Author: David Spiech Page 261 of 283

To [Henry Ward Abbot]
[Rome, Italy, or Paris, France]. [Summer 1932]

. . . pessimism, questioning’s” about a future life, or the desirability of death. Somehow I seem not to feel the edge of those uncertainties, as I did fifty years ago: but, more objectively considered, the moral anarchy of the world is no less interesting. I am reading an excellent book by Papini, “Gog”: the Catholics seem now to be the best critics: Maritain, Papini, T. S. Eliot (an amateur Catholic): it is not their faith that makes them clear-sighted, but their remoteness from the delusions of the age. In America, Edmund Wilson seems rather good: but he is academic; has learned his authors.

I have been rereading John Locke, for a lecture I am to give in Bloomsbury in October: a bit prosy, and speculatively poor, but pungent and genuine in his common sense.

You keep asking about my novel: it is not finished, perhaps never will be, and is not likely to be published in my life-time. Don’t think of it. I will send you my lectures on Spinoza and Locke when they are printed— my last appearances in public!

Your old friend

G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To John Francis Stanley Russell
Ávila, Spain. July 29, 1910

Dear Russell,

The cuttings you enclose interest me only as justifying an old saying of Goethe’s: “Die Engländer haben keine Intelligenz”. All this sort of gossip is worthless, and this sort of controversy ridiculous. The Catholic Church is intolerant on principle, and the expression of this intolerance is limited only by the influence she is able to exercise over the civil power. She would repress, and exterminate, all heresy and schism, if she were able. To talk about persecutions inspired by her as due to individual irritation or hot temper is pure nonsense; and if English Catholics indulge in it, it is because they must be ignoramuses, or cowards. . . .

But what is the use of talking about anything when what guides events, and people’s opinions, is not justice or the facts in the case, but a certain party instinct, or sense for the direction in which they would wish things to move? Now, I am entirely able to feel that the whole society of Christendom (compared with that of Greece, or even with that of Islam) rests on a false and artificial basis; and I can share the hope of those anarchists, or other rebels, who dream of some future more naturalistic system of thought and life—say with free love, and without individual property.

But it is one thing to see the arbitrary and ultimately unstable character of a civilization (every civilization is essentially unstable) and another to set about destroying it by blind force. This latter system is hateful, because inspired only by hate: it has no ideal of a positive sort to inspire it, nor, if it had, could it attain that ideal merely by destroying what now exists. The want of intelligence is immense, that does not see that everything we have that makes (or might make) life worth living is an incident to the irrational, traditional civilization in which we have been reared. All things are like language, which we must use, beautify, but not worship; and your anarchists are mere blundering dumb beasts, that sputter and howl, because they find the rules of grammar absurd and inconvenient. So they are, for people who are too stupid or too ill-bred to use them: but that does not make these people martyrs, or heralds of progress. It only makes them fit to be exhibited naked in cages, like other wild animals, and fed on raw meat through the bars.

I didn’t mean to write a long letter, nor have I the least idea of modifying your opinion on these subjects. Only, I wanted to save you the trouble of sending me the chance thoughts of the provincial correspondents of the Daily News—Quakers or others.

Yours ever,

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910–1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. July 28, 1950

Dear Dick,

You end your long letter, just received, with a pleasing suggestion (as ladies used to do in postscripts) which I mustn’t leave unnoticed. I didn’t send you Cardiff’s book because I was disgusted with it and have not sent it to anybody, not even to Cory. When he sent me half a dozen pages, I smelt a rat at once, but didn’t wish to discourage him, because the project of a selection of maxims or thoughts or epigrams had always tempted my vanity, to show the water-lilies that might be picked in the stagnant pools of philosophy. But I told him that I felt that his selections, though good, were not diversified enough: too much commonplace rationalism (when I am not a rationalist) and not enough cynicism or scepticism or psychological malice: and I gave him a sample of what I wished he would include, what Mario says about our “having to change the truth a little in order to remember it”. When the book arrived I saw that the old rascal had left that out! He also represented me as merely renovating Tom Paine, instead of Thomas Aquinas! Cheap and witless criticism of religion, without all the pages of sympathetic treatment of it, for instance in “The Idea of Christ in the Gospels”. I was furious; but in time, and on looking at other parts of the book, I have reconciled myself to it somewhat. But I am delighted to hear that you have had that project in mind, for some distant future entertainment. And you, who before you had seen me, chose that passage at the end of the Dialogue on Normal Madness, may be relied on not to miss the strong and really radical things. And that egregious Cardiff actually quotes the last few words, which seem, alone, a melodramatic piece of verbiage, when it is all the profound philosophy (not mere physics) of Democritus when it comes after the picture of Alcibiades winning the chariot-race at Olympia and his dismay at thinking it all dissolved into atoms. Weep, my son, if you are human, but laugh also, if you are a man.

This might lead me back to the body of your letter and the question of the moral sense. But I don’t feel like going into it. I read lately in the Times Literary Supplement a review of a Scottish philosopher who maintains the mysterious absoluteness of what is “right” as distinguished from what is naturally good. I have always wondered at the aura that hangs about the word “duty”. It means only owed. If you have pledged yourself to pay something you are bound in honour to pay it—if you can. The propriety of this conduct is obvious; but the mystic awe that hangs about “you ought” is superstitious.—Very glad you are deep in French. Tell me what you are reading.

Yours G Santayana

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 Nancy Saunders Toy
Hôtel des Réservoirs,
Versailles, France. July 27, 1932

You have no idea with what reluctance I tore myself from my Roman diggings and undertook what now seems a great and troublesome adventure: for I don’t know if I have told you that I am to go to England as well as Holland, and to read a paper on Locke before the (Bloomsbury) Royal Society of Literature. It is not only my elderly self that is changed: the good train from Rome to Paris has been taken off; the rapide that remains is as quick or quicker, being now largely electric, but the carriages are inferior, the dining-car occasional only, and altogether there is a feeling everywhere that the good old capitalistic days are over, and that the world is going native, that is, common. However, my trip so far has been easy and simple enough. Poor Strong had gone to stay with his daughter, who has just returned from America, for the summer, to her house at Saint Germain: but after a week he found the arrangement impossible and went home to Fiesole. When I arrived in Paris, he was gone. It had more than once occurred to me, in previous years, that Versailles would be a good place to live and work in Summer: and here was I with a free field, two lectures to prepare, and two months to spend somewhere before going to The Hague. So I looked up rooms in the swagger Trianon Palace Hotel: not very attractive; too “first class” for a person who feels old, shabby, and ugly. So I took rooms at this Hôtel des Réservoirs, which matches such a battered personage perfectly. It was once an excellent hotel, and retains a certain air of faded gentility: reminds you of the Paris Opera House and the ballets of the Second Empire. I have been alone, or almost alone, in the place, but for the Sunday trippers and an occasional old-fashioned party for lunch; but I am comfortable, have done good work, and am training by walking vigorously in the magnificent park, to which this hotel has a private gate.

My nephew George Sturgis, and other people who write to me from America, seem to be fundamentally alarmed, shocked, disconcerted by the CRISIS—such is the way my nephew says the word should be written. How wonderful if a first touch of adversity should convert the U.S, not only back to liquor, but back to God! I had once written a squib to that effect, inspired by Maritain (you know who Maritain is: a leading Thomistic Catholic critic) which of course was not to be published: but I am beginning to think that the idea (that Industrialism is diabolical) may have some truth in it. But the world seems to be so confused morally and [across] politically, that one doesn’t dare to form any opinion about it.

What do you think, or at least feel, to be the drift of things?

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

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 Charles Augustus Strong
Address: C/o Brown Shipley & Co. London.
Box Hill, Surrey, England. July 26, 1905

Please excuse this sheet of fool’s cap: I have no frivolous note-paper at hand and the contents are going to justify the pomposity—and perhaps the name—of the medium.

I had no notion that in submitting my innocent foot-note to your previous censorship I was asking you to aid me in any attack upon your doctrine. Perhaps, if you would only allow me my language, your doctrine would be almost my own. What I wanted was, not to misrepresent you. Now, my prudence seems to have its reward, for apparently I did misrepresent you in supposing that you made human thought “a view or result of much mind-stuff in fusion.” Your correction, if I understand it, brings up a point quite new to me. Mind-stuff contains relations between its own parts; and adding these relations together you get a sort of continuum given within mind-stuff, although the total landscape is only represented, and not within mind-stuff anywhere in an absolute sense. The partners hold hands, so to speak, but no one contains the whole minuet. Is this your idea? If so, it seems to me you are jumping from the frying-pan into the fire. For the “extensity” of sensations, or their essential lapse, is a character of their object; and this is a material character. If the extensity of a sensation can be predicated of mindstuff itself, then mind-stuff is extended! You would not maintain that, I suppose; yet how can you avoid it? Your inclusion of relations within mind-stuff either lifts mind-stuff into mind, its object acquiring the relations observed and it itself being lifted to a transcendental sphere and made an act of apperception or (as my book will call it) an intent; or else this inclusion reduces it more obviously than ever to matter. “Isn’t this what Bergson (whom I am surprised to hear you invoke, when his dichotomy of Matière et Mémoire is all on my side) tries to do, making the immediate material, and the reflective possession or representation of it spiritual and eternal—which is more than I can agree to. However, with many thanks for this information, I hasten to correct my foot-note and will make it read: “a certain bulk of sentiency in flux, illustrating spatial and temporal relations, and not merely representing them.” Is this better? There will be time to make further corrections, if I have gone wrong. I will also correct the phrase about “doing honour to spirit” and substitute “thinking to give spirit a more congenial basis by making it its own stuff, thereby forgetting that spirit is expressive and, being expressive must have a different status from that of its basis or subject-matter.” The style suffers: but I, too, am ready to make any sacrifice of personality on the altar of truth. I may, however, think of a better wording than that above.

Where I can’t accept your criticism is in respect to the word matter. Why should Berkeley’s ignorance of Aristotle be allowed to infect more generations? Matter is in a way approached from without, since it is potential and inferred, as every substance must be, including mind-stuff, or as truth is. But it means the surd in things, the existential strain that makes them be here and now, in this quantity and with this degree of imperfection. I have a previous note on the use of this word, too long to quote. You will see it when the book appears, for on this subject I know what I am talking about and speak quite deliberately.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.