Author: David Spiech Page 85 of 283

To Corliss Lamont
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 6, 1950

Without bothering you with technical arguments, let me suggest this natural status of immaterial forms and systems of relations in the case of music. Music accompanies savage life as well as that of some birds, being a spontaneous exercise of motions producing aerial but exciting sounds, with the art of making them, which is one of the useless but beloved effusions of vital energy in animals. And from the beginning this liberal accompaniment adds harmony and goodwill to dancing and war; and gradually it becomes in itself an object of attention, as in popular or love songs. In religion it also peeps out, although here it ordinarily remains a subservient element, inducing a mood and a means of unifying a crowd in feeling or action, rather than a separate art. Yet it is precisely as a separate art, not as an accompaniment to anything practical, that music is at its best, purest and most elaborate. And certainly the sensibility and gift of music is a human possession, although not descriptive of any other natural thing.

Apply this analogy to mathematics, logic, aesthetics, and religion, and you have the naturalistic status of ideal things in my philosophy. “Humanism” has this moral defect in my opinion that it seems to make all mankind an authority and a compulsory object of affection for every individual. I see no reason for that. The limits of the society that we find congenial and desirable is determined by our own condition, not by the extent of it in the world. This is doubtless the point in which I depart most from your view and from modern feeling generally. Democracy is very well when it is natural, not forced. But the natural virtue of each age, place, and person is what a good democracy would secure—not uniformity.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To the editor of The New Republic
Oxford, England. January 5, [1916]

Protests against your “pro-Germanism” have already had this good effect, that they have made you speak out. May I add another protest, in the hope that it may provoke you to still greater clearness? I think greater clearness on your part is desirable. I have no objection to a German being a German, or a pro-German a pro-German. I read a violently Germanophile Spanish paper regularly and with pleasure. I know that honest men are passionate and that passion is blind. In a clearing-house of opinion. I expect various principles, prejudices, and sympathies to find expression, and I am grateful that my own notions should be courteously admitted there, unshorn and unvarnished. My protest is directed exclusively against your editorial ambiguity. From the beginning the undercurrent of your writing has not been in keeping with your overt opinions. It has been impossible not to feel that if public opinion did not embarrass you you would be far more pro-German than you are. Many an article has begun with an insinuating friendliness towards the Allies that has had a pro-German sting in its tail. If you are really in favor of an inconclusive peace which requires some speedy check to German successes, why do you celebrate the last triumph of German diplomacy and the entry of Bulgaria into the war—somewhat sugaring the pill in another column? And why do you entitle this partisan article “The Debt of Bulgaria to the Allies?” The result can only be that the non-reader should suppose that the article was anti-German, and the confused reader, perhaps, that it was somehow impartial. . . .

What terms of peace have you in mind that would suffice to teach Germany that aggression does not pay, while not inflicting any wound, such as the loss of properly German territory, which would rankle and call for revenge? Could these be less than an indemnity to Belgium, the loss of all the German colonies, the cession of Posen to a reconstituted Poland, and of Metz and the French-speaking districts in the Vosges to France, while the rest of Alsace became a sovereign state within the German Empire? To secure some such terms, if they could ever be secured—terms which would only just save the world from being dominated by terror—a fearful up-hill task, a campaign of months and perhaps years, confronts the Allies, for whose efforts and wrongs your heart does not seem to feel the least sympathy, although they are fighting for what you profess to desire, and for your benefit as well as for their own.

As to an inconclusive peace, which I take to mean the restoration of the status quo ante bellum but with Turkey and the Balkans henceforth under German influence, that would not teach Germany that aggression does not pay, but only, as the Kaiser has said, that everything is not to be attained at one bound, and that something must be left for future generations to conquer.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To Ezra Loomis Pound
Grand Hotel
Rome. January 4, 1941

Dear E.P.

Aren’t you wasting your time in looking for proofs? Proofs must rest either on tautology, because you have granted the conclusion in conceiving your premises, or on stupidity, because you are incapable of conceiving anything different from what happens to suggest itself. Mathematics and logic are tautological; any given essence has essential relations which are seen to be inevitable when once pointed out. Proofs there are therefore interesting because the deepen apprehension; but they prove nothing about matters of fact. I don’t know how you define “substance”: Spinoza could prove that there was only one substance because he conceived it as the essence and truth of all things lumped together. If there were two universes or two attributes the true universe and the total essence would evidently be the sum and system of those two universes and of those two attributes. But in calling this inevitable totality God or natura naturans, he identified it with a dynamic unit or source; something not subject to proof or argument of any kind, but imported into the system by religious tradition or vitalistic myth.

I can’t reply to your suggestions and diagrams because I don’t understand them.

Existence comes in pulses, in strokes. I see no reason for not stopping, or for stopping, anywhere in that flux. Existence has as many centres as it happens to have, as many moments, feelings, assumptions, questions—all in the air and with no power over one another. But if we have time and patience to study a natural world, posited as the source and common continuum in all this existence, we assume that it has dynamic unity: otherwise from one point in it we could never justly infer or posit any other point in it. This is my argument for materialism.

G S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.

To Charles Augustus Strong
New-York Hotel,
Nice, France. January 3, 1923

Dear Strong,

Good weather seems to be returning after the wintry storms of the last fortnight, and I have now entirely recovered from my cough. The attack was not in itself so bad—not involving so much actual catarrh—as on some previous occasions, but it seemed to shake me more and to be so fatiguing that I called the doctor . . . He said that I had a slight congestion of the lungs—légère pouscée pulmonaire—and that my heart was larger than it ought to be. For the latter he ordered some minute pills of a drug called “strophantus,” which is evidently the sort of “dope” which attracts the opium-eaters . . . Anyhow, I seem to have completely recovered: but it is a warning that I am not so sound as I had supposed, and that the machine may behave any day, if I am not careful, like Dr Holmes’s one horse shay.

As you may imagine, I haven’t been making progress with the book; but perhaps by virtue of the strophantus my fancy has been working magnificently and I was never more entertained than during this enforced leisure. The result is that—yielding to force majeure—I have written (in pencil) the four last chapters of the novel, solving the problem of the dénoument in a way which I think satisfactory, and incidentally creating two delightful children, a boy of four and a girl of ten. The novel is not complete yet, and many episodes might be worked up to fill the gaps: but the outline is there, and I think it may not prove a bad thing for the Realms to have that more interesting matter practically disposed of. I hope you are progressing favourably; when you come here in February you will find the place very bright and gay.

Yours ever G.S.

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.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 2, 1937

There is a German translation of my novel “aus dem Amerikanischen.” Also, a Swedish translation. I ask myself why. Don’t they all read “American”?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.