To Victor Wolfgang von Hagen
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 6, 1934
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Unknown
To Ira Detrich Cardiff
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 5, 1950
The several samples of notices of our Atoms of Thought which you have been kind enough to send me show me how much better you know the present receptivity of the American public than I ever did, and that your labours in choosing and arranging and indexing your selection of “Thoughts” were admirably directed and successful in so far as recommending my works to the part of that public which you had in mind. Many of these notices are only announcements: such a book exists, at such a price, with so many pages and an index. Others contain a few samples of the contents, and yet others laudatory comments precisely on that side of my “Thoughts” which you had meant to bring forward so as to shield me from passing for a theosophist.
But do these rationalist and positivistic passages give glimpses of those “prehistoric blocks” which I said in my preface formed the substructure of my boroque philosophy? No: they are samples rather of that superficial, if not baroque, play of contemporary party cries which filled the air in my time. The part that I admit and retain in repeating those commonplaces is the appeal to historic or psychological fact which they contain. Without the recognition of those facts the play of imagination and sentiment in other directions would become delusion. Now the part of my philosophy which you pass over is not favourable to illusion, but highly critical; and so my borrowings from the slogans of the Left were always, in their context, protected from being deceptive by a scepticism which showed them too, no less than the fabulations of the Right, to be products of human fancy. My “prehistoric blocks” were what I call the inevitable assumptions of common sense, or “animal faith”, which do not include, but precede, the dogmatic assumptions of common sense….
This is meant as a letter of thanks for your patience with my grumblings.
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 Roy Wood Sellars22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. October 30, 1917
Dear Mr. Sellars,
It was a great pleasure to receive your essay, which I have just finished reading. After your book on “Critical Realism” I was prepared for a general agreement as to your results, in the wide sense in which they are naturalistic and admit a subjective sphere as well as a physical one. In analysis and in language, however, I find now that we differ more than I had believed. Indeed, I am afraid I have no right to figure as the critical realist for whom you speak: and perhaps, if my paper (and Strong’s) are included in the book at all they ought to be relegated to an appendix, with a note (which Strong might compose) explaining that our point of view differs in some important respects from that of the other contributors. In fact, it differs so much, and so pervasively, that it would be useless for me to send any specific comments on particular passages. You know what these differences are as well as I do. If I may make one suggestion, however, which does not concern my own views directly, it is that you should revise somewhat, or omit, your comments on Plato and Aristotle, and soften the tone of those you make on Kant. As they stand I am afraid they will arouse hostility and controversy, rather than help to clarify or to recommend the views you are advocating. Personally, I also feel some doubts about the advisability of making so much of abstracted philosophical disciplines—psychology, epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, etc. What a man thinks he thinks, and if it is true of its object, I can’t believe it makes much difference which ‘ology we put it under. I am also—but this I know is wicked of me—sceptical about the “increased prestige of science” or the advance of everything in recent times. There are changes which doubtless involve improvements in some respects—even the war does that—but that the balance of recent change is for the good in philosophy does not seem to me plausible. For one thing there are no great men: and I wonder if a philosophy is substantially improved when its personal accent and symbolism are flattened out into scholastic technique. Strong (who I suppose has a separate copy of your essay: else I can send him mine) will doubtless send you detailed observations, to which you may regard me as subscribing beforehand.
Yours sincerely
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Bentley Historical Library, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
To Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell
22 Beaumont Street Sunday
Oxford, England. Sunday [Autumn 1916?]
Dear Lady Ottoline,
If you have an instinctive antipathy to German philosophy, you ought to find my new book agreeable. However, I don’t expect you to read it all, and you must feel quite free to give it away or lend it to anyone who you think is ripe for sound doctrine, and not an incorrigible admirer of Lord Haldane.
I should have been to see you long ago if I hadn’t been far from well; in fact I am so seedy that at Mrs Morrell’s suggestion I am off tomorrow to Harrogate. If I return from there as light as a bird, I shall soon fly to Garsington.
I haven’t got so far as to read book about Dostoevsky, having scarcely read one of his own—only “Crime and Punishment”: but I liked the spirit of it, though the letter didn’t seem to me very beautiful.
Yours sincerely, G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harry Ransom Humanities research Center, University of Texas at Austin
To Charles Augustus Strong
Venice, Italy. October 14, 1927
I am tempted to say something about the philosophical part of your letter, although you know my disbelief in the value of controversy on these points. What is required is clearness in the respective conceptions: as to which is true, if any, we can leave it to God or to the horse sense of mankind. Now, I have felt for some time that your views were changing, and although of course my first choice would be that you should agree with me heartily and completely, if this is impossible, my second choice would be that you should take up an entirely different position from mine: there might then be either diversity without real conflict, or a fundamental difference of attitude or judgement, and not, what is most annoying, mutual misunderstandings.
It wouldn’t surprise me if, on the point you mention, misunderstandings stood between us rather than a real disagreement. I should agree that “the datum of perception” is not an essence. The phrase “datum of perception” can be understood only in the sense in which we speak of “data of ethics”—the elementary facts which make up our knowledge in that field. The “data of perception” would then be things, or the events in one’s life. But when I maintain that “data” are essences and that nothing “given” exists, I am using the term in a much stricter sense. By a “datum” I mean something which exists only speciously, and is exhausted by being given; so that there can be no such thing as a “datum of perception” at all. The deliverance of perception is the existence of an object: but this, by my definition, cannot be given: it can only be posited, as existing on its own account; and it is on its own account, if at all, that it exists. There can be “data” of intuition or feeling; there cannot be “data” of perception, but only objects. The data in perception are the essences which feeling or intuition is then manifesting in their entirety and raising to specious existence as terms in that perception: but the object of the perception (isn’t this what you mean by its “datum”?) is a fact outside the perception: whereas a “datum”, in my sense, can never be a fact outside intuition or feeling (which is simply intuition of a simple essence: for you understand that I am speaking of conscious feeling).
I don’t know whether this explanation does more than re-iterate what you know already to be my view: but I thought it worth while to repeat it, since your use of the phrase “datum of perception”, as if it were unobjectionable, suggests that my meaning of “datum” and “given” was not at the moment before your mind.
Miller used to be a hopeless victim of psychologism, not seeing that if the moments of life have no ulterior objects, consciousness of living must itself have no ulterior object, and the psychological flux must be only the “idea” or “datum” of a psychological flux, abusing the Cherub in his timeless ecstasy. I hope you have succeeded in bring this Cherub to earth, and making him recognize the omnipresence of animal faith, even in his own warblings.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY
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