Category: LETTERS Page 171 of 274

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Christmas Eve, 1938

My dear Clemens,

All you do and say seems to illustrate a theory which, in my intention, applies only to the last and highest reaches of the Spiritual life, and which I myself am incapable of practising. The truth no longer interests you unless you can turn it into a pleasing fiction. This interview with me I suppose is the same of which, years ago, you sent me a rough draft, where I suggested some corrections in view of that lower and servile criterion, truth. But probably in the interval the force of inspiration has been again at work, and you have produced a sheer poem.
. . . .
I return your Foreword, as I keep no files, the extreme modesty of my apartment (it’s not very cheap) precludes anything but a waste-paper basket.

I am at work on my last volume of formal philosophy, The Realm of Spirit; but if life lasts even longer, I daresay I shall find it impossible not to keep on writing something or other.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC

To Robert Seymour Bridges
22 Beaumont Street
Oxford, England. December 23, 1916

Your address is full of wisdom and I have read it with great pleasure keeping in mind what you said about not agreeing with me about reason. I see that you use it here as a synonym of intelligence: perhaps I tend to think of something else, when I use the word; but I don’t discover any material divergence between us as to the good, which is the root of all important differences between people. As to the machinery of reasoning instinct, etc. we are all in the dark, and our philosophies move in the region of rhetorical symbols. When we speak of reason governing an animal or governing the world, do we mean simply that the good is being realized somehow, or that abstract terms and discourse are running meantime through somebody’s head, or do we mean something further? It seems to me all a chaos of conventional phrases and verbal psychology, by which we describe variously the same undisputed facts.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England

To [Sara or Grace] Norton
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 22, 1899

Dear Miss Norton,
I am very sorry that I have another engagement for Sunday evening. It would have been a privilege—I don’t say to help you entertain your strangers—but to be entertained so Christianly in their company.
Yours sincerely,
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 Lawrence Smith Butler
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 21, 1901

It was only last night that I heard you had lost your father, else I should have written before, because you know that my thoughts would turn to you at such a moment. I hope to see you soon—I go to New York on Xmas day and will look you up at once—but as one is not always inclined or able to say at odd times what is most in one’s heart, I will write you a word now. This is an irreparable loss for you but not a bitter one, because it is in the order of nature that we should survive our parents and your father has lived to see you all grown up and to leave his memory and influence always with you. That ought to be a consolation for you. This world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes upon the whole. It is hard for the natural man to bear this thought, but experience forces it upon him if he has the capacity of really learning anything. We should not set our hearts, then, on a material possession of anything, but our happiness should be made to lie in this, that whatever we possess for a time should reveal the ideal good to us and make us better in ourselves. Your family life has been so ideally happy and united (at least so it impresses your friends) that it must be doubly sad to suffer this cruel change; but you cannot lose that past happiness altogether, because it was of the sort that brings happiness in memory and prepares one for meeting all the other events of life, sad and gay, in a right spirit, with a sense of what is truly good. The truly unfortunate are those persons—and how many of our friends are in this case!—who have never known anything worth living for, any noble and natural characters, any true happiness, or any beautiful thoughts and things. But those who have known such things and grown like them can never be truly unhappy because they carry the sweetness and truth within themselves which alone make a happiness that is worth having. Your nature and surroundings have opened this spiritual world to you more than to most people—that is why I have always cared for you so much—and that is a gift all the more to be grateful for in that it cannot be taken away.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The University Club, New York NY

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. December. 20, 1918

What a year this has been for wonderful events! I have often wished we might have been able to talk them over as they occurred, although for my own part I am hardly able to take them in, and all my attention seems to be absorbed by the passing moment, or the immediate future. The past will loom up, I suppose, when it begins to recede into the distance. Just now I am wondering what Mr. Wilson is up to: I rather think he is more to be trusted than the tendency of his political catchwords would suggest. He once told the Philosophical Association at Princeton (were you at that meeting too?) that in that college they had a radical purpose but not a radical manner in philosophizing: but it seems—and is to be hoped—that in politics he has not a radical purpose but only a radical manner. And I wonder what he has by way of manners! From what I hear—the papers can’t tell us what is most interesting—Mrs Wilson, not being able to make a fool of herself, because she is one already, is making a fool of her husband. My own feeling is, however, that he will yield to the experience and also to the fascinations of the European statesmen he is encountering, and that he won’t do any mischief.

Oxford seems to me more beautiful every day. I walked three times round Christ Church meadows this afternoon, under the most romantic of wintry skies and the softest of breezes, in a sort of trance; and I should certainly come to live and die in Oxford, if it weren’t for the Oxonians.

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