Author: David Spiech Page 232 of 283

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Feb. 10, 1935

Dear Cory,
There are many advantages in having you come to this hotel, if you can stand it. You will have the exclusive use of my sitting-room from 11:30 to 5 o’clock; and after 5 o’clock, though I shall be there, you may always come in without fear of disturbing me, because I am only reading, and reading nothing usually that requires much concentration of thought.

You will see that the room is larger and better than the one I had formerly, and very sunny. As you are to be on half pension, like me, I shall expect you to come to lunch with me every day (except when the weather is bad) as in the old days. I will pay for your lunch, of course: but as that will add a good deal to my daily expense (as well as pleasure) I think I might cut down your allowance a little and give you 500 lire a week instead of 2500 a month, as I had promised. Your hotel bill, with 10% for service, and something for washing and drinks, will be about 350 lire a week, leaving you 150 a week for pocket-money. It’s not much; unless you have some other source of income as well, but if you feel cramped you can always leave the Bristol and reduce your fixed expenses, so as to have more loose cash.

Look me up–room 77, at the front end of the passage–when you arrive, unless it is after 10:30 p.m when I usually go to bed: and I don’t reappear, dressed and ready to go out, until about 1 p.m. so that at 12, when I am having my bath, you mustn’t expect to see me.

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 Warren Allen Smith
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 9, 1951

Dear Mr. Smith,
My philosophy would have had to be prophetic if it had contained views on what you call “Naturalistic Humanism,1 which seems to be a product of strictly contemporary opinion. You tell me that it is “described in Ferm’s Religion in the Twentieth Century2 and supported by John Dewey, Julian Huxley, Thomas Mann, Erich Fromm and numerous liberal “religionists”. And you add that you have “already received comments on it by Thomas Mann, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, Henry Hazlitt, Lewis Mumford, Joseph Wood Krutch and others in the literary world”. If any one of these persons has given a clear definition of “Naturalistic Humanism,.” I wish you had quoted it for my benefit, but I am sure it cannot be the same in them all.

In my old-fashioned terminology, a Humanist means a person saturated by the humanities: Humanism is something cultural: an accomplishment, not a doctrine. This might be something like what you call “classical humanism”. But unfortunately there is also a metaphysical or cosmological humanism or moralism which maintains that the world is governed by human interests and an alleged universal moral sense. This cosmic humanism for realists, who believe that knowledge has a prior and independent object which sense or thought signify, might be some religious orthodoxy, for idealists and phenomenalists an oracular destiny or dialectical evolution dominating the dream of life. This “humanism” is what I call egotism or moralism, and reject altogether.

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To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Feb. 8, 1931

My young friend Daniel Cory is now here, and goes to lunch with me every day, and we have philosophical and literary talks (mainly, giggling like school-girls) at other times also. He is trying to recover from a serious weakness of the bowels, and hard work is forbidden.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller
C/o Brown Shipley & Co, London
Seville, Spain. February 7, 1914

They will persecute you, like all the Apostles of sweetness and light, and especially of liberty, that thing unknown to America; it was foretold of the Lord. I trust, however, that you will be victorious in the end and become one of the patriarchs of the orthodox church–I mean of the life of reason.

I note with pleasure that you are to be in Paris in the Summer. You will find me there, and you will tell me, I hope, all about these physical and moral transformations which Harvard is undergoing. What I hear from time to time confirms me in the feeling that I quitted most opportunely. The wonder is that I endured and was endured so long. The only Harvard that in any measure held my affections and with which I could have almost identified myself was that of the “nineties” or rather, of 1890-1895; but the awful cloud of Eliot then overhung it, and made life impossible. Before and after that, Harvard was only an accident and a temporary necessity in my life; and especially since I became a professor I did nothing but save money so as to get out of it quam celerrime. It took a great many years, partly for other reasons, and I wrote a great many bad books in the interval; otherwise it seems a stretch of desert. However, I have still senses and life enough left to see, and perhaps to do, something; and I am perfectly happy. “Of course he is”, said an Italian scholar of peasant origin at the Berensons, when this confessed beatitude of mine was reported to him, “Of course, he has such a strong digestion!”

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
Queen’s Acre
Windsor, England. February 6, 1912

I have just got a telegram, like one you must have received also, saying that Mother died yesterday.
….
What a tremendous change this is! Mother was the absolutely dominating force in all our lives. Even her mere existence, in these last years, was a sort of centre around which we revolved, in thought if not in our actual movements. We shall be living henceforth in an essentially different world. I hope you and I may be nearer rather than farther from one another in consequence.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville