Author: David Spiech Page 218 of 283

To Scofield Thayer
C/o Brown Shipley & Co London
Madrid, April 22, 1913

It is of no importance that you should reproduce or even criticize my views at close quarters: it is more than enough that you find in me a starting-point and stimulus for your own thinking and writing. This is a service which very modest authors or teachers can sometimes do, when they happen to come opportunely into contact with younger spirits or to strike a chord to which the times respond. When the truth and absolute value of one’s views are so doubtful as they naturally are in the case of a philosopher, it is a solid comfort to find proof that at least one’s wind of people will doubtless tell you that this wind is too perfumed, and others that it is too sharp and blighting; but though it ill becomes me to say so, I am inwardly convinced that you will find it healthy. You may, and probably one or another of you will, disagree with each of my opinions; you may balk at “essence” (that most guileless of things!) or complain of the amateurishness of my technical philosophy. But meantime you will have found encouragement for what —is are the great virtues of young thinkers—sincerity and unworldliness. May you never lose them, or imagine that there is anything in the world for the sake of which they should be given up!

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

To Charles Augustus Strong
Serrano 7
Madrid. April 21, 1913

I hope to find you at home when I arrive, about May 15–, and that you will be willing to let me read over what you have written since the publication of your articles.—I myself have been very lazy since I got here, only being able to copy some 50 pages of manuscript which I had written during the winter, and I hope, before I leave Madrid, to copy all the rest; but somehow I have no space, no large horizons or solitude, for original composition here. I am leading a family life, with five women in the house, and though that has many advantages, and is a grateful change in many ways from hotels and solitary lodgings, it is very bad for continuous thought.

I feel rather inclined to read up the French nationalist and new-conservative writers— Maurras, etc—and to write something about them and the collapse of liberalism, in politics and philosophy. I am dissatisfied with the paragraph in my new book about patriotism—the subject was better treated in “The Life of Reason”—and should enjoy working out the other side of the question, namely, the need of specific, exclusive forms of life and of order among various groups of men. Living in Madrid, though not favourable to positive work, is very stimulating to the political imagination.

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 George Sturgis
New York Hotel
Nice, France April 20, 1923

Old age in my bones, or a very exceptional season, can alone account for the fact that, in winter clothes and often in an overcoat, I am still cold here very often. However, unmistakable signs of Spring, not to say summer, have appeared, the sun (when it shines) is dazzling and hot, and I walk daily up the delightful paths of the park into which the old castle grounds have been turned. There is abundance of water at the top (I don’t know how it gets there) which runs down in rivulets along the roads; and although these babbling brooks are only gutters, I find them very poetical, and babble poetry to them in response. The trees and flowers are also at their best, and I feel more secure in my health; and since my friend Strong left me (I suppose I told you he had come here for a week with his motor) I have begun to work again, and feel encouraged in that respect, as my vol. II is “getting together”.

I expect to return to Paris about the middle of May, and perhaps to go later to England for the end of the summer, but not for the winter, as I am afraid of relapsing into my dreadful bronchitis. Fortunately it doesn’t make much difference to me where I am, if disease and society allow me to philosophize in peace.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
Colonial Club Cambridge
Cambridge, Massachusetts. April 19, 1909

You ask me what “Modernism” is precisely. It is not anything precise; but as a general tendency, it consists in accepting all the rationalistic views current or possible in matters of history and science, and then saying that, in a different sense, the dogmas of the Church may still be true. For instance, all miracles, including the Incarnation and Resurrection, are denied to be historical facts; but they remain, in some symbolic sense, theological truths. That is, they are normal ways in which religious imagination has expressed itself; and people ought to go on, in their devotions, using those expressions, just as they go on using a language or a style of dress that has naturally established itself. . . . Theologically considered, Modernism is untenable, like every theory of double truths

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 18, 1949

Yesterday I gave a visitor, Mr. Peter Russell, my last copy of Dialogues in Limbo, because he expressed regret at not being able to order it from England; and I am writing to ask you to be good enough to have two more copies of this book sent to me, as being my favourite child, I don’t like to be parted from it for long.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ