Category: LETTERS Page 11 of 274

To Charles Augustus Strong
[Before 1889?]. [Roxbury, Massachusetts?]
Thursday

I see Fuller now and then—unsatisfactory mind: always seems to be really thinking of something else, like a woman. Yesterday he had a young French professor in tow who said Einstein was an absolutist, and that his theory should have been called Théorie de l’Invariance!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript:Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Cavendish Hotel
81, Jermyn St.
St. Jame’s S. W.
London, England. February 12, 1912.

Dear Strong,

Your letters of Jan. 23 and Feb. 9 reach me today together. Thank you for both of them. I am glad to hear your book is actually done . . . and am looking forward with great interest to reading it. Indeed, I shall do so sympathetically, and what is more with a pre-disposition to change my mind on several points on which I used to hold out against you, as for instance that “appearances” do not “exist”. In my language the essence which appears does not exist; what exists is the intuition of it (a fact with different properties, but often homonymous with the essence it views). Even this intuition, however, does not exist as a substance; it is an expression of substance, a phenomenon; and though you may reject this way of putting the matter, I think you will have to say practically the same thing when you come to define the relation between mind-stuff and mind.

As to the room you intend for me at the Avenue de l’Observatoire, I am sure it will be more than sufficient. If my books don’t all hold in the placard, they needn’t be unpacked, or some of them might perhaps find a place in the dining room, or in some passage. There are many corners in most houses where a book-case can be slipped in without intercepting the rightful uses of the place. One of my friends has book-shelves over the door of his bath-room!

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.

To George Sturgis
Address: Rome.
C/o B. S. & Co.
London. February 11, 1928

Dear George,

I suppose they have telegraphed to you directly that your aunt Susie died yesterday morning, apparently after a short illness. I am leaving in two or three days for Paris and Avila: probably I shall have to stay for some time in Madrid. Your aunt’s age, and my own, softens this blow a good deal in my own feelings; and you who never saw her in her palmy days can hardly have an idea of the ascendency which she exercised over people, and particularly over me. Invalid as she was when you knew her, you must still have felt how much life there was in her spirit: I think she was confident of surviving her husband, and doing great things independently; but the flesh is treacherous, and things have turned out the other way.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To John Galen Howard
Effet de Mer,
Monaco, February 10, 1913.

Thank you so much for “Grasmere”, which is truly “a fructual stirp of that high dedicant,” W. W.1.The wetness (which you render so vividly) frightens me, however, who have fled to the Riviera from the fog and mire of Florence to try to out-stirp a catarrh. Without question, you have the afflatus and the courage of poetry: it is remarkable in these days. And I like your rhyme better than your blank verse!

G. Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

To Arthur Allen Cohen
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo 6,
Rome. February 9, 1948

Dear Mr. Cohen:

Your letter about Kierkegaard raised in my mind more questions than it answered. Does existentialism assume that we are all Christians? Is Angst about “Salvation” that of the Jews at the time of Christ or that of later Christians of avoiding hell fire after death? Is not such ANGST a disease, an emotion produced by Protestant theology after faith in that theology has disappeared? And what is this self that feels the Angst and leaps heroically, for salvation into the Unknown? If it were the transcendental Self, or Brahman, it could feel no anxiety because it can be only transcendental, on THIS side of the footlights; it may have interrupted experiences, but it cannot die in the sense of not being capable of having more; and more of them can hurt it if it is purely transcendental, like the comfortable rich man in the stalls watching a tragedy and then a comedy. If, on the contrary, this self is the concrete human psyche or person we know perfectly what its circumstances are and what it needs to be anxious about. There may be wise or foolish decisions made by it, but no leap into the unknown. The whole thing, from this point of view, seems confused and gratuitous.

. . . Could one say, in the spirit of Kierkegaard, that the total Object confronting a life or personal existence was Circumstances? And would God be a religious name for this? If so, I could see the inevitableness, for our animal psyche, to fear, love, and grope for God. And in so far as the Kingdom of Heaven (i.e. the Reign of God) is just this Object in the measure in which its operation affects us, I can see how the Existentialist revives the Christian problem of salvation. But why revive the problem without reviving the concrete beliefs that would explain and solve it?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.