Author: David Spiech Page 2 of 283

To Corliss Lamont
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 5, 1935

The subject of immortality has long ceased to be a living issue with me; and though I know that some people agonize about it, I am confirmed in my old impression that this is a verbal or mythical obsession of the human mind, rather than a literal belief. Everything, in myth and religion must be understood with a difference, in a Pickwickian sense, if we are to understand it truly, and not to import an unnatural fanaticism into the play of poetic fancy. . . .

Orthodox heavens are peaceful: souls are not supposed to change and pass through new risks and adventures: they merely possess, as in Dante, the truth of their earthly careers and of their religious attainment. In other words, souls in heaven are mythical impersonations of the truth or totality of those persons’ earthly life.

. . . this life, and anything truly living, is something dramatic, groping, planning, excited, and exciting. It is dangerous: and Nietsche needn’t have told us to live perilously: it would have been enough to tell us to live.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To Charles Scribner Jr.
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 4, 1930

Thank you very much for your letter (of Feb. 21) and the cheque enclosed, from which I gather that some ladies’ college continues to use my early works as textbooks.

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

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. March 3, 1947

I am also reading a life of Einstein that the publishers have sent me, asking for a review, or at least a “puff”, but it arrived too late for that purpose. I find it absorbing, although translated from ponderous German into bad English. However, through the fog of words I seem to catch the faint light of very distant stars, and that is exhilarating.

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 Sidney Hook
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 2, 1937

Dear Mr. Hook

You express my entire conviction when you say that philosophical detachment does not signify political indifference. I happen to have lived in isolation from affairs, on account of hardly ever being in my own country or feeling any vital affinity to modern movements; but a man might recognize the relativity of morals and of human nature itself without surrendering any part of his loyalty to his own self or family or nation. On the contrary, nature and truth give us carte blanche in such matters, and every encouragement to play our particular part. . . . although as a philosopher I am sympathetically interested in the Russian experiment, and feel the radical justification of it ideally (as monastic life is also justified), as a man my associations are in the opposite camp.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

To Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. March 1, 1949

The element of existence belongs to the self and leaves the idea to be, as in Plato, ideal: a visionary term or a form. It seems to me that a perception (which in so far as it is spiritual I call an intuition) is either, behavioristically, a reaction in the body to a physical stimulus, or a moment of spirit, spirit for me not being a substance but a flash of feeling in a psyche, intermittent and immaterial. This psyche or self in its animal life, when especially attentive, emits this immaterial cry, and sees this immaterial idea. A pure sound, as heard, and a pure light, as seen do not seem to me to be anything but illusory phenomena, signs for the spirit of the body and the world in which it is incarnate. They do not exist except as features or qualities in its own moral, immaterial, volatile life.

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