Category: LETTERS Page 159 of 274

To William James
Berlin. February 21, 1887

I am very much obliged to you for your articles on Habit and on the Perception of Space. I have read them with great interest—all the more because they go over some of the points you brought out in Phil. 2 and 9. I remember how much the idea of the nervous system as a sort of recording angel struck me at that time. It touches one of my pet questions, the sanction of Ethics, the supposed disappearance of which alarms Mr. Lilly and his school. I can’t help feeling that if people were more inclined to look for the sanction of morals in the facts, they would stop worrying about the future of morality.

Strong and I intend to spend the coming vacation in England, where we find we can go very cheaply by way of Hamburg. My address will therefore be care of Brown, Shipley & Co, and anything sent to me for Strong will reach him. He is looking well and says he feels very much better. He has been working two hours a day over Lotze’s psychology and hearing lectures with me. He seems to be a little afraid of himself in view of the probability of his getting a chance to teach at Cornell next winter. I tell him he is well prepared enough and should thank his stars that he can begin to learn in a practical way by teaching. Still, considering what good friends we are, Strong tells me astonishingly little about himself, perhaps because he thinks I don’t understand how he feels about things, or perhaps because he is naturally reserved. But the fact is I have no idea what has been the matter with him this winter, except that evidently he has not been at ease. I myself have done very little tangible work, although I have been reading all sorts of things, especially Goethe. I don’t think my time has been wholly wasted, as I have gathered a good many impressions besides a working knowledge of German—enough, that is, to read and understand, but not enough to talk connectedly. I ought to have got along much better with the language, but I have really had very little occasion to speak it, and the pronunciation is so abominably hard that I hardly trust myself with more than a syllable at a time. I enjoy hearing it, however, especially in the hearty, honest native way. On the whole I am very glad I came to Germany, although the superiority of the place from the student’s point of view is not so great as I had imagined. In health too, I am feeling well, better a great deal than last year when, as you may remember, I was a little under the weather. In Spain, too, during the summer my stomach became refractory, but this cooler and moister climate made everything all right again. For a while I had some trouble with the complicated cooking here in vogue—but custom can make one swallow any dish, even if it contains thirty nine articles.

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
Hotel Marini
Rome. February 20, 1922

Dear Strong,

Thank you for your letter of the 11th with your article on Schiller-on-Strong on Strong-on-Schiller; also for the London Mercury. I am sorry you have had such a bad cold, and so prolonged: the weather here has continued very bad, and I wonder why I thought Rome a nice place for the winter; but it has proved a nice place in one important respect, as far as I am concerned, that I have managed to keep off the usual winter diseases, and have been well and able to work, although not with any energy. During the last fortnight I have been caught in a tangle, finding that what I thought fresh matter for a chapter or two was nothing but the same old subject, and yet not being clear that it had all been said before, nor able to introduce the new paragraphs in to the previous chapters. I am now copying it all off as it stands, and leaving it for a later revision to decide whether it is all a lot of redites or not.

Isn’t something of this sort the trouble in your article too? The effect on me, I might as well confess frankly, is discouraging. It seems like trying to draw on a piece of paper that is worn and dirty with much rubbing out of old lines; the hand is not free, the eye is misled; it is hopeless. Why not take a fresh sheet? Why discuss at all, and why with Schiller? As he shows in your paragraph (4) he is nothing but a squeaking automaton: he will always squeak the same thing, no matter how you tickle him. Let him
alone. And all this scholastic language does not serve the only purpose that might justify scholastic language: it does not define nor settle anything; it is all radically infected. For instance, I was seriously puzzled in paragraph (1) by the words “it [the datum] conveys the object only in the form of a ‘meaning’.” I thought for a while that you were calling the essence a “meaning”– as some of our American friends wanted to do: I suppose now that you were simply troubled for lack of proper words in which to express the fact that the datum is not the object. But then how can it “convey” the object? All this needs, I think, to be approached quite differently and to be stated in fresh language. Three or four lines above this passage, I can’t understand how the ego, in your system, is “all experience de-objectified.” That would seem to describe intuitions or mental discourse, the fact that various essences appear in varying combinations: but I understand that your ego is sub-intuitional: how then is it experience at all? I also fail to follow you about the non-existence of meaning psychologically. Is it all behaviour merely? Is there no given essence to mark that behaviour inwardly? Is there no premonition of the object, before the datum is used to describe it, so that we know where that object [across] lies, and that the datum is not all? Cf. the pillar-box.

Yours ever, G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY

To David Page
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. February 19, 1936

Dear Mr. Page,

I feel like a dethroned monarch, there are so many about nowadays. My own Sovereign, King Alfonso, is living here in Rome, like me: but we do not exchange sighs. In fact, I am not clear how, having a Sovereign of my own (although deposed) I could loyally have become a sovereign of another country, even if you had really proposed to raise me to that eminence. Let us be satisfied, from this valley of tribulation, to salute the undisturbed summits of the always possible and the truly best. But please don.t put me down as a member of any party. I renounce them all.

Yours sincerely, G Santayana

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 Charles P. Davis
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Hotel Bristol
Rome. February 18, 1936

Dear Davis,
Since you complain of my remissness, I will answer your letter, and thank you for the newspaper cuttings at once, but I warn you that I am no letter-writer. Keeping up correspondences is an anachronism, as Mr. Eden says war is: but we sometimes relapse into both, and rather like it. My novel is having a great success. I have already got $5,000 for it (half of what the Book-of-the-Month Club paid Scribner for their edition of 40,000 or 35,000 copies) and more is promissed both by the American and British publishers. Isn’t it an odd thing for an old professor to become a popular entertainer, when he has one foot in the grave, and twenty volumes of philosophy to his discredit? The reviews of The Last Puritan seem strangely timid. I haven’t seen many, because I don’t subscribe to the newspaper-cutting agencies; but both in England and in the United States, while nothing hostile has appeared, there seems to be some embarrassment, and all the tender [illegible ] spots in the book, moral, political, and religious, are avoided with extreme caution. Only the question whether this is really a novel, and whether the characters are “alive” or speak as real people speak, seems to agitate the reviewing mind. But supposing a book is not really a novel, ought it to be one? And if the characters speak as they don’t speak in real life, ought they to speak so in a book? A candid friend, looking at a modernist picture, observed to the artist: “Frankly, I never saw a woman that looked like that” To which the painter replied, “But my friend, this is not a woman. It is a painting.” The only review that I have seen that faces my book squarely is one by Desmond MacCarthy that appeared in the Sunday Times (of London); and even there, the excellent man got mixed up at the beginning with “essences” and wasted half of his space groping in utter darkness. Some letters I have received, especially from strangers, are also very good. You see, my friends and the professional critics begin with preconceptions about me and about novels: they read with a view to finding certain things, or drawing certain conclusions, to be proclaimed in their review: whereas a book like this, that isn’t a pot-boiler (though it is going to supply me for a while with spaghetti) or written to order, but has been growing up with me almost from childhood up, requires to be taken as a natural phenomenon, like the queer beasts at the Zoo, and not forced into accepted moulds. However, I can.t complain. People are most respectful and kind to my grey hairs; and besides I suspect that the book-trade makes it obligatory for critics to praise all books noticed at all. The old slashing invectives are an anachronism too, like war. Your old friend,
G.S.

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 Daniel MacGhie Cory
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 17, 1948

No wonder that Ryle riles you with his contemptuous repetitions of “pet dichotomy” “sham-question,” and “unsophisticated” “assumption”. Dons used to be old fogeys, but now at Magdalen they seem to be cultivating modernity. Father Benedict here keeps bringing me books by a certain lay theologian Lewis (a convert to Christianity, apparently) whom I should have never supposed Magdalen would tolerate. He has the same cheap way of summing things up in two words, and announcing that all else is effete. However, I find his Ryles handwriting quite legible “semantically,” each word is a hieroglyphic to be recognised as a whole, not an aggregate of letters. This is good psychology; but I don’t know what “semantic” is intended to mean now. Is it anything like “Self-transcendence?”

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