Category: LETTERS Page 17 of 274

To Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell
22 Beaumont Street Sunday
Oxford, England. Sunday [Autumn 1916?]

Dear Lady Ottoline,

If you have an instinctive antipathy to German philosophy, you ought to find my new book agreeable. However, I don’t expect you to read it all, and you must feel quite free to give it away or lend it to anyone who you think is ripe for sound doctrine, and not an incorrigible admirer of Lord Haldane.

I should have been to see you long ago if I hadn’t been far from well; in fact I am so seedy that at Mrs Morrell’s suggestion I am off tomorrow to Harrogate. If I return from there as light as a bird, I shall soon fly to Garsington.

I haven’t got so far as to read book about Dostoevsky, having scarcely read one of his own—only “Crime and Punishment”: but I liked the spirit of it, though the letter didn’t seem to me very beautiful.

Yours sincerely, G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harry Ransom Humanities research Center, University of Texas at Austin

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. October 21, 1917

A copy of Drake’s paper reached me yesterday morning. I presume you have received one two, otherwise I can send you this one. It is poor stuff, both in form and in substance, and if our book is to open with it, it will be stamped from the first page with indecision and mediocrity. He says nothing that you have not said infinitely better, and introduces the “ideas” of British psychology—a swarm of conscious will-o-the-wisps, of which it is impossible to say whether they are known by anything else, or know themselves, or know other things, or simply abolish all knowledge. He misunderstands what you mean by the psyche and a psychic state: but in this I don’t think you are wholly blameless, because you used to believe that psychic states were conscious (I suppose of their own “content”) and in keeping the name, which in modern psychology rather suggests the conscious as distinct from the substantial, you obscure the fact that the psyche is now, in your doctrine, an organic substance, and the psychic state not a datum, as Drake supposes. Doubtless you have already set them right on these points, but it must be annoying to see such inertia in minds that are well-disposed, and on some subjects so sensible. Drake on religion was capital and in psychology his spirit is still good, although his wit is dull. I am venting my irritation upon you, but to Drake himself I have written with all the courtesy and moderation that I could muster. As I hardly share your hopes of converting the whole sect, it really doesn’t matter to me what they say: but of course the worse it is the less inclined I should be to make concessions to their vocabulary; on the contrary, it would become more urgent to stand altogether on one’s own ground and let it be obvious that our association is merely circumstantial, as if we were contributing a the same review.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY

To Llewelyn Powys
Hotel Bristol
Rome. October 20, 1937

The senses are self-convinced, self-satisfied, but they are not controversial, they are not propagandist, they are not partisan. The moment we turn the magic of the moment into a maxim, we have clouded the sky. Aristippus is then on the way to become Epicurus, and Epicurus, though only opening a crack of the door towards asceticism, was on the way to become Buddha, or Burton. It seems to me that the mature materialist, whilst giving up all claims to direct the course of nature, may sympathize impartially with all her ingenious works, amongst which sacristies and their contents are not the least; theologies are as wonderful as spider’s webs, and there is no particular object in destroying them, except occasionally for domestic comfort. Fancy is in one sense prior to sensation, because the form of sensation is fanciful and original; and vice versa the most airy flights of fancy, and the greatest ambitious works of men’s hands, issue in pure sensations felt in their presence. It seems to me reasonable to take all these things with equal thanks, and with equal detachment.

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 Ellen Shaw Barlow
Hotel Bristol
Rome. October 19, 1935

I don’t know what I may have said that misrepresented my mother’s relations with the Sturgis family. I am sure she had a real “culte”  for them, especially for your mother and for “Uncle Russell” and “Uncle Robert”. Their characters, their persons, and their way of living were what she thought absolutely right and superior to anything to be found elsewhere. She especially despised, in comparison, Spanish ways and Spanish ideas. That is why I have never been able to make out why she ever married my father. But there were probably strands in her character and experience which I had no notion of, having known her only in her old age, when she was very silent and led a retired resigned and monotonous life. Family history, and even one’s own past, are hard to decipher unless you have documents to go by. It is like deciphering the Roman Forum. There are the stones, perfectly plain; but they belong to different strata and it is impossible to piece anything out of them that shall correspond to what existed at any one time. The reason you say my mother gave for Susie’s not staying in the Convent—that Susie liked meat and not vegetables—is most characteristic of my Mother. She believed in dialectical materialism before anyone had heard of Karl Marx. And if we take that saying symbolically, I think it was most true, because religion with Susie was a social passion, not a spiritual one, and in her enthusiasms there wasn’t very much peace. She was certainly not made to be a nun; but she was driven to make that experiment by dissatisfaction with her surroundings after the fun of first youth was gone.

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

To Bryn[jolf] J[akob] Hovde
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. October 18, 1949

Dear Dr. Hovde,

Your request for a contribution to the book of tributes to John Dewey reaches me too late. You evidently did not know that I have been living in Italy for many years. Moreover, in spite of repeated suggestions to the contrary, I have thought it better not to figure among the many admirers who have arranged this demonstration for Dewey’s ninetieth birthday. It is not the sort of thing to which I am naturally drawn, and there are particular reasons in this case why I should abstain from any expressions of regard and admiration that might seem perfunctory, or inadequate.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale