Author: David Spiech Page 78 of 283

To Bertrand Arthur William Russell
Queen’s Acre
Windsor, England. February 8, 1912

I have a proposal to make, or rather to renew, to you on behalf of Harvard College. Would it be possible for you to go there next year, from October 1912 to June 1913, in the capacity of professor of philosophy? . . . What they have in mind is that you should give a course—three hours a week, of which one may be delegated to the assistant which would be provided for you, to read papers, etc.—in logic, and what we call a “seminary” or “seminar” in anything you liked. It would also be possible for you to give some more popular lectures if you liked, either at Harvard, or at the Lowell Institute in Boston. For the latter there are separate fees, and the salary of a professor is usually $4000 (£800). We hope you will consider this proposal favourably, as there is no one whom the younger school of philosophers in America are more eager to learn of than of you. You would bring new standards of precision and independence of thought which would open their eyes, and probably have the greatest influence on the rising generation of professional philosophers in that country.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Mills Memorial Library, Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

To Justus Buchler and Benjamin P. Schwartz
Hotel Bristol
Rome. February 7, 1936

There is something of Hamlet in Oliver, no doubt: but he has been so long in my mind, and has developed there so much as a natural fungus or other growth, that I am not sure myself exactly what he represents. The nearest I can come to it is to say that he shows the tragedy of being, as you put it, on the outskirts of society, at least in America. There society is all: and a poet or mystic or essentially spiritual man, when he tries to look beyond the busy but empty social life that is pressed upon him–beyond the conscription to which he is subjected–finds nothing else: so that in that vacuum he collapses and peters out, not having enough substance in himself to make a spiritual universe.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Brooklyn College Library, Brooklyn NY.

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
Queen’s Acre
Windsor, England. February 6, 1912

I have just got a telegram, like one you must have received also, saying that Mother died yesterday. . . .

What a tremendous change this is! Mother was the absolutely dominating force in all our lives. Even her mere existence, in these last years, was a sort of centre around which we revolved, in thought if not in our actual movements. We shall be living henceforth in an essentially different world. I hope you and I may be nearer rather than farther from one another in consequence.

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, VA.

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Cambridge, Massachusetts. February 5, 1908

I don’t know what the general effect of Moore’s system is: how does he attach existence to Being? But I like the clearness with which he holds to the intent of thought and avoids those psychological sophisms to which we all, brought up under the blight of idealism, remain so prone. For that lesson I am willing to forgive him all his narrowness and general incapacity. I have no doubt he is a most disagreeable and unfair person. But he is one from whom we can learn something, which is more than can be said of most contemporary writers. Russell is far better known to me, both personally and as a writer, and I feel as if I agreed with him pretty thoroughly, inspite of all differences in temperament and in knowledge. At least, disagreements with Russell don’t trouble me, because I feel them to be due to additional insights, now on his part now on mine: while disagreements with a haphazard person like James are more annoying, because they come from focussing things differently, from being schief. You may be quite right in thinking that I agree almost entirely with what James means: but I often hate what he says. If he gave up subjectivism, indeterminism, and ghosts there would be little in “pragmatism”, as it would then stand, that I could object to. Of course, pragmatism in a wider sense involves an ethical system, because we can’t determine what is useful or satisfactory without, to some extent, articulating our ideals. That is something which James doesn’t include in philosophy. Dewey is far better in that respect, and I notice he even begins to talk about the ideal object and the intent of ideas! What a change from those “Logical Studies” in which there is nothing but social physiology!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH.

To Martin Birnbaum
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 4, 1946

Dear Mr. Birnbaum,
I write to thank you very much for your reminiscences of Sargent, including those of Henry James and the plates of some of Sargent’s paintings and drawings. I wish that you had gone more systematically into the problem of naturalistic versus eccentric or symbolic painting. It is a subject about which my own mind is undecided. My sympathies are initially with classic tradition, and in that sense with Sargent’s school; yet for that very reason I fear to be unjust to the eccentric and abstract inspiration of persons perhaps better inspired. Two things you say surprise me a little: one that Sargent was enormous physically. I remember him as a little stout, but not tall: and I once made a voyage by chance in his company, and thereafter a trip to Tangier; so that I had for a fortnight at least constant occasions to go about with him; and being myself of very moderate stature I never felt that he was big. The other point is that he saw and painted “objectively”, realistically, and not psychologically. Now, certainly he renders his model faithfully; but in the process, which must be selective and proper to the artist, I had always thought that, perhaps unawares he betrayed analytical and satirical powers of a high order, so that his portraits were strongly comic, not to say moral caricatures. But in thinking of what you say, and quote from him, on this subject, I begin to believe that I was wrong, that he may have been universally sympathetic and cordial, in the characteristically American manner, and that the satire that there might seem to be in his work was that of literal truth only: because we are all, au fond, caricatures of ourselves, and a good eye will see through our conventional disguises and labels. And this would explain what to some persons seems the “materialism” of Sargent’s renderings; his interest in objets d’art for instance, rather than in the vegetable kingdom or in the life of non-sensuous reality at large. Crowding his house with pictures, and his memory with innumerable friends and innumerable anecdotes about them, shows a respect for the commonplace, a love of the world, that prevents the imagination from taking high flights or reflecting ultimate emotions.

Is there, I wonder, any truth in such a suspicion?

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Unknown