Category: LETTERS Page 162 of 274

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Cambridge, Massachusetts. February 5, 1908

I don’t know what the general effect of Moore’s system is: how does he attach existence to Being? But I like the clearness with which he holds to the intent of thought and avoids those psychological sophisms to which we all, brought up under the blight of idealism, remain so prone. For that lesson I am willing to forgive him all his narrowness and general incapacity. I have no doubt he is a most disagreeable and unfair person. But he is one from whom we can learn something, which is more than can be said of most contemporary writers. Russell is far better known to me, both personally and as a writer, and I feel as if I agreed with him pretty thoroughly, inspite of all differences in temperament and in knowledge. At least, disagreements with Russell don’t trouble me, because I feel them to be due to additional insights, now on his part now on mine: while disagreements with a haphazard person like James are more annoying, because they come from focussing things differently, from being schief. You may be quite right in thinking that I agree almost entirely with what James means: but I often hate what he says. If he gave up subjectivism, indeterminism, and ghosts there would be little in “pragmatism”, as it would then stand, that I could object to. Of course, pragmatism in a wider sense involves an ethical system, because we can’t determine what is useful or satisfactory without, to some extent, articulating our ideals. That is something which James doesn’t include in philosophy. Dewey is far better in that respect, and I notice he even begins to talk about the ideal object and the intent of ideas! What a change from those “Logical Studies” in which there is nothing but social physiology!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH

To Martin Birnbaum
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 4, 1946

Dear Mr. Birnbaum,

I write to thank you very much for your reminiscences of Sargent,1 including those of Henry James and the plates of some of Sargent’s paintings and drawings. I wish that you had gone more systematically into the problem of naturalistic versus eccentric or symbolic painting. It is a subject about which my own mind is undecided. My sympathies are initially with classic tradition, and in that sense with Sargent’s school; yet for that very reason I fear to be unjust to the eccentric and abstract inspiration of persons perhaps better inspired. Two things you say surprise me a little: one that Sargent was enormous physically. I remember him as a little stout, but not tall: and I once made a voyage by chance in his company, and thereafter a trip to Tangier; so that I had for a fortnight at least constant occasions to go about with him; and being myself of very moderate stature I never felt that he was big. The other point is that he saw and painted “objectively”, realistically, and not psychologically. Now, certainly he renders his model faithfully; but in the process, which must be selective and proper to the artist, I had always thought that, perhaps unawares he betrayed analytical and satirical powers of a high order, so that his portraits were strongly comic, not to say moral caricatures. But in thinking of what you say, and quote from him, on this subject, I begin to believe that I was wrong, that he may have been universally sympathetic and cordial, in the characteristically American manner, and that the satire that there might seem to be in his work was that of literal truth only: because we are all, au fond, caricatures of ourselves, and a good eye will see through our conventional disguises and labels. And this would explain what to some persons seems the “materialism” of Sargent’s renderings; his interest in objets d’art for instance, rather than in the vegetable kingdom or in the life of non-sensuous reality at large. Crowding his house with pictures, and his memory with innumerable friends and innumerable anecdotes about them, shows a respect for the commonplace, a love of the world, that prevents the imagination from taking high flights or reflecting ultimate emotions.
Is there, I wonder, any truth in such a suspicion?

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

To William Cameron Forbes
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts. [1902 – June 1904]

Dear Cam, Will you dine with me on Wednesday Feb. 12th at seven o’clock at the Harvard Union, where I am trying to get together a few of the old crowd? I hope very much you will not fail us.
Yours ever, G Santayana
I need not warn you not to dress.

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 Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. February 2, 1934

It is a very good idea of yours to write occasionally to S. and to prove–what is the fact–that you are a devoted philosopher. And that leads me to explain, in a word or two, what I felt in your essay to be an inconsistency between the beginning and the end. You come to the conclusion that pictorial experience is pictorial–you will understand what I mean by that. But you propose a problem at first which does not arise, if that conclusion is true: namely, the problem of the comparative simplicity of experience in contrast with the physical structure either of nature at large or of the human body in particular. Why on earth should feeling or perception not be simple? Why should the toothache picture the tooth or the cavity in it, or the histology of the brain? It doesn’t, and it can’t: and the idea that we must somehow explain why it doesn.t is based on a gnostic illusion, to the effect that perception is not sensation in the organ of perception but miraculous divine intuition of things as they are in themselves. As you say, that is at best an ideal for the intellect: we should like to know things thoroughly, to imagine what they must be in themselves, as we like to enact dramatically what we suppose may be the feelings of other people. But when the object is not another human mind, that ideal is unattainable, and rather foolish: because the function of ordinary perception is not sympathetic but utilitarian. This is only a hint: the constitutional uselessness of the mental side of things is another point important in my view, but perhaps better left alone.

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 Mary Williams Winslow
1 February 1922 . Rome, Italy
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123 Pall Mall, London. S.W.1.
Rome, February 1, 1922

In a previous letter you asked me what news of Boston or Harvard it would interest me to hear, and in my walks I have sometimes asked myself the question again, and haven’t found it easy to answer. It is not that my interest has waned—on the contrary, I feel I should like so much to see (through a peep-hole) all that may be going on and to understand it. But what is going on? My ideas are too vague for the inquiry to start at all. Of course, I can see the electric cars going over the Harvard Bridge and I can imagine others, much longer and swifter, going through the subway; and I can imagine you and Fred and (by a stretch) the  children as they must look in your library in Clarendon street; but what is going on under all those appearances? They tell me everything is quite different morally: Boylston Beal, the Potters, your dear friend Apthorp Fuller (who is here with his mother) inform me that when at home they feel like fish out of water, and that America is fast going to the dogs—or, more accurately, that it is sinking into a bog of commonplaceness and youthful folly which makes them feel like frustrate ghosts.1 Now, I don’t believe a word of it; and if you will sometimes give me a hint of what has changed, and in what direction, I think I could supply the rest out of my old knowledge. …. You, who know my friends (as Mrs  Toy doesn’t), could show me how the wind blows in this social quarter—more interesting romantically than the political world, and even more important, because at bottom it controls the turn of public affairs—I mean, that moral changes in society, if they don’t determine political events, certainly colour the result and give it all its importance. . . . Are the poorer classes in America still hopeful and loyal to the established order, or are there any signs of revolution? I ask all these semi-political questions because I have a feeling that we are approaching a great revolution and impoverishment of the world, such as has actually occurred in Russia, and I look for signs, not so much of its coming soon, but of the angle at which it will attack our old society, and the elements of it that may survive. Of course, I think the revolutionists, if they succeed, will suffer a horrid disappointment, because most of them will have to die off: the two great conditions for improving the lot of mankind are a much smaller population and a much larger proportion of people devoted to agriculture.