Author: David Spiech Page 109 of 283

To Henry Ward Abbot
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. August 20, 1931

I am afraid I haven’t yet thanked you for the new (older) book of Miss Millay’s poems. It hasn’t the beauty of language and rhythm which I admired so much in the Sonnets, but the title-piece makes its effect, and the whole is what a good modern poetess might be expected to produce: not the splendid paradox of the other performance. But the atmosphere seems to me hardly American. Is she originally English or perhaps Irish?

Yours sincerely,
G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of (postcard) manuscript:  Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Savoia
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. August 19, 1940

Dear Cory,

It was very pleasant and reassuring to know that you had got Scribner’s cheque and also the money from the Bankers’ Trust. This will keep you going, I hope, until the matter of the Fellowship is settled. As the fund is in America I see no reason why the war should prevent it from being arranged, unless the Trustees in England are too preoccupied to attend to matters not of immediate life or death. I am sorry that my bank account is blocked. I knew it before you informed me, because my poor old friend Mercedes, now 83 years old, had a trying experience. I had sent her a cheque to help fill the yawning void caused by a delay of two months in the receipt of her annuity, which we send her from America; and such is my financial standing—or was—that the Spanish bank gave her the cash at once. But alas, a week or two later they wrote to her that my cheque had been refused in London, and please to give them the money back! Of course, she being a lady accustomed in her youth to satisfy her caprices and to help her poor relations, the money no longer existed, and she wrote to me again in tears for explanation and for help. Well, I can’t send you more cheques on B. S. & Co.. but I will pass on any American cheques I may receive—they may amount to $1000 in a year—to help you replenish your new bank-account. When the war is over, if I am alive and the pound is still worth something, I shall be able to pay your extra expenses (assuming you have your Fellowship) in coming to Italy, and doing Strong’s commission, and if need be looking after me.

Yours affly,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Robert Shaw Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. August 18, 1951

Dear Bob,

Your great letter of some time ago introduced me (as I wrote to your mother) to a new personage. Your three visits during the war had left an unsatisfactorily vague image of your mind in mine; my deafness and your reticence (added to the fact that my contacts with the Sturgis family and yours, though both intimate, had been in different branches of it and at different dates) made it impossible for me to be sure of your character. You were very imposing and attractive as a big boy; but what would you be as an architect or philosopher? I remember laughing at that time and repeating what the fox in Lafontaine says to the crow: Sí votre ramage se raporte à votre plumage, Vous êtes le phénix des hôtes de ce bois, “ramage” in my version (which may be misspelled) meaning intellect, and “plumage” personal charm; but the “bois” stands only for my brother’s descendents, which hardly make a forest.

Now at last, and not because of any flattery on my part, you have opened your mouth and splendidly removed all my uncertainties. You are a firmly-knit man, and yet, happily for you, are a man of your exact time and place That is as it should be in a distinct and enterprising society. So long as the Niagara you swim with flows steadily and victoriously, though you may have some anxious moments, you will on the whole have a glorious experience, even if you are not a distinguished leader

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. Location of manuscript: Collection of Robert Shaw Sturgis, Weston MA.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Ávila, Spain. August 16, 1891

Dear Strong,

. . . “In perception” you say “we have the certitude of a world beyond ourselves.” “What matter is, we know not . . . . for we perceive only the simulaera of things.” “But what mind is, we know.” “Reality which appears to us under the form of a material world.” In this last phrase you seem to admit that phenomena are material in form: the matter of which we are ignorant can only be a supposed metaphysical substratum, not the parts of the material world. Our knowledge of mind is just of this nature: we don’t know the “essential nature” of mind, if you believe there is any essence apart from appearance. We know parts of the psychical world, just as we know parts of the material world: both are phenomena we behold. I wonder at your assuming so boldly that there is a hidden reality of which physical phenomena are the symbols. It is possible, of course; but that is no reason for thinking it true. In perception we have no certitude of a world beyond ourselves, if you mean by ourselves the seat of phenomena. We see an extended world, with our bodies in the middle of it. We have the conception and (while this conception is unchecked) the belief that this extruded world exists eternally and independently. But experience teaches us that our conception of it is dependent on our senses and brain; i.e. that a certain constellation of physical phenomena is the condition of psychical phenomena. But all these discoveries are well within the apparent world—the physical world. For the material world is not a metaphysical object behind phenomena. It is the phenomenon itself. And mind, which you say we know directly, is nothing but the leavings and surplusage of the phenomenal object, those images (imagination and memory) which won’t go to make a permanent and orderly conception of nature, and are therefore relegated to the sphere of mere appearances—i.e. appearances that don’t count in life. The idea of mind is the counterpart of the idea of objective reality—this is a division which experience teaches us to make within the field of direct appearances. Our part is found to be valid for life and inter-communication—that is called the reality. Another part is found invalid and misleading—that is called the appearance, or the subjective world. But the stuff of both is exactly the same—sensations and conceptions—and in so far as they have a describable content at all, this content is spatial, so that all alike are ideas of matter. I should flatly deny that we know mind more directly than we know matter. What we have before us—what constitutes our vision—is a mass of ideas, all essentially spatial and material in form (with emotional qualities, to be sure, which, being useless as information, are all afterwards relegated to the subjective sphere.) By sifting and combining these ideas we gain conceptions of independent permanent things; and by contrast to these independent permanent things, we . . . call the fleeting and unclassified images appearances or mental facts. Of course, if you mean by mind not any definite sphere of reality—not the subject-matter of psychology—but the transcendental self—the seat of all these sensations, conceptions, and beliefs—in fact, the world itself as a phenomenon—of course all we know is mental, it is phenomenal, it is a vision and a dream. But this is an utterly futile and idle reflection. It leads no where. I have no surety or hint of anything except as it appears and suggests itself to me now. But the moment I focus my attention, and look about to see what sort of a world I am dreaming about, I find nothing but matter, matter, matter, and mind as its occasional product and accompaniment.

. . . . You invoke the authority of Kant, and in the same breath bring out evidence about the nature of things in themselves. To my mind, Kant’s great achievement is to show that we must dream our dream, that it is absurd to try to talk of any thing but the objects our faculties discover to us; and that the only relations between mind and matter we can make out at all, are the relations between various phenomena—between the empirical self and the objects in space and time. This relation, as you so clearly show, is being fast made out by experiment and study. It is a relation in which mind appears as the accompaniment of certain transformations of brain tissue; and that is all that is to be said about it.

Yours ever,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.