Category: LETTERS Page 153 of 274

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. March 25, 1934

Why don’t I feel like going to England again? Partly because I am too old and fat—not at all presentable to English eyes; and partly because my pedestrian and country-inn days are over, and I should be bored and really not as comfortable as at a continental hotel.

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

To Mrs. William Warren
6 Park Street
Torquay, England. March 24, 1917

I am myself a sceptic, and if one’s object were to discover and embrace the truth, no religion seems to me much to the purpose, all of them being products of the human imagination.

In a moral and allegorical sense, one religion may still be said to be “truer” than another, if it brings us into greater harmony with the conditions of our life, and developes better our spiritual capacities.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Unknown

To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 23, 1927

Normal religious experience is the assurance that one is living in a world the economy of which is authoritatively known, so that conduct, sentiment, and expectation have a settled basis. If we distinguish . . . between the true and the illusory parts of such a religion, the illusory part, when it is worth considering at all, seems to me to be poetry: that is, it is an imaginative fiction, rich in emotions, which serves nevertheless to adjust mankind to its fate, and to lend form to it’s relations to things, such as worldly life and eternal truth, which are not easily expressed in commonsense language.

There is a great obscurity, to my sense, in your philosophical first principles. Are you a mere humanist, without any physics? Why then don’t you consider the Catholic church, for instance, as just as respectable and acceptable a view of the world and as good a method of human life, as that of the contemporary Intelligentsia? Certainly the church has the advantage humanly: it is richer in fruits of every description, much riper and of sweeter flavour.

I can’t help feeling that your tartly external and perpetually insulting attitude to this church is founded on your love of truth: you hate her for her very excellences, because you are convinced that they are deceptive. I agree with you there; but then the very naturalism on which that agreement is based, if you steadily accepted it (as Spinoza did, for instance) might lead you to regard those deceptive charms historically with more sympathy and understanding: because the natural predicaments of man and his history made them inevitable and dramatically right.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York NY

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. March 22, 1946

I don’t think these plays [The Marriage of Venus and Philosophers at Court] ought to appear soon after The Idea of Christ. They are ultra-pagan and somewhat licentious, not in language, but in temper and doctrine; they perhaps reflect my prevailing sentiments more than does The Idea of Christ, but they belong before not after the latter: in my youth and in what I deliberate think is the natural common inevitable texture of life: the spiritual reconsideration of existence being something optional and rare, though more satisfying in the end. This order of things can be easily established and cleared up after one is dead: but it would be misleading to the public, and unbecoming in extreme old age, to bring out the epicurean side after the ascetic.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. March 21, 1929

I have been reading—mostly in bed, in the depths of night—“Elizabeth’s latest book, called “Expiation”, which is not very amusing (for her) but rather dramatic. It might make a good play.

Cory has developed a great admiration for Proust, whom he reads in the English translation: simply carried off his feet by the description of an asparagus. The moral turpitudes described leave him indifferent—vieux jeu! I suppose this is the attitude (in both respects) of the young men of the hour.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY