Author: David Spiech Page 99 of 283

To Henry Ward Abbot
Berlin. November 1, 1886

Dear Abbot.

I will not delay in answering your letter of Oct. 20th which I got yesterday and with which I am vastly delighted—delighted with everything except with the news about Stimson. That is distressing. I knew nothing about his being sick or overworked, and I still hope your fears about his not living long are exaggerated. It would be a pitiful thing that he should die so young. Take warning, you say very properly; but warning not to do what? Not to work? Surely not, but rather not to trust in anything good. I see, however, that you are not inclined to trust in anything good, at least as far as human sentiments are concerned; for you say, with really excessive cynicism, “He has your sympathies I am sure, for he thought you” etc, as if you thought a man incapable of caring for another who doesn’t happen to care for him. That is not true. We can see what is fine and beautiful in a man, and value it for itself. We can deplore the constant frustration of everything good in this world.

You challenge me to defend the various contradictions you discover in my letters, on pain of not believing me a sound adviser. I might refuse the challenge, since I am not bound to explain contradictions away, because I do not pretend to think only on one hypothesis. I might also refuse on the ground that I am not a dogmatic right-and-wrong fulminator, and therefore can hardly pretend to be an adviser at all. My advice is all given in the spirit of the common phrase: That’s what I would do if I were you. And I think it is hardly worth while to go back and explain what I mean by this and that in letters written hastily and impetuously. Nevertheless I can easily make my general position more clear by a parable. Suppose a mustard seed asked advice of an oak how it should grow, and that the oak (being a fanatic) said: Young seed, unless you grow up into an oak and bear acorns you will be a worthless and immoral plant. God’s rain will not fall on you and his lightning will strike you,— or if (by the mercy of a long-suffering God) you should prosper for a time, do not deceive yourself. You may rest assured that in the end the devil will fell you and make a fire of you that will never burn down. But, dearly belovèd seed, if you do what is right and grow up into a good oak tree, you will never be cut down, but you will remain fresh and green forever and ever. And suppose further the mustard seed asked advice also of an elm, which said: My little seed, consider yourself and study your own nature, till you discover what kind of a seed you are. Then look for the ground where your species grows best, and plant yourself there. In this way you will have the best chance of growing up into a good and beautiful tree. But if you plant yourself in ground unfit for you, you may never spring up, or if you do, you will live with pain and difficulty, and be a shrunken and feeble plant. Yet if you should make a mistake, do not be too much troubled; for in the end all trees alike must perish, and the time will soon come when neither green boughs nor dry branches will be remembered.

Now if our mustard seed came from Boston and had always heard people call what they do right and what they don’t do wrong, it might reason with itself thus: “The oak is a righteous tree and is giving me moral advice: for he knows what is right and, behold! he does it. But the elm is a hypocrite whose life contradicts his doctrine, for he is himself an elm and yet says it makes no difference what sort of a tree I become. How can he think it right to be anything else but an elm? Or if he thinks it right to be anything, why doesn’t he become anything, instead of being always just an elm.” Yet if our Boston mustard seed ever outgrows its native superstitions it will perceive that the oak was blind, and made a bigoted blunder, threatened imaginary evils and promised impossible goods. The elm on the other hand gave sound, disinterested counsel, founded on observation of the realities of life and sympathy for his fellow beings. What an absurdity to accuse the poor elm of contradiction because it said it was right to be anything, and at the same time dared to be something itself! What an injustice to accuse it of hypocrisy because, although confined by nature to one place and one form, it was willing to respect interests it could not share and admire beauties it could not possess!

To say that all standards of value are arbitrary is not to say that you have none—that you have given up the practice of estimating the relative worth of things. All you have done is to admit that this worth depends on a standard proper to you, and that the same things have a different value according to other standards. To perceive that your ideal is one of many which are actual, and of numberless ideals which are possible, is not equivalent to giving it up. The unemancipated are like the children who think the little angels talk English: but there is no contradiction in going on talking English when you discover that the little angels don’t. English doesn’t become less necessary when it becomes less heavenly. So I go on using my moral language—talking about good, bad, beautiful, ugly, right and wrong. I suppose you to understand my language: if you don’t, why, you are a foreigner, and I will respect you as such and wish I could understand you better. I take for granted that my good is your good: should your good happen to be my evil, why, I will say you worship the devil,—and admit your perfect right to do so, else I should be authorizing you to deny my right to worship God. You may say that what you worship is God also; and you will be right. For, to paraphrase Spinoza, we do not worship a being because he is God, but he is God because we worship him. So that if there is a power A in the world, which I worship, and an opposite power B, which you worship, so long as I live A will be God and B devil, and so long as you live A will be devil and B God. While we both live A and B will be each God and devil at once. One need not be a Manichaean to see that; it is enough to observe two Saints of hostile religions. For you mustn’t suppose I am inventing a merely possible example; didn’t the pagan gods actually figure as Christian devils? Devils and Gods aren’t persons so much as offices; and for the same potentate to be both at once, it is not necessary he should have a double nature; all that is needed is an old woman to pray to him and a young woman to pray to get rid of him.

But you didn’t quite understand what I meant by saying it would be better for you to go into business to please your family than to go in to please yourself. I had a malicious notion that in that case you would be less apt to stick to it. We will let that go, however, and suppose I was singing the praises of dutifulness and unselfishness. Why on earth shouldn’t I? Do you suppose I have made up my mind not to praise anything? Far from it. I prefer my family to other people’s, because it is mine, and my verses to other people’s, because they are mine, and for the same reason I would prefer my country, if I had one, to other people’s. I by no means propose to become Brahma so soon: I like my humanity better. If it is contradictory and hypocritical to have tastes and prejudices, I must give up logic and sincerity. But it seems to me that when one sees the arbitrariness of all ideals, the à priori equality of all aims, one can stick to one’s own with all the better conscience. That is what I had in mind when I said that to do right is to know what you want: if you try to discover your own needs and aspirations, i.e. to specify the objects that can satisfy them, you will do better than if you start out on the Quixotic and hopeless search of the needs and aspirations you ought to have. In the case of needs, the absurdity of asking what they ought to be is glaring enough: it is no less real in the case of aspirations. The only obligation possible appears when your needs and aspirations are given and you ask what you ought to do to satisfy them. Then it ceases to be nonsense to talk of mistakes, successes, right and wrong conduct, wisdom, and folly. Only one thing has to be guarded against: the psychological error of supposing that a man’s needs and aspirations cannot have an object beyond his own body and soul. Nature can put needs and aspirations in us which tend to our own destruction. E.g. the sexual instinct, the ascetic aspirations, and such instincts as the insects and birds have, to make life possible for their offspring. All such instincts are in a real sense unselfish. But whether the selfish man is better than the unselfish man or worse, depends on whether you, who make the judgment, have the need and aspiration of finding unselfish men in the world. From all this you can easily see that in my opinion suicide may easily be justified: for instance if you take the absence of pain as your ideal you make it the duty of every man woman and child to commit suicide without delay—and murder, also, for the matter of that, in case of anyones taking too much time about it. For evidently, absence of pain can be secured only in the grave. But of course your thinking it right and proper has nothing to do with your ability to kill yourself. You may know that you will probably do no good in the world and that the stomach ache and the heart-ache are your most faithful friends, but it’s no use. There is the instinct of self preservation in the way and also one’s interest in life. One would rather have a bad time than not see the show, just as a lover will go to see the woman, even if the sight of her makes him suffer. The power of instinct and impulse is far greater than that of self interest.

Your sincere friend,

George Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Robert Seymour Bridges
Dover, England. October. 31, 1923

My glimpse of England after four years has left me with mixed feelings. I fear my English days are over. Nothing I could now see or feel would be likely to equal the memories I have of other days, which, if not the beaux jours of England, were at least my beaux jours, and which it is almost a pity to overlay with sadder impressions. Oxford is very much itself in spite of obvious crowding, and the flocks of women on bicycles which come round the corners of New College Lane Sunt lacrymae rerum but so mixed with pleasure that all regrets become impertinent.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England.

To Roy Wood Sellars
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. October 30, 1917

Dear Mr. Sellars,
It was a great pleasure to receive your essay, which I have just finished reading. After your book on “Critical Realism” I was prepared for a general agreement as to your results, in the wide sense in which they are naturalistic and admit a subjective sphere as well as a physical one. In analysis and in language, however, I find now that we differ more than I had believed. Indeed, I am afraid I have no right to figure as the critical realist for whom you speak: and perhaps, if my paper (and Strong’s) are included in the book at all they ought to be relegated to an appendix, with a note (which Strong might compose) explaining that our point of view differs in some important respects from that of the other contributors. In fact, it differs so much, and so pervasively, that it would be useless for me to send any specific comments on particular passages. You know what these differences are as well as I do. If I may make one suggestion, however, which does not concern my own views directly, it is that you should revise somewhat, or omit, your comments on Plato and Aristotle, and soften the tone of those you make on Kant. As they stand I am afraid they will arouse hostility and controversy, rather than help to clarify or to recommend the views you are advocating. Personally, I also feel some doubts about the advisability of making so much of abstracted philosophical disciplines—psychology, epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, etc. What a man thinks he thinks, and if it is true of its object, I can’t believe it makes much difference which ‘ology we put it under. I am also—but this I know is wicked of me—sceptical about the “increased prestige of science” or the advance of everything in recent times. There are changes which doubtless involve improvements in some respects—even the war does that—but that the balance of recent change is for the good in philosophy does not seem to me plausible. For one thing there are no great men: and I wonder if a philosophy is substantially improved when its personal accent and symbolism are flattened out into scholastic technique. Strong (who I suppose has a separate copy of your essay: else I can send him mine) will doubtless send you detailed observations, to which you may regard me as subscribing beforehand.
Yours sincerely
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Bentley Historical Library, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

To Susan and Josephine Sturgis
Ávila, Spain. [1868]

Dear Susan I have received your letter written in London. What your aunt and uncle said, that I am good-looking, that isn’t true. Papa says that I should write to you that you are good- looking and Josephine too; but I say that that’s teasing, but what is true is that your brother and godson loves you very much

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Sra. Rafael (Adelaida Hernandez) Sastre, Ávila, Spain.

To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. October 28, 1935

I note your change of address. A copy of the English edition of The Last Puritan (addressed, of course, to 1 Federal Street) will have reached you by this time. If you read it (skipping without any qualms when the soliloquies bore you) you will see that it doesn’t lend itself to the cinema. Nevertheless the matter has already been broached, and Scribner has the cinema rights in hand, as my agent. I believe he said I should get 85% of the profits, if any, and he 15%. But there is no chance, I think, in that quarter, unless someone should rewrite all the last part and make it dramatic. There are several occasions where I have deliberately avoided obvious complications in the action. Tom Piper might actually have prevented Oliver’s marriage to Edith; the dropped letter business would then have more point: and later Mario might really run away with Rose, and leave Oliver doubly insulted and forlorn. But I haven’t enough familiarity with melodrama to work such plots out properly, and besides, I wished to keep the tragedy muffled and going on only in the realm of possibilities and frustrations behind the scenes. The lost letter business doesn’t make any difference: that is the point I wish the reflective reader to see: and Mario wouldn’t have snatched Rose away from Oliver for worlds, caring much more for him than for her. So that her caprices in the matter are wasted also. That is a more cynical and pessimistic effect; also a nobler one, if you catch it at all. And I am much encouraged about “putting over” my intentions. People don’t miss them. This morning, together with your letter, I receive one from Lady Russell (Elizabeth of the German Garden) who has recognized her late husband in my Lord Jim! Nobody else will, I hope and expect: and the likeness is not intentional or external; but it is the same man really, and it is a triumph that his wife should see it at once. But these psychological mysteries won’t go on the screen.

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