Category: LETTERS Page 178 of 274

To Charles Scribner’s Sons
75 Monmouth St
Brookline, Massachusetts. November 21, 1906

You asked some time ago for a list of errata in “The Life of Reason”. I have one that I can send—unhappily a rather long one—but if the possible reprint is not to be made soon, it might be better to keep it a while longer, as new errors are pointed out to me from time to time by various people, and I suppose the correction ought to be as thorough as possible. I don’t mean to make any changes in the text, except of clerical errors, on the principle of Musset “lorsqu’on change sans cesse au passé pourquoi rien changer”? When I am converted I will make my recantation in a new book and not spoil the old one.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 20, 1931

During two sunny afternoons on the Pincio I have absorbed your counterblast to religion. As a popular tract it is capital, beating the eloquent parsons at their own game. But isn’t it a bit discouraging that the work of Voltaire, which he did so thoroughly, should need to be done all over again after two hundred years? Is reason in the same parlous position as faith that it has to be dinned into the ears of each generation, or it will die out?

From my own point of view, if you were here, I should have some  observations to make upon your presuppositions. You seem to regard “Religion” as merely myth and magic, that is, bad science: and of course you have a clear case in proving that bad science is worse than good science.

But is religion merely bad—hasty, poetical, superstitious—science? I should say religions (because each religion seems rather irreligious to the others) often had at least two important ingredients besides magic and myth. They were the intellectual and ritual expression of a particular ethos, nationality, or civilization; and they were also forms of “spiritual life”. Now I like very much what you say about science, if it became a religion, losing all its scientific virtue. A philosophy more or less inspired by science, like Epicureanism or Stoicism, may be a religion, or a substitute for religion: it may sanction a particular morality, and it may be refined into a form of spiritual life—I mean, into a great life-long dialogue between God and the soul of man. But science, as you conceive science—á la Dewey—is only experiment and invention; it is not a philosophy: and if any speculative ideas more or less illegitimately associated with it were set up as eternal truths, science would cease to be science to become bigotry. One of the happy, if somewhat disconcerting, discoveries of our—or my—later years has been precisely this: that science is intellectually blind and dumb, and that you may be a leading scientific expert without knowing what you think on any important question. It seems to me, therefore, that you ought not to pit “religion” and “science” so squarely against each other, as if they were rivals in the same field. A scientific philosophy might be a rival, or an ally, of certain religions or religious philosophies; but what chiefly attaches mankind to its religions is precisely the need of completing their traditional ethos, and their spontaneous spiritual life, with an appropriate speculative doctrine: and science is dumb on that subject and, in its scientific domain, ought to be dumb. Perhaps this explains in part why, in spite of you and Voltaire, religions still exist in the world.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Cambridge, Massachusetts. November 19, 1911

As to me, the present is a blank like the Hinterland of Tripoli, with sniping going on desultorily, always in the same places. But the past and the future are both full of features. California, on the whole, disappointed me. The country is fine, the climate perfect; but the people are all—except the Italian restaurant-keepers and the Chinese—from Newton Centre, Mass. It was no relief morally. My notion of the U.S. now I have traversed the whole, is that it is a smaller place than I thought. The potential features are all marked, as in a child’s face, and there are no ideal surprises in store for us, as far as this country is concerned. It will be, for five hundred years, much the same thing, more congested. As to the future, I sail on January 24th , and am making in the first place for Madrid. In the late Spring I shall return to Paris to stay with Strong, and catch whatever winds of doctrine or revolution may be blowing in that most ventilated of atmospheres. Beyond that nothing determinate except freedom, which for the moment is a very distinct thing in my eyes.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH

To Victor Francis Calverton
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123, Pall Mall, London. S.W.1.
Rome. November 18, 1934

It surprises me a little that you should seem so well pleased with my comments on your “Passing of the Gods”. I thought I had made some rather sharp criticisms of it, but let that be, since all seems to be well. I have now read your other book, which I really like better; but since you take criticism so kindly, I will try to be as disagreeable as possible, and only tell you what I don’t like about it. This is all the easier, because in the note on p. 36 you point out the contradiction between your Chauvinism-and-Anglophobia and your Cosmopolitan Communism. You say it is temporary, like the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, to be outgrown when there are no classes and no nations. Now I happen to be, by force of personal circumstances, much more a cosmopolite than you; and it seems to me that you don’t see this Colonial-Complex, as you call it, from a sufficient distance, or impartially. There are two distinct things: Anglomania, which a very few rich Americans share with a great many Europeans of various nations, and is expressed in foot-ball, afternoon-tea, boy-scouts, and masculine clothes for women. That is a fashion which you may laugh at, but which is harmless and reasonable, as fashions go. A second, entirely different thing is the heritage (not a “complex” but the smoothest possible habit of the soul) of the English language, literature, and home. This, as you show, was middle-class, but fed from above, in people who had known Latin and even French, and were cultivated people. Naturally, when they spoke or wrote, they did so in their own way, the English way. Far from showing any prejudice against the New world, they tried pathetically to glorify it; but every day their own talent grew thinner and ghostlier, and the subject-matter which American life offered them–when not treated (as it is now-a-days) satirically–was woefully poor and uninspiring. They were morally stifled and starved. In the 1890’s, or thereabouts, I knew half a dozen young Harvard poets, Moody being the most successful of them with the public: every one of them was simply killed, snuffed out, by the environment. They hadn’t enough stamina to stand up to their country and describe it, as a poet could. It was not that they imitated the English–they were ferocious Anglophobes–but that, being educated men, they couldn’t pitch their voices or find their inspiration in that strident society. I daresay now that incapacity is overcome. I have read Babbit, and mean to read something of Dos Passos. But even now, even in Emerson & Wm James, the chief interest is that they are Americans and might throw light on the American state of mind. All the world feels that America is a great phenomenon; they want to understand it. But, apart from that symptomatic or descriptive interest, nobody would read any American books. They are still poverty-stricken and bloodless; or if violent or morbid, like Moby Dick or Poe, it is rather in a psychopathic than in an artistic way that they are interesting. What you call the Colonial-complex, then, seems to me to have been simply universal intelligence, . . . natural sensibility, and good taste surviving in America: and it is a stronger gust of this same wind, which had rather died down in an intolerantly “petty Bourgeois” society, that now makes American writers freer. And they write, you yourself write, very much better English, than was written in the U.S. fifty years ago.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The New York Public Library, New York City NY