Author: David Spiech Page 204 of 283

To William Gerber
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. July 6, 1947

Dear Mr. Gerber,

The idea of a topical history of philosophy seems a good one, if opinion were so thoroughly disciplined that it recognised a certain number of precise problems, stated in unambiguous terms. Scholastic philosophers might make such a synopsis to their satisfaction. But isn’t the great difficulty today that no two persons or schools have the same problems or the same terms?

For instance, you suggest the old question of freedom of the Will or necessity. But now-a-days “necessity” and “causation” are ambiguous concepts. I should say, for instance, that no fact was or could be necessary, all existence being by definition contingent. Would it follow from this that I believe in freewill? Not at all. The ways of nature, are contingent in that logically they might just as well have been different or not to have been discernible at all, if no trope had ever been repeated. But tropes are repeated more or less: events to that extent are predictable on the assumption that these chance repetitions will continue regularly. There is therefore no traceable problem of freedom or necessity in the history of philosophy, but only confused contradictory talk on uncriticised presumptions.

Yours sincerely,

GSantayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Collection of William Gerber, Washington D. C.

To Mary Potter Bush
Hotel Savoia
Cortina, Italy. July 5, 1935

I am reading Alain’s Les Dieux, the most obscure French book I ever have come upon, ragged and perverse in places, but also full of wonderful insights. Besides, apart from his vulgar politics, I agree with him, and am encouraged to find so penetrating and spontaneous a thinker taking precisely my view of “spirit”. He says: “L’attribut de puissance, délégué à l’esprit pur dans une sorte d’emportement, doit être pris comme la partie honteuse de la religion de l’esprit”.1 I must quote this in my book, The Realm of Spirit, which I am working on at present, being in the mood for it, although The Realm of Truth should be published first. But my mind isn’t entirely clear for sheer philosophy, as the second proofs of the novel are about to reach me, and I shall have to go over those 723 pages once more. We are having some qualms about the hotels and inns also parsonages mentioned, all real ones, and the possible law-suits that the proprietors might bring for defaming them or their establishments; but I am careful to kill or remove all the persons, and not to say anything not flattering about the houses; so that I hope to escape prosecution. My weakness for real spots and their atmosphere makes me hate to give false names to places, or even to persons, when the true name is not positively out of the question. I hope people won’t think it is impertinence: it is genuine love of truth.

1. The attribute of power, assigned to pure spirit by a kind of passionate impulse, should be regarded as the part of the religion of spirit of which one has to be ashamed (French).

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Corliss Lamont
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. July 4th, 1950

Since the American Army first came to Rome, I have received more callers than ever before in my life, and they still straggle in, newspaper correspondents especially, with photo graphic intentions and instruments but a treacherous memory in reporting one’s words. And they do not come to discuss immortality but only to observe that I am dressed only in pyjamas and live in a shabby room in a lower-middle-class English establishment (according to Mr. Edmund Wilson) where the Sisters have painted veils.

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

To Lawrence Smith Butler
Palazzo della Fonte
Fiuggi, Italy. July 3, 1941

I see by your note-paper that you are a bona fide professional architect now, which sounds more serious than your love-making or even your music. I am glad you keep up all these humanistic interests. The great satisfactory thing about you as a friend (as I will say if I get to you in my Memoirs) has been that you are always the same. Most men–this is less true of the ladies–in America lose their youth and their liberty at 25: they are thereafter just what a German philosopher named Jaspers pretends that we all are: our situation personified. But you young men were such nice company in America because you were not your situation personified since as yet you had no situation: you were yourselves and you had Lebensraum about you: athletics, music, society, books: and the nice ones, like you, also religion, friendship, and family life. You have kept more of this freedom than other men of your time; and you would be as good company now as you were in 1898; whereas your contemporaries, almost all of them, would be, from my point of view, ciphers. Of course I know they might personify an important situation. But I don’t want to talk to a situation. I want to talk to a man in that situation.

My situation at this moment is rather strange. I am rather well off, but threatened with starvation, because it seems that all credits belonging to foreigners, at least to Europeans, have been “frozen”, and all my money is in America! I have enough on hand to last into the autumn, and I hope that by that time my nephew will have got a licence to send me funds as usual: otherwise, Goodbye.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The University Club, New York NY

To Scofield Thayer
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123
Pall Mall, London
Paris.  July 2, 1920

In Italy, two or three months ago, I received a copy of The Dial together with a letter, which in the confusion of travel I am afraid I did not answer. Now I receive two separate copies of the June number, with your new letter of June 17. It is now nearly ten years since I have been in America, and I can’t think even of one name with which to begin the list which you ask me to make out, of persons who might be interested in The Dial, and whom you do not know much better than I do. Your idea of bringing the old and the new together is interesting: but if you find that the public prefer their meat apart from their vegetables, why should you earnestly desire to serve them both up on the same plate? I think the vicissitudes of art at present, and of the faint though eager echoes that spread over America, like wireless vibrations, are not of much importance. It is all too voulu: something will gather head of itself some day when people least expect it.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT