Author: David Spiech Page 7 of 283

To Winifred M. Bronson
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. March 26, 1948.

The astronomer can survey things better if he doesn’t become a planet.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

To Samuel Martin Thompson
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 25, 1934

Dear Mr. Thompson

The point which has most pleased me in your thesis—which I have read with interest—is the clearness with which you bring out the constant need of taking “ideas” to mean “essences”. This clears the whole matter up, so to speak, upwards; but you don’t seem to me to clear it up downwards, towards biology. Locke began with biological assumptions; he knew the origin of ideas through contact with things: this was “experience” in the original sense. If you had restored tradition on this point, as you do in the upward direction, I think you would have recovered altogether what Locke meant to say and ought to have said: which was not at all what his school gathered from his loquacity. If you restored the biological presuppositions of Locke, and of everybody, you would not need to pack the world “in some fashion within our experience”, because the involution and relevance of our experience within the world would never have been disregarded.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933–1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Samuel Martin Thompson.

To Ottoline Cavendish–Bentick Morrell
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1
Rome. March 24, 1928

You mustn’t think that my affection for England has in the least cooled: only it has become retrospective, I like to think of what it used to be, and the present and future seem to offer nothing there that can tempt me.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 23, 1927

Normal religious experience is the assurance that one is living in a world the economy of which is authoritatively known, so that conduct, sentiment, and expectation have a settled basis. If we distinguish . . . between the true and the illusory parts of such a religion, the illusory part, when it is worth considering at all, seems to me to be poetry: that is, it is an imaginative fiction, rich in emotions, which serves nevertheless to adjust mankind to its fate, and to lend form to it’s relations to things, such as worldly life and eternal truth, which are not easily expressed in commonsense language.

There is a great obscurity, to my sense, in your philosophical first principles. Are you a mere humanist, without any physics? Why then don’t you consider the Catholic church, for instance, as just as respectable and acceptable a view of the world and as good a method of human life, as that of the contemporary Intelligentsia? Certainly the church has the advantage humanly: it is richer in fruits of every description, much riper and of sweeter flavour.

I can’t help feeling that your tartly external and perpetually insulting attitude to this church is founded on your love of truth: you hate her for her very excellences, because you are convinced that they are deceptive. I agree with you there; but then the very naturalism on which that agreement is based, if you steadily accepted it (as Spinoza did, for instance) might lead you to regard those deceptive charms historically with more sympathy and understanding: because the natural predicaments of man and his history made them inevitable and dramatically right.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921–1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Rome. March 22, 1925

I am at this moment struggling with Dewey’s “Experience and Nature” which I am to review for the Whited Sepulchre—a formidable task; but I don’t regret having undertaken it, because it seems that, after intense application and infinite patience in suspending judgement on opinions evidently absurd in form—according to my understanding of words—a certain order and naturalness begin to appear in his theory, which has many elements in it which I like extremely.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.