Author: David Spiech Page 211 of 283

To George Washburne Howgate
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1

Rome, May 31, 1933.

[M]an is an animal before he is a spirit, and can be a spirit only because he is alive, i.e. an animal. The nature of the human animal, however, is to be intelligent, to be speculative; and hence the vocation to transcend the conditions of his existence in his thought and worship.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933–1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Mrs. George W. Howgate.

To Boylston Adams Beal
Hotel Royal Danieli
Venice. May 30, 1935

What Gordon Bell says in the History about us, and in particular about me, is all true enough, and sympathetically meant; but it misses the atmosphere of the ’90’s, or early ’90’s, when the Philistine mind had freshly discovered sport, art, literature, and religion, and was respectfully, but humorously, in love with them. Bob & Warwick Potter, you and I, were just that: dilettanti really delighting in the nice side of things: and the distance—the American and Protestant perspective inevitable for most of us—made the experience romantic and a little tragic at bottom. Probably the young men of today are better adapted to the age. Those I come across seem to me all alike, and rather uninteresting, unless they are caught in the political revolution. That is the living question now, not our questions, when we thought the material arrangements of the world had all become final and satisfactory, and there was time for thinking of higher things. Now there isn’t time or inclination or much sense of higher things to think about. But there is the great social army to lead and to keep in order. It is what the old Romans had to do.

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

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol Rome May 29, 1928

It is too bad if I hurt your feelings by calling you a young barbarian. It was very far from my intention, but criticism by a friend is a delicate matter, and I ought to have been more considerate. Would you have minded if, supposing you had green eyes, I had called you a green-eyed wild animal, like a stag in a forest, who by some miracle doesn’t run away from you? I once wrote this, or something like it, to my friend Roberts, (it being rather too sentimental to say) and he was frightfully pleased. True he was nearer my own age, only 20 years younger, and didn’t regard me as an authority at all; and for that reason, and his natural transcendental conceit (he is now out of his mind, I fear) he felt how envious I was in my heart of hearts of his green eyes and his animal wildness. I have always felt the deeper roots of what is animal in man, and, in one sense, its prior rights: and the rebellion against harness and sober reason, the barbarian pride, has always seemed to me full of a kind of wild poetry and strength which it was a sorrow to me not to understand perfectly. By barbarian I under- stand undisciplined, rebellious against the nature of things, non-Moslem, then, rather than non-Christian—for you know “Moslem” means “resigned”, “submissive”. When people despise that which exists, in language, vocabulary, or morals, and set up the sufficiency of their unchastened impulses, they are barbarians. But, as I said in my letter of the other day, that may be the beginning of a fresh civilization. It is only at first that it seems crude and unnecessarily wasteful.—Thus Christianity, Gothic architecture, and German philosophy—as well as much in the spirit of English poetry, (cf. my “Hamlet!)— are barbarous in principle. I am therefore far from contemptuous when I use the word: but you perhaps really prefer the classical—do you?—and in that case, I take the epithet back, as applied to you, because to look away from barbarism is the most that any rational mind can achieve.

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 Ira Detrich Cardiff
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. May 28, 1950

After several days’ browsing [through Atoms of Thought]—I must now have read almost all the text as well as your Introduction and Foreword—I have come to the conclusion that your patience in gathering “texts” must be a sub-conscious heritage from some Puritan ancestor of yours who picked “texts” from the Bible in order to quote them against the minister’s sermons. Your interest was not at all to choose beautiful passages or passages that contained the key to my philosophy or to my idiosyncrasies. I was out of the picture, just as the real history and doctrines of the Jews and the Christians was out of the picture for your text-collecting ancestor. You both already had your complete philosophy apart from anyone else’s books: but texts might be pungent; and when they tallied with your views, they might be employed to assert them boldly under another’s masque, for greater apparent modesty. So you have collected all the anticlerical texts in my books, no matter in what context, satirical or historical or even dramatic, whether it be Zeus or Lucifer or Mephistopheles, or Hermes or Aphrodite that says them: my cynical father’s saying, or my own, if cynical in the right direction, will do for texts as well as the soft sentiments of a rich Polish-Jewish jeweller; and what I have said expressly to you and in print about myself that I am not and never wished or meant to be an American, is flatly contradicted. And when you say that I suggested the danger of spoiling a dictum if shorn too closely of its context, you forget to say or remember the danger I felt of being quoted only on the Left side; and you do not seem to feel that what you do quote about the pity that Bertrand Russell should waste his powers in repeating anticlerical commonplaces (although he did it only for pot-boilers) you do not feel that it is a pity that you should make me do the same thing in this book gratuitously. When I wrote The Life of Reason criticism of all non-naturalistic philosophy and religion was inevitable; and I did it and do it to bring out, if I can, the beauty of naturalism, not to insult the beliefs of other people. The cream of those beliefs, pagan, Indian, and Catholic especially, are just the baroque ornaments with which I like to adorn, and to vivify, my opinions; because Positivism without “post-rational” detachment is deadly and hypocritical. My anti-religious side is only a part of my pessimism; those myths are materially false, and a philosopher should not flirt with them; but they are the tragedy—Hebraic and Christian as well as Greek—of human illusions and vanity. Tragedy, the tragedy of existence, should be transcended, but it cannot be decently mocked.

I wanted to tell you frankly what I feel on this subject: but I do not regret that you should have taken the pains to make this collection. It is not a fair representation of my philosophy; but it is a fair record of one strain in it, and if it stimulates or entertains the public, so much the better. It would be unreasonable to expect the public to read us if we wrote only long books that bore them.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. May 27, 1950

“Atoms of Thought” has reached me. It is a selection of “Left” utterances of mine for propaganda of anticlericalism. But, although I am rather ashamed of being compared, to my honour, with Tom Paine, I think it shows an essential stage in clearing up one’s mind. Only it is a by-gone stage for those in the van, and Cardiff and Runes are retardataires. I am going to write to Cardiff in as friendly and conciliatory a spirit as possible, because he has done the work well in many respects, and his bias is so obvious to anyone who has a fair notion of my philosophy as a whole, that he ought to be passed over with a smile.

One thing that surprised and pleased me is that he begins with three or four pages from Lucifer, of all things, and later quotes other verses. They are not bad of their kind, and do speak for my real feelings when younger.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY