Author: David Spiech Page 5 of 283

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St. Oxford
Oxford, England. January 12, 1919

Dear Strong

It is quite true that in my comments on your book I haven’t come to close quarters with your arguments. I think your metaphysical system, as sketched in your last chapter, is very attractive, and that if I could grasp it, I should have no difficulty in embracing it as at least one of the possible accounts of substance, or perhaps as a part of the true account of it, for I suppose if “attentive vividness” were widely diffused in matter, your axiom that it could not arise by evolution would be less plausible. But the difficulty I find is not in believing but in conceiving your position, and I hark back to other conceptions because I can’t frame those you propose. You see that I can’t comprehend “attentive vividness”, nor “feeling”, nor “introspection”, and I am not sure that “sensation” is intelligible to me, because while you say it ought to be distinguished from the object (the sensibile?) you also say that you can see a sensation move. This drives me to distraction, and my only resource is to unknit my brow and try to see the thing for myself in my own terms. Sometimes I think I have caught your meaning: e.g. I flattered myself that “attentive vividness” was simply a new name for awareness, and therefore I went on to say that it must be intuition of an essence, since awareness of nothing would not be awareness, I suppose. But now you tell me this is wrong, that “attentive vividness” is an entirely different thing, and I confess I am simply lost again. I have reread your last chapter and carefully studied your letter, but I don’t feel able to make any pertinent comments at present, because I am too much in doubt about your meaning.

My brother in Boston has lost his wife, who was the youngest (except my youthful self) of our generation. Their boy is still in France, and writes very interesting accounts of his experiences as a soldier. My brother is naturally much affected and writes despondently about his own approaching end: but I believe there is no ground for this foreboding, Yours ever

G Santayana

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 Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller
Anglo–American Nile Steamer & Hotel Company,
Chief Office, Sharia Boulac, Cairo,
(Grand Continental Hotel Buildings)
Luxor, Egypt. 11 January [1905]

January 11th 1904
near Luxor on the Nile

Dear Fuller,

. . . I am at this moment going up the Nile with an impossible party of tourists, conscious of being no less grotesque myself than the rest of them. So many labour-saving-machines have left us no time for anything, else I should like to travel long in the East and yield for a time to its fascinations. People here seem to realise something of Faust’s dream, to be young in body and old in spirit. What an amusing place the world would be to such a creature. We sometimes speak of regretting lost illusions. What a silly idea! We may well regret lost powers, but the loss of illusions is an unmixed benefit. It leaves you free face to face with the facts and authorizes you to profit by every real opportunity. The trouble is that, the Life of Reason being so largely in abeyance, people do not ordinarily lose their illusions till they have lost their passions, and then the real world, when they see it for the first time as it is, seems to them stale, not because it is real but because they are played out.

I may perhaps go to Jerusalem and Damascus before returning to Europe. The donkey is losing its terrors for me and I now generally ride at the head of the party. Think what a party it must be!

Yours G Santayana

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

To Bruno Lind (Robert C. Hahnel)
Via S. Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 10, 1952

Dear Lind

The enclosed letter has just arrived, and makes me wonder at the complexity of life now in the U.S. It was much simpler in my early days. It occurred to me at once when you first wrote, including a typed letter for me to sign, to the Photographic Department in the Library of Congress, how easily I could have sent you a copy of that sonnet–only 14 lines!–which I have a copy of, and besides know by heart. It is not a good sonnet considered as a work of classic poetic art, but it has many tentacles stretching into feelings, backward from 1895, when it was written, and foreward also. For you will notice that the line “Why mourn for Jesus?–Christ remains to us” accurately prophesies my “Idea of Christ in the Gospels” published more than fifty years later. 1895 had been the year of my first visit to Italy, in company with my friend Loeser, and it was on my return from there that I stopped at Arles, and other places in Southeastern France, before returning to America in a cattle-boat, for economy, from London to N.Y. in 16 days, without a touch of seasickness. I am not sure whether I speak of this voyage in any detail, or of the journey to Florence, Rome, Venice, and Milan, but they were all sentimentally important episodes for me at that time, when I was beginning to live my second, or rather my third life after my “Change of Heart” in 1893, described in the first chapter of the third book of “Persons & Places.” This was a reversion to solitude enriched by a great many absorbing scenes in the past and absorbing themes in the present and for the future. The sonnet in question has not been printed expressly because I think it would not be understood as yet; but it will appear in my “Posthumous Poems,” which Cory will publish; and it occurs to me to say all this to you now, since you happen to have searched it out at the Congressional Library, to which I sent it (when asked for something) together with the portrait by Andreas Andersen, made one year later, when my College Life at the Harvard Yard was coming to an end. The next year 1896–7 I was at King’s College; and when I returned to Harvard I lived in rooms in the town, like any outsider. All these things and others are pertinent, beginning with the Platonic Sonnets, to the various implications of that Sonnet at Arles. I give you these hints, knowing that you are penetrating, and wishing that your penetration may go right. When do you expect to have your book done, soon or years hence? I should like to be able to read it before it is published.

Yours sincerely  G Santayana

P.S. Feb. 25, ’52

I had just sent off my letter about your sonnets on the Via Crucis, when this was returned to me–my second blunder in addressing letters to you. I send it again, hoping that this time it will reach you, as by chance it touches the same points as my last.

G.S.

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 William James
Berlin. January 9th 1887.

Dear Prof. James.

I was delighted to get your letter this morning, and hope you will forgive my not having written. The truth is I was ashamed to do so, because I have done those things which I ought not to have done, and I have not done those things which I ought to have done, and there is no science in me. But I have been having a good quiet time, picking up some German, and finding out which way the philosophical wind blows in these parts . . .

I find it pretty hard to make friends among the Germans, although they are good, simple-hearted people. The Americans are so much more lively that I always find myself going with them. There are a great many here, studying everything and nothing. I have been to some American dinners and Kneipes, but otherwise I have poked comfortably at home, reading Goethe, with whom I am in love. I find no difficulty in reading, and understanding lectures, but I am helpless when it comes to talk.

[I] still propose to take up physiology, but I am afraid . . . I shall do little in that direction. I do not know how to work. I think, apart from the spelling book and the Greek grammar, I have never studied anything except for pleasure and with enthusiasm; and I find it terribly hard to peg at things that I don’t seem to grasp. I recognize that all this is an additional reason for trying to get a feeling for the severe, minute way of handling things, and I shall try to do something in that direction. But my vocation is toward the human, political problems. Even the metaphysical and ethical puzzles appear to me rather as obstacles to be cleared than as truths to be attained. I feel now as if I could pass beyond them into the real world. And as far as the world we live in—I mean the social world—is to be got at by study, it strikes me it is to be found in history and political economy (not counting literature.) It is in this direction that I am drawn. Of course, if one could study everything, it would be very nice to understand the physical world too: but isn’t it a fact that popular and second hand science, bad as it is, is less treacherous than popular Pol. Econ. and history? I can better afford to be misled about chemistry or physiology than about free trade or the Reformation. That is why I am anxious to look into these subjects for myself.

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

To Robert Seymour Bridges
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 8, 1925

Through the more and more frankly confessed mythical character of exact science—I . . . have been recognizing of late that the church is a normal habitation for the mind, as impertinent free thought never is. But there remains the old misunderstanding, the forcing of literature into dogma, and the intolerable intolerance of other symbols, where symbols are all. Here in Rome, in the Pincio and the Villa Borghese, I often watch with amazement the troops of theological students of all nations, so vigorous and modern in their persons, and I ask myself whether these young men can truly understand and accept the antique religion which they profess—especially the Americans (very numerous) with their defiant vulgar airs and horrible aggressive twang. Could the monks of Iona and the Venerable Bede have been like this? Was it perhaps after some ages of chastening that the barbarians could really become Christian and could produce a Saint Francis?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England.