other words, is not implied in the inflexibility of a moral regimen. The inflexibility comes from the truth with which it expresses Primal Will at home; it becomes “bad” for another phase of Primal Will, when it attempts to legislate for that other Will abroad.

The third “Book” in Dominations and Powers is concerned with rationality in government rather than with moral rightness in precepts or ideals. Moral rightness has its credentials in nature. All life, if not all existence, has an intrinsic direction; it therefore evokes phantoms of good and evil according as things (or words) seem to support or impede its own élan. There can be no question, no possibility, of abolishing moral allegiance: only, when it breaks down in part, to get it together again rationally, in its own interests.

If I seem to you to be condemning militancy or unification, it is only because, in my own heart, I love things that have grown perfect, and hate the ideas that sanction the ugly impulses that come to destroy those perfections. And there is an ultimate mystical aspiration (not personally strong in myself) that would really transcend good and evil. It would not make any type of existence dominant, but all, in their perfection, coexistent, as in the realm of truth. That all evils remain unexpunged there spoils this prospect for the moral man, with his vital specific standards. But it appeases the Primal Will, which bred all those goods and evils, by the lapse of Will itself, as in Buddhism and even in Schopenhauer. I have drawn a good deal from both.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

P.S. You might compare the chapter on Chivalry in my book with all this. Also the motto from the Upanishads at the beginning of the Realm of Spirit.

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

To Nancy Saunders Toy
Cortina d’Ampezzo
Italy. August 28, 1938

Dear Mrs. Toy,

I am sending your note about Miller to Strong, who is at Valmont, his nursing home above the Lake of Geneva; and very likely he will act on your suggestion. However, he has not had much spare cash of late, most of his securities having stopped paying dividends, and it might be easier for me to help Miller (it would not be the first time!) quite unbeknown to my actual pocket, by asking George Sturgis to send him a cheque. . . .

Your extreme delicacy, vicariously attributed to Miller, amuses me a little. He has been dependent on Strong for long periods, and once, out of a clear sky, he wrote to me asking for a largish sum, (a “loan”) several hundred dollars, to fit himself out in clerical garments suitable for his visits to the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury. He then hoped to get a living in England, so that the investment, though speculative, was a “business proposition” on his part. He was then said to be living on raw spinach—“not exclusively”, he admitted—and being “behind the veil”, whether from inanition or mystic rapture, is also nothing new to him. The trouble is that he is a little unbalanced and difficult to deal with, because he makes his health an excuse for not sticking to anything. Do you remember the quarrel he had with Münsterberg, when the latter wrote to him saying that he (Münsterberg) was a doctor of medicine as well as of philosophy, and that he detected in Miller every sign of incipient paranoia? Poor Miller knew only too well that he lived on the verge of nervous collapse; but such a diagnosis was not only cruel but, as the event has shown, mistaken. Miller’s conversion, which came much later, may have canalized his supersensitiveness a little: but he seems not quite settled even in his religious life. It is a sad career.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

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 Henry Ward Abbot
Address: Care of Frau Sturm
Werder Strasse 6 Dresden, Germany
Göttingen, Germany. August 27, 1886

I must thank you at once for your letter. Of course I take an interest in you; what else should I take an interest in except in the doings and thinkings of people who have more or less my own point of view and my own interests, and especially of those among them whom I happen to have met and liked? As you say, we haven’t been great friends in college; but that has an easy explanation. At first I had no friends at all, and after a while, when I could have made many acquaintances, I found the damnable worldliness and snobbishness prevalent at Harvard relegated me to a sort of limbo, the sphere of those who, though they might have committed no actual sin, had not been baptized in the only true Church. Of course such a limbo contained a good many souls; and among them I found some very good friends indeed, whom I by no means would change for others. At the same time, if college society were a little more simple and disinterested, I could have made friends not only in limbo, but also in heaven and hell. In hell I did make some friends, because that, of course, is always possible; but in heaven—unless Herbert Lyman be a cherub—I made no friends at all till the very last; for Ward Thoron must be counted among the fallen angels. You mustn’t think that I am a sorehead, or that I think any fellows intentionally turned me the cold shoulder, because I had little cash and wasn’t in a fashionable set: I know very well that I have a great many tricks that can make people dislike me, and that I lack all the qualities that go to make a popular fellow. I have never had any ambition to be a popular fellow: what I complain of is that a certain artificial state of things at Harvard makes it impossible for a man who is not a popular fellow to have those fellows for his friends who would have been his friends at school, and would be his friends in the world. So that the fact that there has been no “ease of fellowship” as you say, between us at college, is no reason whatever for my not taking an interest in you or for concluding that we really belong to different spheres. Certainly, after reading your letter, I am sure that you are just the man with whom I should like to talk things over. You have, whatever you may say, the contemplative disease; and what is more, you are able to escape the conclusions which people agree to be the proper one’s to arrive at, although I fancy you feel a little wicked for doing so. For instance, what you say of your family, although the effort you make to say it perhaps leads you to exaggerate, shows that you can open your eyes to look at those truths which it is considered wrong to see. It is wrong to see that right and truth may be subjective, imaginary things, or that one’s family may be very much in one’s way; yet you are willing to consider these heresies. But although your letter confirms my belief that you ought to go into the idea business rather than into any other, I see that you can’t do so now. Of course a man shouldn’t quarrel with his bread and butter, nor with his family even if he had his own bread and butter already. But if you go into business to please your mother or your grandfather, it is a great deal better than if you went into business to please yourself; you will in all probability not lose your taste for intellectual things, nor get very much absorbed in your employment. I myself would not hesitate to go into business if circumstances made it necessary for me to do so; nor would I think I was selling my birthright for my mess of potage. For after all our birthright is our love of observing; and a man can study the world in one place as well as in another. If you have an ambition to write novels, you lose nothing by going to an office every morning, where the values of men can be learned as well as the values of cotton and sugar.

[A]lthough I am awfully sorry you can’t be within reach of me this winter, I see no reason why you should regret your situation. Of course it is not ideal, since you are not as free as one likes to be—not as free, perhaps, as I am; because my family, having nothing to bribe me with, are very willing that I should follow my inclinations, and even help me as much as they are able. But your mother was not mistaken when she thought me an ungrateful son: I am ungrateful; because the amount of space occupied in my mind by my family and my obligations to them is infinitesimal compared with the amount occupied by . . . my own ambitions. My father, who is very shrewd and cynical, and my mother who is determined and unselfish, & always ready to face fortune, both perceive this, and acquiesce in it. They know perfectly well that I like to be away from home, because I tell them so; but of course they also see that it is good for me. I am not the most comforting and loving of sons—but naturally they can’t blame me for existing or being more or less as I am.—But although you are not as free as one likes to be, you probably will have leisure enough to read a little, and a good opportunity of seeing the world. Besides, as some old Roman said, to know well the ways of men, one house is enough. So I shall be expecting your first novel, as well as the news of your engagement to that divine creature which you so generously assign to me. By the way, I do not expect that either you or I can do as much as Stimson, whom I admire very much; but we can help make that atmosphere in which Stimsons bloom, and perhaps even greater men. We can’t expect to be geniuses (and I believe Stimson has the quality, in what degree we cannot yet tell) but we can be lovers of the things of which geniuses are masters; we can be, like Norton, maggots in the big men’s cheese. And for myself, being a supercilious and Epicurean maggot, I like cheese better than Philistine potatoes.

I am not insensible to the sincere compliment you pay me by giving me your confidence to the extent you do; but for God’s sake, no compliments of any other kind. I don’t know how much water there may be in my stream; but I am sure that many a sluggish river has more. I have not had the chance to stagnate; I have been shut in and forced down in one single direction, and much of my force comes from my limitations. I have as much to admire in you or in anyone (for I am not flattering) as you or anyone can have to admire in me. I am a slightly different specimen—more or less curious—a little rare, perhaps, because an imported article. But if you think it worth while to write to me, why, I shall be very glad, very glad indeed, to write to you, and preach your patience out. You may be able to be a little franker with me than with most people, because being an antimoralist in sympathies as well as in theory, I will not think any the worse of you for telling me what is psychologically (or, as in Ward’s case, physiologically) true of you. I know before hand that at the bottom of things spiritual is darkness, and at the bottom of things physical, filth; but I think it a pleasant thing for a few persons (and there have always been such) to say it to each other in a decent way. It will also be a great pleasure for me to hear through you about other fellows, and when the time comes, about the woman to be deeply and sincerely loved—by you.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.