Author: David Spiech Page 89 of 283

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 18, 1936

Thank you and your committee for your congratulations for still being in this world. It is a dubious privilege in itself, especially at the age of 73, but I am in good health and spirits, and willing to exist a little longer, Deo volente.

As to my medal, and the inscription you propose, I suppose, being from the Mark Twain Society, it is meant to humorous. But most people would laugh at us, not with us; and please choose something else, or (better) nothing at all. I have an imitation-gold medal from the Royal Society of Literature which says simply Honoris Causa and leaves the rest to the imagination. That at least is safe.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC.

To Bertrand Arthur William Russell
Oxford, England. December 17, 1917

As for deaths and loss of capital, I don’t much care. The young men killed would grow older if they lived, and then they would be good for nothing; and after being good for nothing for a number of years they would die of catarrh or a bad kidney or the halter or old age—and would that be less horrible? I am willing, almost glad, that the world should be poorer: I only wish the population too could become more sparse; and I am perfectly willing to live on a bread-ticket and a lodging-ticket and be known only by a number instead of a baptismal name, provided all this made an end of living on lies, and really cleared the political air. But I am afraid the catastrophe won’t be great enough for that, and that some false arrangement will be patched up—in spite of Lenin—so that we shall be very much as we were before. People are not intelligent. It is very unreasonable to expect them to be so, and that is a fate my philosophy reconciled me to long ago. How else could I have lived for forty years in America?

All this won’t interest you, but since it is written I will let it go.

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

To Mary Potter Bush
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 16, 1932

Thank you very much for your good Christmas wishes, which I reciprocate, and also for your address, which has enabled me to send off this morning three books of yours which I ought to have returned long ago. The Couchoud has made a great impression on me, and I have sent for others of the same series, to see what backing his views may really seem to have. I believe he is right in his religious psychology, that Christianity is an eschatological prophecy, not a personal morality corrupted into a theological system; but I am doubtful about the historical mixture of tradition, legend, & myth. Were it not that today being my 69th. birthday, I have made a good resolution to write no more articles and give no more lectures, at least until all my projected work is done, I might be tempted to write something on Couchoud & Co.: but I must abstain.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, Cambridge MA.

To Sidney Hook
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. December 15, 1935

I write to thank you and Kallen for your book on “American Philosophy” and I address you rather than him, although he is an older friend, because there is something in your paper which interests me very much, namely, your account of your juvenile flirtation with Platonic Realism, and your pragmatic disillusion afterwards. Russell and Moore’s early interest in essences had a great influence on me also; but just as in Plato the Ideas have a theological and zoological dignity which my essences wholly lack, so in Russell and Moore’s “concepts”, there was a strain—strain in both meanings of the word—which is absent from my “baubles”, and from my affection for them. And your very living account of your enlightenment on this subject shows me, as I feel, where the trouble lies. It peeps out in the term “subsistence” (which I never use, except possibly by inadvertence, about the realm of essence); and it becomes obvious when you speak of validity and truth, as claimed by Platonic logic for its structures. Didn’t it become a commonplace some time ago that mathematics, in its own sphere, was not true, but only correct, congruous with itself, and consistent? And wouldn’t the same thing hold of all the internal relations of one essence with another? When you speak of meaning, however, I am a little puzzled, unless you mean applicability and practical importance. A definition seems to me to have meaning, in that it specifies some essence, and distinguishes it from all others; and on those specified characteristics logical relations are demonstrably dependent. But these “meanings” are confined to the realm of essence; and I should entirely agree with you that both Platonic Ideas and mathematical equations have to be exemplified in the world, or at least in human discourse, which is a part of the world, before they can have any validity or truth. The first chapter of my “Realm of Truth”, on which I am lazily at work now, is to be entitled: There are no necessary truths. All truths, in my use of terms, are eternal, but none are necessary; because truth is a synthetic view or description of existence, and all existence being contingent, all truth is so too. But it is eternally true that each accident that occurs occurs when and where it does.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

To Frederick Champion Ward
Rome. December 14, 1934

Dear Mr. Ward
Your eulogy of me reads like an old-fashioned epitaph: strictly true to the facts but with no pretense to impartiality. It is very well expressed; and I am sending it to another friend who at this moment is writing an article about me, in case he should like to steal some of your thunder for his peroration. Would you mind?

As to the “subsistence” of essence, have I ever said that it subsists? If so, it was inadvertently. That is rather the neo-realists’ word. In my vocabulary, if anything could be said to “subsist,” or be an essence with a lien on existence and a certain obduracy against contradiction, it would be TRUTH. The compulsion that the triangle exercises on us in forcing us to admit that it has three angles, equal in all to two right angles, etc, is due to the definition and to the essence of Euclidean space, in which that triangle is inscribed. But this whole geometry would be an UNEXEMPLIFIED essence, and would not “subsist,” if nature and experience had not led us to perceive and to study objects in which that essence is found, so that it is a part of the TRUTH about them.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

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