Category: LETTERS Page 14 of 274

To Nancy Saunders Toy
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 4, 1934

New Testament criticism will never become straightforward and clear until two things happen together which as yet occur only separately: that the spirit and presuppositions of the critic should be thoroughly secular and scientific, and that his object should be purely religion itself, i.e., the religious feeling, imagination, and tradition in the New Testament writers. We must substitute a scientific interest in religion for a religious interest in science; otherwise both religion and science will be muddled.

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

To Pierre de Chaignon la Rose
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 3, 1924

Dear la Rose,

Today at last, sitting enjoying the golden warmth and light of a glorious afternoon in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, I have succeeded in making a version of the lines of Catullus which you had copied. I have been carrying them in my pocket for some time and had some scraps of translation ringing in my head, but the thing had never taken shape until this moment. It is a very Italian piece, childish, full of repetitions and sobs; and I have tried to catch something of its passion, while letting other things go. My friend Strong brought me here a week ago in his motor, and on the way we stopped to lunch with the daughter of Bayard Cutting, who is settled in a farm near Monte Pulciano with her young and charming husband Marchese Antonio Origo. Strong has returned to Fiesole, and I am looking forward to six months of peaceful existence and work. Rome is a particularly pleasant place to me: I like the solidity of its stones, the nearness of the green country, the troupes of theological students of all nations, the soldiers and sailors and Facisti, and the combination of modern comfort with a suggestion of grandeur and a great deal of Bohemian freedom and simplicity. Vale.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York NY

To Victor Francis Calverton
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. November 2, 1936

Dear Mr. Calverton,

Your mysterious book is being laid aside until some future moment when I may be less occupied and preoccupied, but I have dipped into it, and in thanking you for sending it I can already say that it has started a train of thought in my mind which might lead to radical conclusions. Suppose that by hypnotism. we understand those biological tides which produce mass-conversions, religious epidemics, and climaxes or collapses in civilization, such as the intellectual barbarism. that made Germany uninhabitable for your friend in the book. There is a nation hypnotized for good or ill, at least temporarily: but who did the hypnotizing, and what determined the kind of hypnotic suggestion to be induced? Hardly Hitler; he is too slight a personage; hardly even Nietzsche or Treitschky or Houston Stewart Chamberlain. But suppose it was they, or one of them: who shall un-hypnotize the hypnotizer? Who shall hit upon the blessed prescription that might liberate, instead of constraining, the “man inside”? Does your book contain a fresh discovery of human nature, so that not only the machinery for imposing a regimen, but the character of the regimen to be imposed, could recommend itself to mankind in the long run? I happen to be reading Lao Tse at odd moments. I wonder if we have any better solution to propose than he proposed long ago.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

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