Author: David Spiech Page 260 of 283

To Horace Meyer Kallen
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, MA. December 5, 1903

I see it has taken me more than a month to answer your letter, which I was really very glad to get. What you tell me is amusing, and makes me think that perhaps you are inwardly enjoying the horrors of Princeton. Of course Princeton is very far away—but we may ask, as the Westerner said on a similar occasion “Far away from where?”—and of course it is intensely provincial, as I hear President Harper of the University of Chicago says New York and the whole East is, and notably Boston. Why isn’t it very nice to have class spirit and respect for professors? And why isn’t it interesting to see puritanism and industrialism trying to express themselves in one philosophy? You shouldn’t mind the ugly symbols in which these things are expressed; now-a-days we have no taste in symbols. We have to ignore them as we should the style of a telegram or the drawl of a preacher, and try to attend only to the thing signified, the force embodied. Doesn’t Princeton embody a force? Isn’t it a better place than Harvard, for instance, in which to study America? And America is something worth a lot of trouble to understand. If I thought I could quite succeed, I think I could be brought to sit for half an hour in President Wilson’s pink parlor, and to breathe a pretty strong scent of religiosity even for a whole year. You remember what Socrates said to his son about Xanthippe’s bad temper? “If people used equally bad language at one another on the stage, would that disturb you? Then why should bad language, uttered without malice, disturb you in the real world?” The religious people merely use a bad language; what they mean, if they only knew what it was, would be all right.

James has sent me two of his new articles from the Columbia Journal. The one (or more) in Mind I have not yet seen. Dickinson writes to me from Cambridge. “I love W. James as a man. But what a singularly bad thinker he is!” James’ new statements do not seem to me to be bad insight, whatever may be thought of the logic of them. They point to materialism, which I believe may be destined before long to have a great rehabilitation. The material world is a fiction; but every other world is a nightmare.

I am enjoying myself hugely and reading a good deal more than usual. Friends of mine turn up at regular intervals, and the sun shines, and humanity smiles about me almost without hypocrisy. I feel at home.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH.

To Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 7, 1948

Dear Dick—or Reincarnation of Oliver,

It had never occurred to me while you were here that you are like Oliver; but now that you suggest it, with your introspective letter to back you up, I see it clearly. I didn’t know you had so much psychological atmosphere—“vapours”—in your mental landscape. It is very romantic, northern, and you must be of Scandinavian descent; but don’t let the delicate mists thicken into fog. Spiritual pride and independence are like Oliver and the American transcendentalist of a hundred years ago; and in your letter you are more like Oliver than he was like himself in my book; because it would have been impossible in a novel to reproduce the actual flux of half-formed thoughts and images that floats down through the mind. Even in the two places where I pretend to quote Oliver’s compositions—the “thesis” on Platonic love and the verses about Rose Darnley—I make his style more terse and mature than it could have been, even when he was older: for he had the same difficulty in landing his fish that you complain of. But don’t worry about it. Angling is a sport; you don’t go fishing for the fish, but for a healthy foolish game in the fresh woods and the stream full of lovely reflections. It is a bit cruel—unintentionally, but nature always is so by the way. I don’t think there is anything mysterious or defective in images and thoughts being elusive and dissolving before they are quite formed. Nature, again, is everywhere wasteful, and breeds a hundred seeds for one that ever flowers. You mustn’t mind that. A choice selection of lucky ideas, that actually could take shape, will be enough to show what you were after.

Now as to “solipsism” and the “transcendental ego”, these are not wellchosen words for what is probably meant, or ought to be meant if we mean to be scientific in regard to the facts. There is a transcendental function or relation between any witness and what it or he perceives; it should not, however, be called transcendental, but ciscendental (as I used to say to my classes) because the relation or function signified is that of any and every spectator, in the dark on this hither side of the footlights, seeing only the phenomenal play on the lighted stage. If the play is not a dream, but one actually written by a playwright and acted by players who are not at all, in real life, the characters in the play, then the author and the performers, and the theatre and audience, are transcendent (not transcendental, i.e. or ciscendental) realities, conditioning the spectacle, but rooted in a much larger “real” (or dynamic) world.

Now, as a matter of fact, the transcendental function or relation of the witness is exercised by a material man, part of the same transcendent world in which the author and the actors have their dynamic places. If, then, I say that “I” or the “ego” am something dynamic and self-existent, but that the play is all make-believe or a dream in me (which view would be real solipsism) I am contradicting myself; because my natural person and power are a part of nature transcending all phenomenal presence to thought or dream; and it is absurd that a part of the material world, by going to a material theatre and seeing real actors perform fictitious parts, turns them and himself, as a man, into a mere phenomenon in his mind. Solipsism, then, understood strictly, is absurd; even “solipsism of the present moment”, because the visioned scene is not a self, and if there is a self that has that vision, this self is part of a transcendent world, and not alone in existence.

What I think a more correct way of speaking is to say that “transcendental” is only spirit (or attention) in anybody: a spirit (or attention) which can arise only in animated bodies, as they receive impressions and prepare reactions on other bodies or natural agents. Spirit (or attention) can never be disembodied: therefore it is never solipsistic in fact; yet it is, in each intuition or feeling, a focus, transcendental and invisible, for whatever it sees. The Germans confuse this transcendental function with dynamic mythical “spirits” existing in a void.

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 Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. August 1, 1947

As to Bob’s engagement—I suppose it is practically an engagement: at least they are novios—seems suitable and quite in order. “Chiquita”, however, is not a “Christian” name, but only Spanish for “little one” or rather “little girl”, and won’t do if she becomes tall or fat or a grandmother. Has she another name, perhaps, or would that be too old-fashioned? I can’t get used to the costumes and embraces in the photos in American papers. I see they are innocent: the creatures are not attractive; but I can’t get used to the publicity. Besides being in love evidently Bob is very busy and deep in his architecture. Building houses in series is no doubt useful training. When I thought of being an architect, I looked forward to finding an engineer for a partner, and doing only artistic work myself. But those were the days of individual enterprise and amateur art. Now everything is of standard democratic thoroughness, a matter of training and not of caprice.

Training is the pragmatic side of education, which I lack and feel the want of even in languages and history which are things I like and have picked something about en passant; but I see that the old apprenticeship in the dirty work of any art is necessary for solid result. Please give . . . Bob my love and congratulations. Perhaps you could also send me a photo of the charming Chiquita, and tell me what sort of family she belongs to. Are they rich or fashionable or simple or especially cultivated? When the wedding is arranged and I have got further impressions, I will write to Chiquita in Spanish and suggest that she take Bob to Avila on their wedding trip and visit some nice relations that I still have there.

It is interesting, but not exhilarating, to see what an ugly commonplace person Sartre is, at least in the snap-shot in the clipping you send me. But his book of plays and the other book by Camus had already disillusioned me about French Existentialists: but from all I have read about Kierkegaard (the founder) and of Husserl and Heidegger (the German representatives.) I know there is better stuff hidden in the movement than appears in the popular reports. It is a reversion to the sense of being a spirit in a strange and dangerous universe: a sort of religious revival without any dogma or leader: but the working out of the sentiment is different in each member of the sect; and in some it has lost the religious element and become simply chaotic impulse.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941–1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To John Hall Wheelock
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Paris. July 31, 1936

As to the illustrations, I am sorry to be helpless. I had a very nice little photo of myself at 18, my graduating school portrait, but somehow I have lost it. Possibly George Sturgis or his wife asked me for it when they were in Rome years ago. In that case he may be able to let you have it. Or the Latin School people in Boston: although I doubt that they collect photographs of their old boys. It was the class of 1882.

There was also a family group taken a year or two later in which I had rather long hair and little whiskers—bad form, but characteristic of the time before I had become a commonplace Harvard man. Otherwise, I don’t remember any picture of me in “early youth”.

The Denman Ross portrait is not a good likeness, but I am pilloried in it for all future time in Emerson Hall, and as it has a beard it will seem more like me to my old pupils between 1906-1912. All the rest of my life I have worn only a mustache.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933–1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.