Category: LETTERS Page 1 of 274

Letters in Limbo ~ November 20, 1931

On November 20, 2024

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.

Letters in Limbo ~ November 19, 1911

By David Spiech

On November 19, 2024

In LETTERS

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Cambridge, Massachusetts. November 19, 1911

As to me, the present is a blank like the Hinterland of Tripoli, with sniping going on desultorily, always in the same places. But the past and the future are both full of features. California, on the whole, disappointed me. The country is fine, the climate perfect; but the people are all—except the Italian restaurant-keepers and the Chinese—from Newton Centre, Mass. It was no relief morally. My notion of the U.S. now I have traversed the whole, is that it is a smaller place than I thought. The potential features are all marked, as in a child’s face, and there are no ideal surprises in store for us, as far as this country is concerned. It will be, for five hundred years, much the same thing, more congested. As to the future, I sail on January 24th , and am making in the first place for Madrid. In the late Spring I shall return to Paris to stay with Strong, and catch whatever winds of doctrine or revolution may be blowing in that most ventilated of atmospheres. Beyond that nothing determinate except freedom, which for the moment is a very distinct thing in my eyes.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH.

Letters in Limbo ~ November 18, 1934

By David Spiech

On November 18, 2024

In LETTERS

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

Dear Mr. Calverton

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.

Letters in Limbo ~ [1895 or 1896]

By David Spiech

On November 17, 2024

In LETTERS

To Gertrude Stein
[Cambridge, Massachusetts?]. [1895 or 1896]

My dear Miss Stein

Friday evening is perfectly convenient, and you may expect me at 7:45 at Miss Yerxa’s. If you don’t think the subject too vast I should like to talk about “Faith and Criticism.”

Yours very truly G Santayana

Letters in Limbo ~ November 16, 1922

By David Spiech

On November 16, 2024

In LETTERS

To Mary Williams Winslow
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1.
Nice, France. November 16, 1922

I spent the summer very pleasantly in Paris, working on the above-mentioned volume. I wasn’t at Strong’s; because his daughter Margaret was about, and the apartment is too small for three, a maid, a dog, and ten thousand hat-boxes. I found a quiet cool hotel near the Palais Royal, and lived there in a top room like a true philosopher, dining every evening with the Strongs. They are my most constant link with human affairs. Strong himself, in spite of his lameness, has developed a new geniality (in every sense of this word) composes fables, reads the Latin classics, travels by motor, builds baroque staircases in his garden at Fiesole, and altogether plays the part of an opulent man of letters of the eighteenth century. It is a great satisfaction to me to see him so happy, in spite of his physical infirmity, and to find him blooming intellectually in his old age after having been all his life rather cramped in expression and rigidly professional in his interests. I think the Anglo-American colony in Florence has had a great effect on him, and thawed him thoroughly. Perhaps he has also caught from me the idea that a serious philosopher may be playful on occasion. He has just been to Rome in his motor with his architect, who is an invaluable friend and fac-totum, and I expect he will turn up here later in the winter. I have not wanted to go to Italy nor to Spain this year, because I want to finish the big book—and turn to the novel! When that comes on the tapis, if I am as well as I am now, I shall go the rounds again to Avila, Seville, Rome, Fiesole, Venice, etc, because those scenes will not distract me from the fun which I shall be having. Composing a system of philosophy is not such an easy matter, and when once the thread of interest and the momentum of the argument are lost it is sometimes weeks before the engine can be made to run again properly. Therefore I need absolute solitude, such as I have here—that is, solitude in casinos, cafés, restaurants, theatres, and rambles in the midst of swarms of idlers, villas, motors, and palm-trees. But to return to the Strongs: there is the question of Margaret. Everybody (including herself) wants her to get married, and she has plenty of suitors and of money; but somehow she doesn’t make up her mind. This prolonged coyness on her part has a curious effect on the lives of two elderly philosophers, her father and myself, because it keeps us both waiting with one foot in the air, until (she having established herself) we may know where to set it down. I for my part should like to settle down somewhere for the rest of my days; but I don’t like to go to England, for instance, and leave Strong altogether; and yet I can’t live with him while she is about, because then I feel I am staying in a rich man’s house, and not sharing rooms with a fellow-student—which is the sort of existence that Strong and I affect when we are alone

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