Category: LETTERS Page 156 of 274

To Logan Pearsall Smith
22 Beaumont Street
Oxford, England. March 9, 1919

My own unhappiness about the war disappeared on July 18, 1918, and indeed in a certain sense had disappeared earlier, because although I thought the Germans might win a nominal victory, the Russian revolution seemed to me to have sealed the fate of the German system and its essential ambitions

Existence is fundamentally in flux—that is a conviction and expectation to start with; and we are merely resuming the movement, perfectly sensible before the war, which is bringing about the dissolution of the age of luxury and respectability in which you and I were born. Let it dissolve! Of course much horror and injustice will be involved in the process—but much would have been involved also in maintaining the old order.

I am not afraid of the people. It is their leaders that are odious, but they will either succumb and be discredited, or they will become fashionable tyrants and patrons of the arts like all the bosses that have preceded them.

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

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. March 8. 1952

Yesterday your friend Loring brought me your letter and “Patterns of Progress” and found me at 11 a.m reading in Lorenzo de’ Medici some musical verses on the diabolical act of Prometheus in bringing fire down to earth with the dreadful consequences of war, trade, and the devouring of cooked carcasses. All fire wills to go heavenward, where according to Aristotle it belongs, and on earth, according to the love-sick Lorenzo, there should be only vegetables and nude Adams and Eves.

. . . . I am with you rather than with Lorenzo, not caring at all for love-making in Paradise, but thinking that knowledge both as a means and an end is the best of acquisitions.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Ezra Loomis Pound
Hotel Danieli
Venice, Italy. March 7, 1940

You and T. S. E. are reformers, full of prophetic zeal and faith in the Advent of the Lord; whereas I am cynically content to let people educate or neglect themselves as they may prefer.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT

To Josiah Royce
7 Stoughton
Cambridge, Massachusetts. March 6, 1892

Dear Prof. Royce,

I have been waiting to thank you for your book [The Spirit of Modern Philosophy: An Essay in the Form of Lectures (1892)], which I got long ago, until I had read enough in it to have some just sense of the value of the gift. I perceive now that it is much more than a mere record to your lectures, as we heard them; a thousand things that one overlooked or forgot in the hearing stand out in the printed page and stick in the memory. It is marvellous to me that you should have been able to write a book so full of enthusiasm and humanity in circumstances of such external pressure and distraction. I have read the appendices with special care, and feel much enlightened by them not only in regard to Hegel, but even in regard to Kant. Many things that are vaguely before one are not made really known until one comes upon the just and brief expression of them. It must be a great satisfaction to you to have brought into the world so attractive and inspiring a book, and I am grateful to you for having sent me a copy of it.

Always faithfully yours, G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Corliss Lamont
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 5, 1935

The subject of immortality has long ceased to be a living issue with me; and though I know that some people agonize about it, I am confirmed in my old impression that this is a verbal or mythical obsession of the human mind, rather than a literal belief. Everything, in myth and religion must be understood with a difference, in a Pickwickian sense, if we are to understand it truly, and not to import an unnatural fanaticism into the play of poetic fancy.

Orthodox heavens are peaceful: souls are not supposed to change and pass through new risks and adventures: they merely possess, as in Dante, the truth of their earthly careers and of their religious attainment. In other words, souls in heaven are mythical impersonations of the truth or totality of those persons’ earthly life.

This life, and anything truly living, is something dramatic, groping, planning, excited, and exciting. It is dangerous: and Nietsche needn’t have told us to live perilously: it would have been enough to tell us to live.

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