Author: David Spiech Page 3 of 283

To Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. March 1, 1949

The element of existence belongs to the self and leaves the idea to be, as in Plato, ideal: a visionary term or a form. It seems to me that a perception (which in so far as it is spiritual I call an intuition) is either, behavioristically, a reaction in the body to a physical stimulus, or a moment of spirit, spirit for me not being a substance but a flash of feeling in a psyche, intermittent and immaterial. This psyche or self in its animal life, when especially attentive, emits this immaterial cry, and sees this immaterial idea. A pure sound, as heard, and a pure light, as seen do not seem to me to be anything but illusory phenomena, signs for the spirit of the body and the world in which it is incarnate. They do not exist except as features or qualities in its own moral, immaterial, volatile life.

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. February 28, 1949

Your letter of a week ago brings unexpected news and it has taken me a few days to digest it. I see what a completely new and actively social life your marriage will open before you, and how this, added to the warmth of a new affection, will bring you. . . .

More important than the setting is to have some idea of your future family circle. As to Mr. Little himself, being master of a House in Cambridge and being Secretary to the University are both positions of which I have no first hand knowledge, but they suggest administrative and executive duties rather than teaching, and you don’t tell me what Mr. Little was before there were Houses at Harvard. Garrick and the 18th century sound like a specialty in English history or literature. And then of his four children, which are boys or men and which girls or women? That must make a great difference in the ease with which you can slip into your new position. I have some experience of this sort of problem, as my sister Susana had six step-children as well as a middle-aged husband with fixed habits. Anyhow, give him my compliments and congratulations; and I can understand how you too can feel a fresh glow of youth and excitement at the prospect of this new life. What I cannot sincerely congratulate you on is the procession of visitors and official functions which will demand your time and attention. But I am an old bear, and could never feel the charm of society where it went beyond real friendship or a real feast to the eye and to the gullet.

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. February 27, 1946

Dear Rosamond: Today I drove to the post office and got your gift of four books on sublime politics. You ask whether they are what I want. Yes, exactly, at least three of them. I am less sure about Churchill’s war speeches, although they may be what I need, even if I don’t like them, in order to give me a victorious thrill and a sense of being a good fellow surrounded by a nation of other good fellows, guaranteed to beat any other set of good or bad fellows on earth. Being in doubt about the possibility of getting my organism, at its age, to react properly on this alcoholic stimulant, I have for the moment lent this one book to Mother Hilda, acting head of this establishment (the Mother General being on travels of inspection in foreign parts), who is an ardent Englishwoman and speaks of “Mr. Churchill” with a hush of reverence. She sends word that she is much obliged, and will take great care of the precious volume and return it soon for my improvement. Meantime I have begun on “The Anatomy of Peace” by Emery Reves, which attracted me most; and I began with the last chapter to see what he was after: for the “jacket”, if that is what you call the paper cover, gave me no clear idea of the author, who didn’t proclaim himself to be a professor or even a Ph.D, and was not described in any of the comments quoted by the editor as belonging to any party. That fact encouraged me; and indeed I have found the last chapter splendid. Just what I think myself! Only, of course, I should add a word or two that might materially transform the issue. We must have law or suffer conquest: agreed; but if we have law, somebody must enforce it, and we should have to submit just as if we had been conquered. Apparently the establishment of this control is to be left to circumstances, as it always has been hitherto. I may get more light on that point when I have read the book properly, beginning at the beginning.

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 Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. February 26, 1950

My portrait was finished on Saturday and, as far as I can judge, it is rather good. I showed Wood my only previous portrait by an artist, Andreas Andersen’s carbon of 1896, and he looked at it intently for a long time and seemed to appreciate it. He said it still looked like me, which was a compliment to Andersen as well as to me.

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 Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. February 25, 1937.

Dear Kallen,

Perry’s mind is more conventional than yours, and he has undoubtedly presented a William James painted, as it were, by a member of the Royal Academy. He has done it very nicely, much better than I had thought him capable of doing anything. But there are at least two fatal handicaps under which such a biographer suffers—an official biographer. He can’t tell, he can’t even wish to know, everything, not the misères, physical and moral that really beset and largely direct the lives of all of us. That is one handicap. The other is that he is still interested in the questions that agitated his hero, they are still living questions to the biographer too, so that he will necessary pull and stretch the man’s thoughts to agree with his own, and will give a disproportionate emphasis and finality to those thoughts so surviving in himself. This is the trouble with your corrections and interpretations. Wm James is still living within you, and in vindicating him (as you think) you are vindicating yourself. That is honourable enough, but not biography. I therefore entirely agree with you that it would be better if Wm James’s Nachlass had been published almost without comments, leaving it for a future age, if it is interested in him, to review the maximum of his ipsissima verba and then perhaps draw a portrait of him as he appears to that remote posterity, to whom his problems will be a dead as himself, though both perhaps memorable in their by-gone virtues and humanity. If I were younger, and my planned work quite finished, I might be tempted to work out a notion I have, not about James especially, but about the old mind of the New World in general. It looks to me (I have been reading Jonathan Edwards) as if America had started life with an official mentality of the most alien and artificial character, and that these three hundred years have not sufficed to allow a native mentality to grow up (like a weed, at first) and crowd out the traditional imported principles. Wm James would illustrate the bravest possible struggle of the young and native growth against the old roots and stumps still encumbering and empoverishing the ground. And I am not sure that, for all his vitality and courage, he too was not, on the whole, stifled. Neither Emerson nor Walt Whitman seem to me to have escaped altogether, especially not on the political side. In any case, the discrimination between tradition and nativism would be tempting to make in every American yet on exhibition.—With best wishes from

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York NY.