Author: David Spiech Page 43 of 283

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
Oxford, England. October 1, 1913

I have been working very steadily; my book, however, hasn’t got all the benefit of it, as I have been writing other stuff—some half-poetical dialogues that I have long had in mind and one of which was actually written and published long ago in a review. When this spurt of inspiration is over, however, I shall go back to the solid work, and I count on being stimulated especially by talking with Bertie Russell in Cambridge. I saw him at his brother’s, but we didn’t have more than one or two opportunities for quiet discussion. He is a logician and mathematician, strong where I am weakest, so that it is not always easy for us to understand each other on these abstruse points. However, we feel sympathy even in our diversity, and that is why I am anxious to put my view on some subjects (not on all) before him and to learn his more accurately. However, in the end every philosopher has to walk alone.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

To Charles Augustus Strong
60 Brattle St Cambridge
Cambridge, Massachusetts. [Autumn 1899–June 1904]

I have been reading more Fichte and Hegel, but my inner self rebels increasingly against their empty pertinacity and shocking habit of covering a paradox with a truism, and making you believe the absurd under the guise of the self-evident. So I shall be kindly disposed to the things-in-themselves.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Washington DC.

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St Oxford
Oxford, England. September 29, 1917

My so-called second paper has given birth to various excursuses on “existence”, “consciousness”, etc, and I have run up against points which have puzzled me and made me vacillate in my views. What you call “semiexistence”, and I was inclined to accept or to call “specious existence” has given me special trouble. My conclusion now is that it is a mistake to speak of the essence as existing at all. What exists substantially is the organic or mind-stuff process; what exists actually and historically is the passing perception or intuition—a fact, a cognition, something spiritual, having a date and duration, but no substantial or efficacious existence; while the essence (though it would be pedantic not to say that it existed, while it is given or embodied) exists only by a current figure of speech, the true existence not belonging to it, but to the mind that perceives or to the thing that embodies it. Do you agree with this? I should be glad to know

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To George Sturgis
Hotel Danieli,
Venice, Italy. September 28, 1939

Sept. 28, 1939

I have ideas about what is going to happen anent the war, but I won’t communicate them, partly because you wouldn’t think them reasonable, and partly because I might prove a false prophet. But this is not a gay confident war, as that of 1914 was at the beginning. It is something people have been too stupid and stubborn to avoid, although they hated and feared it so much as to be entirely upset at the thought of it’s actually overtaking them. It is a result of bad government by good men more than of good government by bad men: although there is something of this too.

And now Russia!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Charles Augustus Strong
7 Park Place, St. James’s
London, S.W.1. September 27, 1932

Dear Strong,

Your letter about Cory came at an unlucky moment when he was laid up with a touch of the “flu”, and had received a nice letter from the Journal of Philosophy, saying that his paper on Whitehead was accepted and that Whittredge had read it and liked it very much. Thus, for the moment, two of the points of your dissatisfaction were a little blunted, in that he seems to be really delicate, and to have advanced one step towards establishing himself in the public eye as a philosopher.

I feel hardly competent to advise you, from your point of view, about the wisdom of continuing to support Cory. If you regard him merely as a philosophical investment, I am not at all confident that he will ultimately justify your confidence: he has perception and an occasional intense spurt of industry, but on the whole his temperament is Irish and poetical, he is self-indulgent and capricious, and resents any attitude towards himself that is not one of complete disinterested sympathy and trust. For my own part, I feel perfectly willing to take him at his own valuation, and run the risk of wasting my sympathy—not entirely in any case, since I find him a pleasant companion, and a link with the younger intellectual generation. It seems to me that, in your place, I should wish to continue to encourage him, in the hope that, as the years go by, he may prove more and more valuable to you as a disciple and friend. But I think, in that case, the experiment is more likely to be satisfactory if you leave him free to choose his residence and way of living, and above all the tone of his opinions, as his own temperament dictates. A check-rein is the worst possible harness for a colt of his mettle. Of course you should expect him to come and see you frequently, and to continue studying philosophy with a serious mind. But beyond that, I think pressure will be rather wasted on him. For instance, he might go on living in England, but remain shut up in his bedroom, reading Proust and Pater and T. S. Eliot: evidently he might as well have read them sitting in the sun in the Riviera. I myself have always wished that he should mingle with refined English people of the intellectual type—like old Bridges, for instance, or Bertie Russell But it has to be, if at all, in his own way: and you and I are too old, and too much out of the world, to expect him to choose his best friends in our small circle.

As to his returning to New York—that too was originally my idea of what might be best for him. But isn’t it rather too late now? If you drop him, and he has to do that, it might be the making of him: but I certainly should still feel responsible for his future after having tempted him to remain so long out of his country and almost idle. Yours ever G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.