Category: LETTERS Page 172 of 274

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

To Christopher George Janus
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. Dec. 19, 1946

Dear Janus,
Several inquisitorial reporters, disguised in the lamb’s clothing of soldiers, have inveigled me into “interviews” which I took at first for innocent conversation. No great harm came of it, as far as I know, except that my English was transformed into the dialect of day. You can’t catch me so easily in writing. If people really cared to know what I think about politics in America, they would read the last chapter of my old “Character & Opinion in the U.S.” . . . . But people only want “copy”, and I think I might make them wait until the book on “Dominations & Powers” which I am at work on sees the light. I may not live to finish it, but enough is already written to make my position clear. It is independent of all parties, nations, or epochs: and this is easier for me than for most philosophers because my native Spanish attachments are not close (although I have scrupulously retained my legal Spanish nationality) and speculatively I am a naturalist.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Santayana Edition, Indianapolis, IN

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Danieli
Venice, Italy. December 18, 1939

Today I have received from Miss Tindall the double copy of my last two chapters, and will revise it during the next few days. If you care to see these chapters in view of your contribution to Schilpp’s book, I can send you the carbon copy. I have revised the rest of the book already, and was much pleased to see that when you got to the chapter on Liberation, you woke up, and actually corrected not only the punctuation but also in places the arrangement and choice of words. I wish you had done more of this, as your suggestions are almost always good. At least they show me that there is something wrong, which I may straighten out in one way or another. But the best thing is that, towards the end of this chapter, you seem to have made the argument your own for the moment and wished to express it better. Of course I am old and tired, and although there are good things, often old things, in this book there are bound to be lapses and platitudes also, and repetitions!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Via Santa Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. December 17, 1946

I am glad you have got your $500 safely and that Wheelock says there is no tax on it for any of us; but Wheelock’s good news is rather at a discount with me now, because he has played me a nasty (verbal) trick by writing first that he had $2,500 clear for me, and a month later writing that owing to “certain charges” and to the 30% tax due, my credit (before the $500 were sent to you) was reduced to $280.–somewhat less than the 500 that you were to receive; but that he would send you that sum notwithstand, and things would be settled in my next account. I daresay it is only the desire to be agreeable and encouraging that makes him write in this “diplomatic” way: but though Scribner has always been a little close and mysterious in money-matters, I never felt so cheated as on this occasion, and have written (facetiously) describing my feelings, and asking for an explanation. I had ordered books freely from Scribner, and he was sending me parcels to be charged also to my account (none of which have arrived yet) but the total as I conceive it would still leave me with a thousand dollars margin to my credit, instead of a debt of $220! It is ridiculous that I should be left in debt when T. P. Salmon (my real agent, under Mr Appleton, at the Old Colony Trust Co) informs me that $10,000 have been added to my personal fund, which is independent of my Trust, and can be tapped to at any moment.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Lewis Mumford
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London S.W.1
Rome. December 16, 1926

I feel that you are thinking of me, quite naturally, as just a Harvard professor, author of a book called “The Life of Reason”. Your appreciation seems absolutely just, as directed upon that semi-public personage: but I never felt myself to be identical with that being, and now much less than ever. What you say, about my roots being at best in Mrs. Gardner’s Boston, is true of him, not of me: my own roots are Catholic and Spanish, and though they remain under ground, perhaps, they are the life of everything: for instance, of my pose as a superior and lackadaisical person; because all the people and opinions which I deal with, and try to understand, are foreign and heretical and transitory from the point of view of the great tradition, to which I belong.

. . . . The moral world, for me, is a part of the human world, which is itself a detail in nature: variations in the moral world are as legitimate, and may be as welcome, as changes in art or in language: but does the universe change, or can a serious philosophy change, with the moral weather?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.