Author: David Spiech Page 95 of 283

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 20, 1931

During two sunny afternoons on the Pincio I have absorbed your counterblast to religion. As a popular tract it is capital, beating the eloquent parsons at their own game. But isn’t it a bit discouraging that the work of Voltaire, which he did so thoroughly, should need to be done all over again after two hundred years? Is reason in the same parlous position as faith that it has to be dinned into the ears of each generation, or it will die out?

From my own point of view, if you were here, I should have some observations to make upon your presuppositions. You seem to regard “Religion” as merely myth and magic, that is, bad science: and of course you have a clear case in proving that bad science is worse than good science.

But is religion merely bad—hasty, poetical, superstitious—science? I should say religions (because each religion seems rather irreligious to the others) often had at least two important ingredients besides magic and myth. They were the intellectual and ritual expression of a particular ethos, nationality, or civilization; and they were also forms of “spiritual life”. Now I like very much what you say about science, if it became a religion, losing all its scientific virtue. A philosophy more or less inspired by science, like Epicureanism or Stoicism, may be a religion, or a substitute for religion: it may sanction a particular morality, and it may be refined into a form of spiritual life—I mean, into a great life-long dialogue between God and the soul of man. But science, as you conceive science—á la Dewey—is only experiment and invention; it is not a philosophy: and if any speculative ideas more or less illegitimately associated with it were set up as eternal truths, science would cease to be science to become bigotry. One of the happy, if somewhat disconcerting, discoveries of our—or my—later years has been precisely this: that science is intellectually blind and dumb, and that you may be a leading scientific expert without knowing what you think on any important question. It seems to me, therefore, that you ought not to pit “religion” and “science” so squarely against each other, as if they were rivals in the same field. A scientific philosophy might be a rival, or an ally, of certain religions or religious philosophies; but what chiefly attaches mankind to its religions is precisely the need of completing their traditional ethos, and their spontaneous spiritual life, with an appropriate speculative doctrine: and science is dumb on that subject and, in its scientific domain, ought to be dumb. Perhaps this explains in part why, in spite of you and Voltaire, religions still exist in the world.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH

To Carl Sadakichi Hartmann
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 19, 1937

Dear Mr. Hartmann,

That the world should seem to run away from us is a familiar sensation. I had it all through my younger days; but I was lucky in being able to return the compliment, and run away from the world. Now I am being treated more sympathetically, when I don’t need it; and I am glad to send you a little help in your difficulties. I hope you will send me your book on Baker Eddy, if you get it published.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Rivera Library, University of California, Riverside

To Victor Francis Calverton
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123, Pall Mall, London. S.W.1.
Rome. November 18, 1934

It surprises me a little that you should seem so well pleased with my comments on your “Passing of the Gods”. I thought I had made some rather sharp criticisms of it, but let that be, since all seems to be well. I have now read your other book, which I really like better; but since you take criticism so kindly, I will try to be as disagreeable as possible, and only tell you what I don’t like about it. This is all the easier, because in the note on p. 36 you point out the contradiction between your Chauvinism-and-Anglophobia and your Cosmopolitan Communism. You say it is temporary, like the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, to be outgrown when there are no classes and no nations. Now I happen to be, by force of personal circumstances, much more a cosmopolite than you; and it seems to me that you don’t see this Colonial-Complex, as you call it, from a sufficient distance, or impartially. There are two distinct things: Anglomania, which a very few rich Americans share with a great many Europeans of various nations, and is expressed in foot-ball, afternoon-tea, boy-scouts, and masculine clothes for women. That is a fashion which you may laugh at, but which is harmless and reasonable, as fashions go. A second, entirely different thing is the heritage (not a “complex” but the smoothest possible habit of the soul) of the English language, literature, and home. This, as you show, was middle-class, but fed from above, in people who had known Latin and even French, and were cultivated people. Naturally, when they spoke or wrote, they did so in their own way, the English way. Far from showing any prejudice against the New world, they tried pathetically to glorify it; but every day their own talent grew thinner and ghostlier, and the subject-matter which American life offered them—when not treated (as it is now-a-days) satirically—was woefully poor and uninspiring. They were morally stifled and starved. In the 1890’s, or thereabouts, I knew half a dozen young Harvard poets, Moody being the most successful of them with the public: every one of them was simply killed, snuffed out, by the environment. They hadn’t enough stamina to stand up to their country and describe it, as a poet could. It was not that they imitated the English—they were ferocious Anglophobes—but that, being educated men, they couldn’t pitch their voices or find their inspiration in that strident society. I daresay now that incapacity is overcome. I have read Babbit, and mean to read something of Dos Passos. But even now, even in Emerson & Wm James, the chief interest is that they are Americans and might throw light on the American state of mind. All the world feels that America is a great phenomenon; they want to understand it. But, apart from that symptomatic or descriptive interest, nobody would read any American books. They are still poverty-stricken and bloodless; or if violent or morbid, like Moby Dick or Poe, it is rather in a psychopathic than in an artistic way that they are interesting. What you call the Colonial-complex, then, seems to me to have been simply universal intelligence, . . . natural sensibility, and good taste surviving in America: and it is a stronger gust of this same wind, which had rather died down in an intolerantly “petty Bourgeois” society, that now makes American writers freer. And they write, you yourself write, very much better English, than was written in the U.S. fifty years ago.

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

To Mercedes de la Escalera
[Rome.] [1942]

Many thanks for your having given me the message from George. When you write to him, tell him that I continue in good health, that I received (with seven months’ delay) the letter that came in care of the Spanish Embassy and that I am grateful for his efforts. I do not need money at present, and if I should need some, I believe that there would be means of getting it here as I have relations with some Italians who are familiar with my situation and who could supply me with the modest sums that I would need. In spite of everything I am contented, so much so that I believe that old age is the happiest part of my life.

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

To Charles Augustus Strong
Cambridge, Massachusetts. November 16, 1911

The Columbia people have formally invited me to become a professor there; I told them it was too late; that I was not quite divorced from Harvard, and that the divorce, such as it was, was not for the sake of a second marriage, great as the new lady’s charms might be, but for the sake of quiet and freedom. I am full of plans, like a young man. I feel as if I were going to begin a new career, that which I was really fitted for, and from which circumstances diverted me twenty five years ago. My sister Josephine and I have been looking over old papers; I have collected and reread all my father’s letters to my mother and to me. They have given me a new and vivid impression of our whole family history, and I seem to see the crises and turning points of my own life in a dramatic way which I was unconscious of before. ‘83, ‘88, and ‘93 were the years in which I took the path of least resistance when, with a little more courage on my part, or sympathy on the part of my family, I might have turned to less arid courses. However, I had a good time at Harvard from ‘89 to ‘93; and since then I have written a great many books, such as they are. What consoles me is that I still may have time and inspiration to write two or three more, more nearly such as they should be.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY