Author: David Spiech Page 9 of 283

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. February 2, 1934

It is a very good idea of yours to write occasionally to S. and to prove what is the fact that you are a devoted philosopher. And that leads me to explain, in a word or two, what I felt in your essay to be an inconsistency between the beginning and the end. You come to the conclusion that pictorial experience is pictorial, you will understand what I mean by that. But you propose a problem at first which does not arise, if that conclusion is true: namely, the problem of the comparative simplicity of experience in contrast with the physical structure either of nature at large or of the human body in particular. Why on earth should feeling or perception not be simple? Why should the toothache picture the tooth or the cavity in it, or the histology of the brain? It doesn’t, and it can’t: and the idea that we must somehow explain why it doesn’t is based on a gnostic illusion, to the effect that perception is not sensation in the organ of perception but miraculous divine intuition of things as they are in themselves. As you say, that is at best an ideal for the intellect: we should like to know things thoroughly, to imagine what they must be in themselves, as we like to enact dramatically what we suppose may be the feelings of other people. But when the object is not another human mind, that ideal is unattainable, and rather foolish: because the function of ordinary perception is not sympathetic but utilitarian. This is only a hint: the constitutional uselessness of the mental side of things is another point important in my view, but perhaps better left alone.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Charles William Eliot
75 Monmouth Street
Brookline, Massachusetts. February 1, 1898

Dear Mr Eliot,

Thank you very much for your letter informing me of my appointment as assistant professor. It is very gratifying to me that the University should have confidence enough in me to take this step, and I shall endeavour to do my best to justify its expectations.

Yours very truly,

G Santayana

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

To George Sturgis
Grand Hotel Rome
Rome. January 31, 1941

Dear George,

The Credito Italiano telephoned this morning to say the lire miste had arrived, and awaited my convenience. Unluckily I had a relapse, complicated by a colic (something antedeluvian in my history, but perhaps this is one form of a second childhood) and although better and quite comfortable I am still confined to my rooms. I get up and have my meals and receive my doctor in my salotto or sitting-room. For six nights I had a nurse who gave me my medicines and much conversation. She says there are too many children. Her two boys, being a widow, bring her no end of work in order to provide for their superior education. Evidently society is in a fluid state. I hope the end of this war will bring a new organization that may last, in fundamentals, for a thousand years. I mean in all countries.

I had never heard of lire miste, nor had my doctor (although he is a Jew, and a very nice person). From what the man at the Credito Italiano said this morning, I gather that a non-Italian bank is involved in the issue. In any case, the better exchange will partly take the place of the 20% that I got these last two times from the government.

Thank you for sending Pepe my Xmas present for the children. Pepe’s daughter Josefina and his son Eduardo have written. She has two babies and he is expecting one. That is all they write about. Too many children!

Yours affly G Santayana

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

To Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien
3 Prescott Hall Colonial Club
Cambridge, MA. [September 1908–January 1912]

Dear Mr. O’Brien:

We are besieged at this moment by soi-disant philosophers from all over the country, and I shall not be my own master until Saturday. If you could come to tea then or on Sunday, at about four o’clock, I should be delighted to see you. Perhaps you would explain to me then some of the things you refer to in your letter, which I don’t quite understand. The tempests of the Olympians to not reach my catacomb.

Yours very truly

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Alan Denson, Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

To Rosamond Thomas [Sturgis] Little
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. January 29, 1952

Your letter of Jan. 12th, and your box which arrived the day before, would have been acknowledged sooner if I hadn’t been depressed by the persistence of my “gastric catarrh” and subject to a diet of milk and mashed potatoes, with one raw egg at mid-day, which reduces me to dozing most of the time. I am afraid at my age this is an incurable trouble, though not immediately fatal; but it is not painful (except at moments, when a fit of cough comes) and allows me to read and to write letters when the weather clears. After a hot and dull summer, we are having a cold and dark winter, which have alike contributed to my complaint, and I think, now that winter is (here) on the wane, that I shall feel better in the Summer. Lucky that this trouble didn’t come a year sooner, or I should never have managed to get my last book together. It is being well received in Europe: there is to be a German translation and two in Spanish, one at Buenos Aires and one at Madrid.

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.