Category: LETTERS Page 175 of 274

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome, Dec. 6, 1946

Dear Clemens,
I have been putting off thanking you for “Attlee” until I had read it, but for the first time in my life I am really busy. I am trying to learn something about politics, and have been reading all I can find trustworthy from Aristotle to Stalin, especially now Toynbee’s “A Study of History”, which is to be in 13 volumes of which 9, I believe, are already published. And I have just heard of a book published by the Harvard Univ. Press on “Plato’s Theory of Man”, which to judge by the review in The Times Lit. Supplement is excellent. The author, whom I had never heard of, is John Wild. Is he a professor somewhere or–happy man?–a free lance? Your “Attlee”, like your “Truman” will fall in well in my re-education, but I am too deep at the moment in the migrations of Nomads and the decay of prehistoric civilizations to read about the present, which seems not itself to know what on earth it is.
With best wishes for the New Year,
Yours sincerely.
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC

To Arthur Davison Ficke
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. December 4, 1917

It is a pleasure to hear from you and to see that you are at close quarters, as well as at head quarters, with the army. You will doubtless be useful, and the experience will transform (I should think) your sense for human life and give all you write hereafter an added value. I myself am too old to improve very much: yet I think whatever I may find it possible to undertake in the future will be bronze instead of lead, or of gingerbread,–whatever you think has been my rather cheap material hitherto.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT

To Abbott Lawrence Lowell
Colonial Club
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 3, 1910

Dear Mr Lowell,
Thank you very much for the information about comparative marking, which I am sending to my assistants in Phil. B. It seems to me quite natural, however, that the marks in this course should be much higher than in a group which contains several courses taken almost exclusively by Freshmen. It is also to be noted that Phil. B. contains a decidedly select body of students, comes at 1.30 (an hour avoided by the self-indulgent) and is one in which ability and intelligence, even without very much work, suffice to produce good results, so that B is more commonly attained than it might be by the same men in other courses, when these men are clever.
Yours sincerely G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harvard Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 2, 1927

Perhaps I may abandon “Symptoms” for a while and turn to the “Realm of Matter”. Russell’s latest book ought to have helped to revive interest in this direction, but I have been disappointed. It is nice to see him insisting on his newly acquired conviction that “percepts are in our heads”: it ranges him among my examples of latent materialism in idealists. But does he conceive his whole philosophy, in the moment when he is most aware of it, to be a single constituent of the series of events which make up one of the electrons in his brain? It seems monstrous (to use one of his words) to give so rich a substance (to use one of my words) to so minute a phenomenon. It would seem to me more plausible to say that his awareness of his philosophy was an event engaging a great many gyrations of a great many electrons: it would therefore have no punctiform locus in space-time, and could not be identified with a single constituent of the physical world. But I agree with him, and with you, that the mental world, in so far as it has a locus in nature at all, has it in the head—or in objects arranged, like books and pictures, to excite certain events in the head. As to the mental or moral world in itself, Berty is a poor witness: here is a book entitled “The Outlines of Philosophy” in which there is nothing but spleen, behaviourism, relativity, and babies. He has come down terribly in the world: I suppose this is a set of lectures cooked up for America: there is nothing in it that he hasn’t said as well or better elsewhere, and there is an unreadable amount of improvised commonplaces, and chance polemics. I have had to skip a good deal: but I haven’t missed here and there an extraordinarily witty passage, like that about the behaviourist seeing the rat not seen by his friend, and thinking that he must give up that bootlegged whiskey.

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 Charles Augustus Strong
45 Chesterton Road
Cambridge, England. December 1, 1914

The war moves slowly, painfully, but is not agonizingly dangerous to the cause for which you and I can’t help caring—at least, not for the moment. The English are wonderful in their calm confidence and open-minded courage in receiving punishment; if I had half the stakes I should be terrified, for the danger is great and even if the chances are favourable danger, to me, is more intolerable than loss. Let us hope the sky will gradually clear and that the end will come before we expect it

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