Author: David Spiech Page 262 of 283

To William Archer
5 Grove Street
Oxford, England. July 24, [1901]

Dear Sir,

You will not get my photograph from Pach—I am sorry you have taken the trouble to write to him. The many photographers I find in Oxford do not tempt me much more than he; but although I dislike the idea of having my face associated with my verses, I am writing to a friend in Paris, who has the photograph of a drawing made in ’96 by Andreas Andersen which I am asking him to send you. It is a clever drawing, and as it represents a past and somewhat fantastic aspect of my humble personality, I object to it less than to a glaring photo. Moreover, it corresponds exactly to the date of the later sonnets. . . .

Thank you very much.

Yours faithfully

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The British Library of the British Museum, London.

To George Sturgis
Savoy Hotel
194bis rue de Rivoli,
Paris. July 23, 1936

I am settled here comfortably enough, with a great view, and Strong and Cory for daily company. No doubt France, Spain and more or less everything is going to the dogs: but that has been happening ever since the creation, and in spite of it all, here we are, you and me, quite decent presentable people having rather a good time. Let everything continue to go to the dogs, and probably the dogs will like it.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933–1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Ávila, Spain.  July 22, 1890.

As to my plans for the future, they are simply to take up and put up with what offers. I am content to go on with lectures at Harvard indefinitely, if they want me. If they don’t, something else will probably present itself. Harvard has many attractions and advantages, the main one being the great freedom you enjoy. Royce last year annoyed me a good deal. I took a course he gave in Hegel’s Phenomenologic which was appalling, and he seemed to be bent on converting me to absolute idealism nolens volens. But Royce, although sometimes such a bore, is a good and kind man, and very appreciative, and generous to me. With Palmer I get on well. We never discuss anything. I treat him as if he were a clergyman, and he is nice to me. With James I have much more sympathy, both personal and intellectual I think he is beginning to understand that I am not a dreamer and obscurantist, and that, in spite of certain literary leanings, I am capable of facing questions of fact and evidence without repugnance —and or parti pris. Everett has also become a friend of mine.

Peabody is the only member of the philosophical Committee that seems to think me dangerous and highly improper. The President looks upon me with favor, because as I am told, he thinks I may contribute to the college a little of that fresh air and blood of which it stands in so much need. It is really sad to see how mediocrity Germanised rules supreme there. For all these reasons I think my position at Harvard tolerably stable and honorable. I study to keep apart from the Germans. Royce is the only one I cannot avoid. . . . Altogether I had a good time, and enjoyed what I never had cared for before, the air and sunlight, food and drink, and the consciousness of life—rational and irrational—about me.

By the way, I saw your former chief Prof. Schurmann this winter. He came to sound the Cambridge philosophers on the subject of founding an American philosophical journal. I was glad to see that his project met with universal discouragement. Since that time, however, Royce has afflicted me with the subject again, and even asked me if I would be willing to undertake the editorship. I gave an evasive answer, for I should not particularly object, if the thing were perpetrated at all, to have some influence in selecting the kind of ignorance and presumption that should appear in it. A little less Hegelian drivel might thus be administered to the feeble minded public. But I hope the plan may collapse. If anything is written in America worth publishing it can go into Mind, which certainly has room for it. I do not attach great weight to Schurmann’s objection to this plan, viz. that in two weeks a number of Mind is behind the times, and we must have a pure American truth, served hot every morning like the biscuits. Schurmann, indeed, appeared to me like a wise man of Philistia, rhetorical, vulgar, and self-asserting.

I have not left room for much discussion of Ethics. I admit all you say about the inherent lack of authority in a “demand”. All the stars laugh at a demand. I have no notion of making it sacred. And I also admit (and here I am glad to see we have been moving in the same direction) that it is by their consequences that the lawfulness of actions should be measured. There is no practical seriousness in a system that poopoos consequences, and strings phrases together about self imposed, self evident principles. But I would have you observe, in excuse for my former insistence on demands as the basis of Ethics, that our judgments about good and bad consequences are inspired by instincts which may very properly be called our natural demands. The reason why I should not do a particular atrocity, e.g. maintain protection or Hegelianism, is the consequences. But why is poverty, the consequence of the one, or idiocy, the consequence of the other, an evil? Because of my natural demand, and that of my fellows, for wealth and for intelligence. And so it still seems to me, after heartily admitting all you say, that our actual and spontaneous demand for one kind of existence rather than another is the ultimate basis of all values.

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.

To Henry Ward Abbot
Hotel Miramonti
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. July 21, 1933

Dear Harry,

Your impatience is most flattering, and I am asking the English publisher of the Locke lecture to send you a copy. Scribner seems not to have brought out the American edition yet, I suppose waiting for good times to return. The English edition appeared in May.

As to the Spinoza paper, I am myself a trifle annoyed. Nijhoff, at The Hague, was to have issued the Septimana Spinozana (in which my paper appears) last November, then in January, then in the spring, and now in the autumn. I have not received any explanation, but probably the multitude of languages and of contributors have made a Babel of the editor’s mind, who was not well to begin with.

All this comes, not of my being mad à enfermer, but only weak enough to have accepted invitations to waste my sweetness in the lectureroom air, and surrender my MS to third parties. It won’t happen again.

It is most entertaining living in these times. This Roosevelt is more Caesarian than the spluttering Theodore; we are having Fascism under another name rising in France, in Germany, and in the U.S.! And the English Church—what a comedy that is too! I enjoy it immensely.

Yours sincerely G.S.

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 Charles Augustus Strong
Address: C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London
Box Hill, Surrey, England. July 20, 1905

In my fifth volume, which I am now revising, I have added a note about your philosophy (not mentioning you). Lest there be any misrepresentation I copy it here and beg you to point out anything that is wrong. Of course you must not ask me to leave out the joke; but apart from that I will change anything. The text has been saying that the philosophy of mind is in hopeless confusion since “it is not settled whether mind means the form of matter, as with the Platonists, or the effect of it, as with the materialists, or the seat and false knowledge of it, as with the transcendentalists, or perhaps after all, as with the pan-psychists, means exactly matter itself.” Here follows the note: “The monads of Leibniz could justly be called minds, because they had a dramatic destiny and the most complex experience imaginable was the state of but one monad, not an aggregate view or effect of a multitude in fusion. But the recent improvements on that system take the latter turn. Mind-stuff or the material of mind is supposed to be contained in large quantities within any known feeling. Mind-stuff, we are given to understand, is diffused in a medium corresponding to apparent space (what else would a real space be?), it forms quantitative aggregates, its transformations or aggregations are mechanically governed, it endures when personal consciousness perishes, it is the substance of bodies, and, when duly organised, the potentiality of thought. One might go far for a better description of matter. That any material must be material might have been taken for an axiom; but our idealists, in their eagerness to show that “Gefühl ist Alles”, have thought to do honour to the spirit by forgetting that it is an expression and wishing to make it a stuff.

There is a further circumstance showing that mind-stuff is but a bashful name for matter. Mind-stuff, like matter, can be only an element in any actual being. To make a thing or a thought out of mind-stuff you have to rely on the system into which that material has fallen. The substantial ingredients, from which an actual being borrows its intensive quality, do not contain its individuating form. This form depends on ideal relations subsisting between the ingredients, relations which are not feelings but can be rendered only by propositions.”

To this note is reduced the chapter I had written about “Natural philosophy in quest of substance”: for I find that to keep volume five within limits I must reject everything not strictly falling under its title “Reason in Science”. A chapter on “Transcendentalism” which I love like the apple of my eye is also sacrificed: so that when I have had a good rest and am back in Cambridge I may begin to rival you other prolific article-writers out of the slaughtered innocents born to bloom in the L. of R.

I have found a (somewhat vulgar) retreat here among the hills between Surrey and Sussex, and am making rapid progress with my work. As a relaxation I am reading Mill’s Logic. What bad logic—but what good feeling and good scholarship and pure wisdom! He is a sort of steadier and four-footed James.

President Eliot writes me that they have collected $2,400,000 for increasing our Harvard salaries. It sounds magnificent, but I believe it doesn’t amount to $500 a piece.

Yours ever G.S.

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.