Category: LETTERS Page 157 of 274

To William James
Hôtel Minerva
Athens, Greece. March 4, 1905

Dear Mr James,
Thank you very much for your amusing letter.1 Why didn’t the Messiah come this year and leave me the more congenial task of being a Paul to him and reducing his doctrine to dead dogmas and metaphysical Hellenisms?

1. James had written to Santayana on 8 Feb 1905, urging him to accept the Hyde lectureship in France for the following autumn and winter: “I cannot believe, considering where you already are, and that your book [Reason] is ripe for being made into lectures, that you will refuse such an opportunity. I can’t conceive a better man for our university to put forward among the first. The plan between Eliot and Hyde is to make me the lecturer the next year, 1906–7, and I am feeling so hearty again that I don’t say nay. You the Baptist! I the Messiah! (That’s the way it looks to my wife!) Pray write to me again and tell me how the whole thing is looking at your end.”

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 Wallace de Groot Cecil Rice
Hôtel Minerva
Athens. March 3, 1905

Dear Sir,

No letters have reached me for three weeks while I was making a tour in Syria, and that is the reason I have not answered you before. Of course it will be only an honour and a pleasure to me that you should use my “Ode” for your athletic symposium. Thank you, too, for the “Flying Sands” which don’t take long enough in running—if I may mix sand-metaphors like the blameless Longfellow. You seem to me to combine a great many things which go to make a poet’s soul—affectionate familiarity with nature, sincere reflection, and metrical sense. Perhaps, however, the age we live in is too cold a winter for even the best of us to do more than chirp a little, lest the tradition should be altogether lost, until the Spring sets somebody really singing.

My publishers have the copyright, as you doubtless know, and are reported to be somewhat chary of permissions to reprint; in this case, however, they can have—generous souls!—no pecuniary interest in the matter; and you may appeal to my wish, if need be.

Yours very truly,
G Santayana

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

To William Roscoe Thayer
52 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts. March 2, 1898

Dear Mr Thayer,
Would my review of Berenson be signed? If so, I am a little afraid of undertaking it, as he is an old friend of mine and not very tolerant of any diversity of opinion, however qualified with appreciation of what is brilliant and useful in his way of putting things. But if the contribution can be anonymous and I may have the Summer to write it in, I should be glad to have it entrusted to me, as I have the greatest interest in Berenson’s books, and read them with considerable pleasure.

Yours very truly,
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 Charles Augustus Strong
Rome. March 1, 1932

I return your latest manifesto with a few notes on the parts put into my unworthy mouth. Though I should have used different word’s . . . I might perhaps not have said anything more valuable. I am vaguely conscious that in our verbal discussions, of late years, I have been a good deal of a dummy. As for your elucidations, I find the word luminosity in them, but not the thing, and I had better abstain from commentaries which would surely seem to you only blind and irritating.

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

To Ervin Paul Hexner
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 28, 1949

Dear Mr. Hexner,

The pieces that have been appearing in The Atlantic are not “essays” but fragments of books, the one you refer to being the Epilogue to my autobiography. Others have come from Dialogues in Limbo, and some may follow from Dominations & Powers. They have appeared because my publishers think it advisable to keep my name before the public, and my books are long-winded and I am now slower than ever in finishing them.

If you have dipped at all into my philosophy, you know that I am not a dogmatist in morals. It is for each man’s nature—not for his consciousness or opinion—to determine what his “true” interests are. It is what I call his “primal Will”, which is unconscious, that decides the matter, and then the possibility of realizing this Will is determined by circumstances. This unconscious nature or Will may well be unselfish or social or, as the Indians maintain, mystically negative, so that every mans “true” interest is to become Brahman, or the Absolute. I think this is the “true” interest only of a very special Will, which if dominant would destroy all Will or life, and so would not justify itself to itself. There are forms of natural happines that do so.

I meant to answer your letter in a few words, but the subject has made me run on automatically.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries, University Park PA