Author: David Spiech Page 216 of 283

To John W. Yolton
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. May 2, 1952

Argument has never been, in my opinion, a good method in philosophy, because I feel that real misunderstanding or difference in sentiment usually rests on hidden presuppositions or limitations that are irreconcilable, so that the superficial war of words irritates without leading to any agreement. Now in your difficulty with my way of putting things I suspect that there is less technical divergence between us than divergence in outlook upon the world. And I am a little surprised that you should attribute to official America today an ambition to prevent Russia from establishing labour-camps, etc. All that I should impute to American policy is that it fears the eventual spreading of Russian methods over the whole world. This is what the Russians mean to do, and gives a good reason for resisting, not for abolishing, them; which last, as far as I know, nobody intends.

It is what people intend or actually do that interests me, not what they think they or others ought to do. Therefore in my books, at least in the mature ones, I am not recommending a rational system of government but at most considering, somewhat playfully, what a rational system would be. And in considering this, I come upon the distinction between the needs and the demands of various human societies. The needs and the extent or possible means of satisfying them are known or discoverable by science. So medical science may prescribe for all persons the operations, cures, or diets that it discovers to conduce to health. And so, I say, economic science might discover how best territories may be exploited and manufactures produced, in so far as they are needed or prized. There should therefore be a rational universal control of trade, as of hygiene; and both involve safety for persons and their belongings. The police, communications and currency should be universal and international; and the limits of wages and profits in all economic matters should be equitably determined by economic science. There could therefore be no strikes, monopolies, labour-camps or capitalists, and a scientific communism would reign in most of the things that now cause conflicts in government and between nations. But the justification for this autocracy in the economic sphere would be that only the force majeure of nature imposed on mankind in their ignorance; whereas, imposed by doctors of science, it would prevent all avoidable distress and unjust distribution of burdens.

With this foundation laid in justice and necessity all races, nations, religions, and liberal arts would be allowed to form “moral societies” having, like “Churches” among us now, their special traditions and hierarchies and educational institutions. Each would have an official centre, as the Catholic Church has the Vatican, but need not have any extensive territory. I am always thinking of the East where great empires have always existed, controlling in a military and economic way a great variety of peoples, and preserving a willing respect for their customs. It does not occur to me to say whether cruel institutions should be suppressed from outside if odious to other peoples. Violence, in any case, would be impossible, since that could be exercised, in the name of Nature, only by the rational universal economic authorities, and all the “moral societies” would be unarmed. They would not be able to prevent rebels within their society to leave it; nor would they be compelled to unite or compromise with any other moral society. They might mingle as Jews, Moslems and Christians mingle in the East when they have a good impartial government, such as Alexander planned to establish and the Romans and in a measure the Moslems have sometimes carried on.

I suspect that you naturally think of “moral” passions as guiding governments and instigating wars. You expect “ideologies” to inspire parties, and parties to govern peoples. All that seems to me an anomaly. And it is not the intellectual or ideal interests invoked that really carry on the battle, but the agents, the party leaders, who have political and vain ambitions. Mohammed was a trader before he decided to be a Prophet, dictated to by the Archangel Gabriel; and it is already notorious that in Russia the governing clique lives luxuriously and plans “dominations” like so many madmen. It is human: and the gullibility of great crowds when preached to adroitly or fanatically enables the demagogues to carry the crowd with them. There would be no “communists” among factory hands if they knew their true friends.

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

To Robert Steed Dunn
Rome. May 1, 1936

“Bobby Dunn!” I said to myself on seeing your name printed at the upper left-hand corner of your envelope. “What a nice person that was!” But when I went on from that purely sentimental sensation in search of images or ideas, I had to open your letter for guidance, and afterward your book. I remember lunching with you in New York—wasn’t it in a basement?—and that you were already a mature person, not exactly Bobby Dunn any longer, but Robert Dunn; with something of that for- midable will, that capacity for mysterious strong feelings and velléités which the hero of your book has . . . .

I won’t pretend to fathom your intentions in your book. For one thing I don’t understand it very well. Perhaps if I heard it read aloud, with the right idiomatic emphasis, I should catch the meaning more often; but even then you have a lot of words unknown to me, as well as a mixture of slang and poetry which disconcerts my aged mind.

Yet I feel that you are a poet in eye and heart, and I thank you for remembering me.

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

To Charles Augustus Strong
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1
Windsor, England. April 30, 1919

The affair of my Y.M.C.A. lectures has advanced to a stage when it seems likely that it may be realized. The Y.M.C.A. people seemed sensible and not at all mystically inclined: rather imperialistic and with a sort of missionary spirit, but all quite political, so that I don’t feel any incongruity in working with them. I have got my passport and filled out the “Demande de Visa” and the Y.M.C.A. officials promise to take all the steps necessary. I am asking, for the moment for permission to resume permanent residence in Paris; my proposed journeys later to Spain and Italy will then figure only as trips, from which I shall return to Paris as to my head-quarters. If they refuse to admit this arrangement, I shall be forced to ask for an exeat to Spain; and then manage to return to Paris or go straight to Italy from there. It is a great lapse from our old liberty. And how foolish! What conspiracies are you or I forging?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY

To Robert Traill Spence Lowell Jr.
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 29, 1948

Although we are “friends” you are still shy, on account of my venerable age to tell me where I go wrong: but not all modern young talent has such scruples. A young Russian, become a Canadian, came to see me the other day in an open brown flannel shirt, round goggles, and dirty yellow hair brushed back from a forehead already very high and like Josiah Royce’s: and he began by demanding what I recognized for my principle in ethics. While I hemmed and hawed, his eye caught, some three yards off the title “Lord Weary’s Castle” on the narrow back of your book, which was laying in a heap of others on the table. And he relieved me by asking if I read that. I pleaded guilty, and told him why I was especially interested in it, and mentioned that you had sent me three more of your poems. He asked to see them, and I showed them to him, where I kept them under the flap in the paper cover of your book. He immediately seized them, and without asking permission or excusing himself, began to read them one after the other to himself, without once lifting his eyes from the pages as he passed from one to the other, and leaving me to wait, as if I didn’t exist. When he finished the third, very quickly, he murmured, “Yes. That’s all right.” I said I admired the intensity of his attention, and his speed in reading. “Yes,” said he, “I can read 600 words a minuit, and I always read poetry fast once, to see if it is right; if the end picks up the beginning. Then I study it in detail.” But he didn’t proceed to put your poems in his pocket for that purpose but put them back quite accurately in their places, and said he was a Neo-Kantian, that everything was a part of everything else, that this could be proved, and that he had found some difficulty in interviewing Croce. And before he went he offered to leave me a copy of a list of some fifty men of science that he meant to visit before returning to Canada, which list I declined with thanks.

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

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont Street
Oxford, England. April 28, 1916

The trees are green, the sun bright, my winter clothes put away, and the need of a straw hat is pressing. This sudden warmth has made me a little restless and lazy at the same time; I don’t feel like working, even in the evening: nevertheless I have the Realms of Being spread out on the table, and am intending to copy some of the older versions, so as to incorporate the parts of them I do not reject into the revised text. I have also had one or two ideas on minor points. Godstow is delightful, and I have lunched there twice out of doors, notebook and pencil in hand, trying luminously to refute final causes.

Bridges left a card here while I was away, and I must try tomorrow, if the sun is not too hot, to climb to Chilswell, and have a laureate tea.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY